E-commerce at Woolworths

Question: Discuss about theE-commerce at Woolworths. Answer: Introduction E-commerce by definition is the process of conducting commercial transactions over the internet. In simpler terms it is trading on the internet. E-commerce has seen significant growth since the internet helped business reach a new sense of globalization (Andam 2014). Almost all companies today buy and sell products off the internet and have a wide customer base. Woolworths is one such company that had made an excellent stand in the world of e-commerce. The below report is an analysis of various e-commerce applications and strategies used by the company to grow in the online market. About the Company Established in 1924, Woolworths is one of the oldest and the largest chain of supermarkets that operate in Australia and New Zealand. The company supplies food product, liquor and other general merchandise and have an operative e-commerce website for their daily trade operations. According to the financial reports of the company, the company has made AU$ 1.2 billion sales in the year 2014 alone which is clearly an indication of the size of their business, the customer base and the efficiency of their e-commerce strategy. E-Business Applications The company has made tremendous effort to ease the use of their e-commerce platform. The website and the mobile application have been revamped at several stages to enhance customer experience. To have a store like feel, the platforms are filled with images aiding visual search capabilities and have an enhanced search functionality to find appropriate products within seconds. The categories of each product are clearly defined and easy to navigate. Since the customers generally look for product information, price information first and then ways to compare these products. The company provides clear images of the products and presents the price during the selection of the product making this an easy task. The website also provides the facilities to create lists so the customer may not pick items every single time but can rather order things of the pre stored list making purchase time and search time significantly low. Document Automation The company makes use of a document automation system. This system on adding products to the cart, automatically creates a sales order. This order is sent to the store to pick the products and based on the availability of products a delivery note is generated. Based out of the same the invoice is sent over to the customer and payments are adjusted. Payment Systems The company makes use of the EDI technology for payment transfers. The website is connected to the banks via an Electronic Data Interchange. Wowlink is the interface on the side of the company and is a business to business EDI gateway provided by accredited third party Value Added Network Providers (VANS) (Rodriguez, 2014). Payments are made via payment gateways for credit and debit card payments, where encrypted card data is used to a payment processor that is used by the companys bank (Kou, 2013). This is then forwarded to the issuing bank to check for available amounts. Once the amount is authorized the payment is received by the acquiring bank making the entire process simple and quick. The company also provides a wallet facility. GS1 Net GS1 net provides the facility to identify trade items uniquely in a supply chain. These numbers are integrated with data carriers that facilitate the e-commerce process and product synchronization (power, 2015). The technology is used to store product data in a central pool and would maintain, validate and update this data to provide accurate inputs to all the customers. It enables customers to choose products and submit request for purchase and also provides information in regard to the status of the request, thereby eradicating several manual forms. Member Portal The member portal of Woolworths uses applications developed by Elcom. The technology is used to validate the membership number with the database of the company to authenticate user to access the portal. The partner organizations are setup as groups for simpler and controlled access. Email marketing is done to these members by automating the email system that send out promotional details to all the registered members. Strategies Every company develops efficient strategies to enhance the functioning of each of its department. Some of the strategies used by Woolworths are mentioned below Marketing Strategy The company is currently exploring several social media sites making them an efficient marketing venue. The company has commendable presence on Instagram, Facebook and twitter. Sales and promotions are announced time to time on social media attracting customers of all ages (Mata, 2014). The company has a loyalty program in place that gives back to the customer. Loyalty programs work as a strong marketing strategy when commendable rewards are provided to the consumers. The company also sends out regular emails to keep the customers updated with the new products and promotions available. The company provides recipe based ingredients list making it easier to the customer to locate products. The company is here by promoting the regularly used products by the customers (Boone, 2013). The company also highlights the products that are on sale helping the customer choose these products and the visuals are very big and the price is highlighted. The company also tags products as special to emp hasize products that are different or rarely available. Supply Chain Strategy Woolworths has being in the market close to a century now and hence have a superior supply chain in place already. The company has recently migrated to Trade Stones Merchandise Lifecycle Management platform to enhance their supply chain creating an efficient system from the suppliers to the customers (PYMNTS, 2015). This system includes the both orders and supplies, B2B activities and related services. The business documents of the company are handled by SPS commerce who ensure that all the e-commerce documents generated comply with the business standards (SAS Commerce, 2016). They handle a hundred thousand documents a month. The company in collaboration with SPS commerce ensure that the data sent around to the various partners in the supply chain and accurate and efficient. Woolworths also implements SAP technology to handle delivery, inventory and warehousing of the company. SAP provides a grid system for inventory management and has the ability to integrate with other systems that use a different technology to pick order details and keep take of the same. Security Strategy Almost all the e-commerce website implement several strategies to ensure safe data transfer. Some of the key technologies used are Secure Socket Locket that provides integrity and non-reputability, Secure Hyper Text Transfer protocol that comes with a public encryption key, digital signatures and authentication. Secure electronic transactions are used for the purpose of wallet software. The payment gateway technology itself comes with built in security to ensure that the payment details are not corrupted or leaked. A highly efficient data encryption code is used to ensure that the details are secured and can be accessed only by the authorized parties. Electronic Data Interchange is also done through a predefined encryption set. Recommendations Below are some of the recommendations that can help Woolworths provide a superior customer experience. The website has a high responsive time when compared to other online sites. This need to be enhanced by decreasing the size of the content and using faster servers (Strauss, 2016). The images are used to provide a customer like experience however, they make the initial page clumsy. Smaller and clear images need to be used in the first page at least (Mohapatra, 2013). Instagram is a highly populated application with a lot of potential customers. Advertising through the new marketing feature developed by Instagram can help Woolworths sustain customers The company can study the buying patterns of the customer and send out a customized grocery list to the customer in the month to let the customer know that they are being valued and making purchasing an easy task (Sila. 2013). Products that are identified as profitable but are not easily purchased can be put up in a recommendations section under the regularly purchased products to gain more visibility (Yin, 2014) References Andam, Z.R., 2014. e-Commerce and e-Business. Boone, L.E. and Kurtz, D.L., 2013. 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