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Zara corporate strategy
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Recommended: Zara corporate strategy
What decisions do the customers of the web site make?
Answer: zara.com is an online store that customers can make their purchase through this website. Moreover, customers visit this website in order to purchase their goods such as fashion clothes (women, men, and kids), accessories, and bags and shoes. At the end of their visiting, they may or may not end up by purchase one or more goods from this website, and this is a decision that customers usually do through this website. Customers purchase their unique fashionable goods through this website which includes design, production, distribution and sales through our extensive retail network.
2. What decisions does the web site make in response to the customers’ requests?
Answer: zara.com is
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Moreover, the IT department plays a very important role, and they always take immediate actions whenever the company’s sever down. They have strong capability to fix network traffic, data redundancy, and stock error. Zara brand also put a huge amount of money on their advertisement, and those advertisements really increase the company’s revenue, so this is also another major advantage that other brand hard to compete with Zara.com. The way that the website organizes the products is very user friendly; customers really enjoy to shop, and it is also easy for them to shop at this online store. V. Strategies for achieving competitive advantage.
1. Barriers to Entry that Restrict Supply: Zara is a popular brand compare to its competitors in the same market industry. Customers trust this website as well as the items that they are purchased. The important point of this online store is that the store provides their customers a convenience time and also helps customers to save on shipping cost if the customer are willing to pick up their online ordered stuffs at their nearest local store, zara.com will offer that services for free.
2. Demand Control: the demand is under the supplier control because Zara is a trusted clothing brand, and they give their customers at the highest satisfaction in term of their products quality. Therefore, their regular customers are usually their returning
The other problem people face with many other online clothing retailers is the inconvenience caused if they need to return a product. With our service, the customer does not pay the price for the product and has considerable amount of time to come to a decision as to whether or not to buy the product. This removes any remaining doubt in the customer’s mind and increases customer confidence levels.
Target must compete vigorously and fairly in the marketplace using our independent judgment to make the best decisions for the Company.
YakkaTech Corp. is growing IT services firm which mainly installs and upgrades enterprise software systems and related hardware. They have grown and consolidated as well as become more efficient at their business but this isn’t without growing pains. Their employees seem to lack job satisfaction and their customers feel that the employees “seem indifferent to their problems.” The company’s voluntary quit rates have risen above the industry average while management raises pay rates in the hopes that customer service quality and productivity would improve. However, customer service complaints and productivity remain low and employee moral seems to be low as well.
They have good practices in password management and recovery mechanisms. They have built-in redundancy in their systems. So if a network element fails their sales order systems still continue running so that the orders do not get lost.
The Panera Bread Company began in 1981 as Au Bon Pain Co., Inc. Founded by Ron Shaich and Louis Kane, the company thrived along the east coast of the United States and internationally throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s and became the dominant operator within the bakery-café category. In the early 1990’s, Saint Louis Bread company, a chain of 20 bakery-cafes were acquired by the Au Bon Pain Co. Following this purchase, the company redesigned the newly acquired company and increased unit volumes by 75%. This new concept was named Panera Bread. Top management chose to sell their previous bakery-café known as Au Bon Pain Co. due to the financial and managerial needs of Panera. In order for Panera to become the success top management visualized all resources needed to become available for Panera. Panera Bread is now the most successful bakery-café in the category in which there are currently 1,777 bakery-cafes in 45 states and in Ontario Canada (Panera Bread).
Zappos is an online shoe and clothing store. The idea of an online shoe store originally came from Nick Swinmurn in the year 1999. He then pitched the idea to Alfred Lin and Zappos’ current CEO Tony Hsieh. Zappos quick rise to success is mostly attributed to their ten core values. These values vary from creating fun and weirdness to being humble. However, the root of this company’s success lies only on one important thing: their regard for customer service. They value the quality time spent with customers over the phone rather than the quantity of customers.
Macy 's strategy is to provide a "localized merchandise offering and shopping experience to targeted consumers" (Macy 's Inc., n.d.). Macy 's generates primary revenue through the sale
Hertz operates its car rental business through various brands in 145 different countries. Hertz was named, for the thirteenth time, by Travel + Leisure readers as the Best Car Rental Agency (Hertz Annual Report, 2013). Hertz is one of the top companies in the car rental industry by obtaining 18.6% of the market share (IBISWorld, 2014). In addition to the leading position that Hertz has built within its industry, the focus was to add more value offerings while recreating the experience in car rentals across the globe. Hertz employs both growth and competitive strategies to sustain competitiveness.
Zara sources fabric, other inputs, and finished products from external suppliers. It has purchasing offices in Barcelona and Hong Kong. This gives Zara a competitive advantage towards the costs of goods sold, as it can purchase from both Europe and Asia according to prices. Buying more from China in the future might reduce even more the costs of goods sold.
Analysis & Recommendation: Zara’s main strategy is the ability to respond very quickly to the demands of target customers which called for identifying trends of the customer in advance. The company has been able to identify the trends and meet the demand with the help of its autonomously organized structure and its effective value chain systems. The present system followed by Zara has been very effective and very easy to maintain, which as a result has persuaded the company to continue without any change in the present system so far. The problem that Zara faces right now is that the system that they use, P-O-S (Point of Sale terminals), runs on DOS which Microsoft does not support anymore and any hardware change in the POS terminal will not be compatible with the current POS software. Although the sense of urgency for the change may not be that high, investing in IT infrastructure is a must as MS Dos is an obsolete technology and there is no contract or guarantee from their POS terminal vendor that they will continue supplying the same terminal with out much changes in the hardware for any specific period of time, therefore change is unavoidable. The other main issue that Zara faces is that the stores don’t share inventory information electronically and hence inventory management becomes highly difficult and manual. The decision making process is based on the judgment of employees throughout the company instead of relying on a small set of decision makers; the majority of the decisions were made by store managers and as a result they placed orders for the items rather than simply accepting and displaying what headquarters decided to send them.
For example, occasionally M&S has products shipped to Asia to be created, then back to the UK for packaging and labeling, and back once again to Asia to be sold in their retail stores. This increases production costs and time, placing them at a disadvantage to Zara. Zara uses two main centers for their products, a supply center in Beijing and it’s manufacturing center located in Spain. M&S also creates collections in mass numbers compared to Zara, therefore, failed designs cost the company far more money. Zara’s success in inventory turnover lies in the process of creating far less product, keeping its exclusivity, and decreasing its risk of profit
The fundamental business strategy of Zara is very simple which is linking customer demand to manufacturing, and liking manufacturing to distribution. Zara has been running their business in fashion industry which is susceptible to seasons and quick changing customer tastes. Zara has been approached to and considered their business as a perishable commodity business just like a fresh baked cake or bread to be consumed quickly.
People know that for the most part they can rely on Amazon.com for fast delivery and a wide selection of goods and somewhat affordable prices. Amazon.com has an efficient and advanced supply chain model, which is why they are able to guarantee quick product delivery to customers. They have strong customer loyalty due to their string customer service and unique business model. Customers freely and openly rate products and services which allows for greater customer satisfaction because customers are able to perform better product research in order to find the best fit for their needs. There are many benefits to be a strictly online business, for example having less overhead expenses compared to normal department stores with multiple locations and employees. and more money to give back to shareholders (Free SWOT). Customers can shop anywhere, anytime, and in any condition they choose. And depending on where the customer may live, they will always get their desired product within a week unless notified otherwise. It is easy to understand why Amazon.com has become a giant in the E-shopping
Shopping and shipping: Zappos tried to put effort to make shopping enjoyable. The Zappos website was known as the easy shopping center. Zappos provides direction that how customers improve features, plan inventory and adapt search results. Zappos was adopted simplicity, creativity, great service of inventory and distribution. Zappos provides
For instance they can purchase anything at any point of time without going out to any physical store; they can compare the prices of the product from different websites and can purchase from the site where they are getting cheaper; it also saves time; customers can also avoid pressure when having a face to face interaction with the salesperson etc. We can summarize these factors into 4 categories: