Business development plan. This requires you to demonstrate that you Essay

Business development plan. This requires you to demonstrate that you learnt from the management theory from the lectures and se - Essay Example The book store is located at Gloucester road in Bristol, UK. The study also took help from secondary sources such as â€Å"Love Gloucester Road† website in order to understand nature of business operation for a book store (Love Gloucester Road, 2013). Currently the book store operating in brick and mortar format but the owner of the book store is considering of changing from its traditional business into e-commerce. The store offers books on various topics ranging from Science, Commerce, Management, Fictions and Non-fictions. Target customers for the book store are students, professionals, senior citizens of local community. The book store earns significant amount of revenue by selling second-hand books to customers. It has been realized by the owner of the bookstore that floor space of the store is too small to accommodate large set of customers at a particular time hence they are planning to sell books through an online platform in order to cater to the demand of large pool of customers in systematic manner. Sweeney (2006) has pointed out that small businesses move into e-commerce platform for three reasons such as 1- creating brand awareness, 2- decreasing overhead cost and 3- competing with big players in the market. In the last decade itself, there has been a surge in second hand book selling in England, which can be a very prospective market to harp on. Industry trend is showing that demand for e-books, kindles and epub files is growing at steady rate for last five years (Davenport, 2012). Companies like Amazon, eBay have changed the concept of brick and mortar book stores by introducing online bookstores. Online bookstores are providing facilities like home delivery, cash on delivery and others which have helped them to create a large consumer base within last few years. Being a part of this ever changing book industry, every business house must try and adopt itself to suit the needs of customers who prefer online shopping over traditional brick a nd mortar retail shopping. Therefore, an online portal will give this book industry a common platform where all customers can mingle, interact and most importantly buy and sell books with the click of a button. It takes minimal effort and cost for a small book store to e-commercialize its business. For example, e-commercialization can help a book store to decrease various overhead costs such as maintenance cost, rent, electricity charges and wages. It is evident from the above discussion that lower overhead cost caused by e-commercialization can help a bookstore to adopt penetration pricing strategy in order achieve competitive advantage over other book stores. An online transformation has innumerable benefits, and one of it is its global reach. A physical store somewhere in Gloucester will only cater to customers from its surroundings, but an online business has no boundaries and people from all across the globe are its potential customers. An online business has numerous other ben efits apart from reach and cost. It is much faster than the traditional method of business with faster transaction process, faster inventory management and faster information storage. An online shop never closes down contrary to the ordinary shop, which has its fixed timings when it remains open. One of the 4 Ps of marketing is Place, and every business strives to enhance it by broadening its distribution channels and its temporal and spatial convenience. An online portal fulfils just