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Because Calalilly has a pretty clear idea of what kind of business it is, a business selling gifts for body, mind and spirit to baby boomer women, assessing the competition is a little easier than it might otherwise be. What makes it tough though is the fact that this is an online company. In theory, the potential market for this site lives from one side of the US to the other and probably somewhat in other countries. The first step in measuring competition then is defining exactly what we mean when we say competition. What we are looking for is other sites that are similar to calalilly in product focus and business tone but not necessarily aimed at exactly the same group of people. This is because calalilly’s customers, generally speaking, are not going to stumble on the site using a search for gifts. Hanchy will be driving customers to her site through marketing promotions and other sales support techniques. She has a large network of women friends in several different areas of the country and she will be using those contacts to attract visitors to this site. Because we are looking for sites with similar product lines but not necessarily market focus then, we can use a few different keywords in Google to see what we can come up with. What I usually do is about ten different searches using different phrases and then bookmark any site I find that has a look and feel and similar product line to the client’s site I am working with. For calalilly, we will try unique gifts women. We could also try unique items women, unique products women, funky gifts women and funky items women. These searches give us five consistent results particularly in the paid results column for sites that are similar to calalilly. UncommonGoods, ArtsAndPassions, DetailsArt, DaringWomen.com and MariposaArt. From just a quick review of our first reactions to these six sites, we can draw some conclusions for calalilly. Positioning the site as a gift site may not be the best fit for the product line and look and feel of the company. It may work better to position the company as selling unique items rather than unique gifts. This conclusion is because the gift related sites show colors, logos and layouts that are generally conventionally feminine and this association may not be the best fit for calalilly. While more images are better on the Home page, we will need to assign more space for a description of exactly what kinds of products can be found on this site and why someone would want to shop at this site. This is true even though calalilly’s first customers will probably start out knowing the product line because as they make recommendations to friends and others, the new visitors will not know the product line. It would probably be good to highlight the most unique and unusual products on the Home page to give visitors a strong, quick, first impression. More information about the company itself, the founder, the company policies and the reason for existence needs to be more visible and easy to find on the site navigation. Finally, the idea of putting different collections of products with catchy names at the top of the navigation is an excellent one and we will probably build that into the working site. Overall, a relatively small number of sites were found using these search terms which is good news for calalilly.
Course: | Introduction to E-Commerce |
Author: | Darcey Spears |
SKU: | 33628 |
ISBN: | 1-932808-79-5 |
Release Date: | 2005-08-25 |
Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 102 lessons |
Work Files: |
Yes |
Captions: | No |
Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |