E-Business Case study WHSmith Company

Fundamental of E-Business

Brief Contents

1.Introduction......................................................

2.Part one...........................................................

3.Part two...........................................................

4.Part three.........................................................

5.Part four..........................................................

6.Part five...........................................................

7.Conclusion.......................................................

8.Reference.........................................................

9.Knowledge.......................................................

1. Introduction

As the changes of the political, economic, societal and technological factors in the macro-environment, the whole market becomes more competitive and customers are becoming more powerful. In order to succeed, and frequently to survive, in the face of this dramatic change, companies must take not only traditional actions such as lowing costs and closing unprofitable facilities, but also innovative actions such as customizing or creating new products or providing superb customer service. (Boyett and Boyett, 1995) Many traditional companies chose to do E-commerce as an affiliate to its primary business in response to the environmental change.

WH Smith is a typical example of adopting EC as a part of its business. WHSmith is one of the UK's leading retail groups incorporating market-leading companies in retail, publishing and news distribution and the Group has 1,464 stores world-wide and sells in 12 countries. (What we are, 2003) It changes from a traditional high street retailer to partial EC player, which sells products both on street shops and also on Internet. This report includes five parts.

The first part tells us that WHSmith.co.uk takes business-to-customer and business-to-business as its nature of the EC transactions and its primary business model is on line, direct marketing. Applying EC does a lot benefits to its whole groups such as obtaining more customers, saving costs and gaining competitive advantages.

The second part identifies the typical supply chain of WHSmith group and the importance effect of E-commerce to its supply chain. Then it also uses Porter's 5 forces to analyze the effect of EC to the change of WHSmith's industry structure.

The third part describes the characteristics of e-tailing and its EC service. Then it also expresses...