Personalisation is a method used by some sites to what they think the users wishes to view. This is done by Input – Algorithm – Outputs

This is easier understood from the image below.

My stand on personalisation

This week I have been asked to take a stand on personalisation. Personally I think personalisation is a bit of a bluff for web designers. So I am against personalisation. I will now give reasons for this.

Backing up opinion using own arguments and opinions

When I am browsing, I want to constantly see new and exciting ways to layout pages, viewing other people’s ideas and viewing new and different ways in which they portray text. With personalisation being really an information gatherer from within the web site to store information about you, the user, the personalisation analysing information from you, I find it very unexciting as it is just developing from what you have already viewed or sourced in the past.

I want to, so to speak, go new places and see different things. If for instance I looked on a few sites on a particular topic or materialistic items, I do not want banners and images linked to site searches with this information. I take a stand from the position that I do not want to be forced in a way to look or view anything that the site gathers from me in an informatics way and thinks “ohhh” lets display this to the current user. It is as if the site is therefore telling you what to do and is trying to track you and plan the future of your browsing.

So in my opinion I want to be viewing a site in a way for what it is, I do not want to be viewing something that is just tailored for my individual use. I see it as a false sense of security from the designer of the site, as if they can not take an idea and stick with it. Almost as if they are afraid of what users will think and want to display the information in a way they think the user would like it to be able to be viewed. In my opinion I think a page of web site should just be designed and not made to just be targeted to specific users.

 Many people online want to be anonymous as well anyway, like myself when I’m browsing I don’t want every site I surf to know my name, age and house number and any other sensitive information. A reason why the Internet as a hole would not like personalisation could be that they are buying a gift/present, they want to be innocent as they could be buying a birthday present and they don’t want their partner to find out. Lack of relevance can also come under affect, you are just looking at a site, like window shopping through the mall really. You’re not wanting to be there and creating a relationship so to speak with the company. This leads into the lack of credibility and security also. If you do not like the look of a site or do not trust the company, you do not want to be associated with it anyway. And when a company gets in financial difficulties and you did not trust it in the first place, they would sell anything to get out of a sticky situation for example selling on customer details for you to be targeted by other associated businesses or suppliers.

With all these thoughts and reasons in mind, that is why I am against personalisation.

The graph below shows the defference in click rates by personalisation and open rates by personalisation.

Links

http://www.kefta.com/

http://www.navigationarts.com/insight/website_personalization/

Customer Relationship Management

This week your task is to construct a list of key phrases that describe your chosen e-commerce business.

This week my task is to construct a list of key phrases that describe www.dixons.co.uk I will be using keyword search sites to gather keywords related to my chosen site.

The 1^st keyword search I am using is http://www.google.co.uk/sktool/#, so to carry out the search I typed in dixons.co.uk and this is the results. These results are for the monthly searches.

This search came up with a surprisingly large amount of keyword search results.

In this page I then clicked the keyword tab and it brought up a different list of keywords.

From this I can see that Cannon stands out in the keywords results with it having 7 of the keywords on this 1^st results page. Unfortunately looking at the web site where the keywords where extracted from, none of the have been sourced directly from the Dixons website.

These lists of results are not all that beneficial in relation to what I am looking the keywords for. I want the keywords to be ones that perfectly describe the website chosen. So such things like 2gb micro sd, 3 wirless, 430ex and bagless don’t really perfectly describe as good keywords for the Dixons website.

With the 1^st search tool used and not being very successful I am now going on to use Google insights. In the search in entered Dixons and this is the results shown.

This is a better result. At least this time Dixons is present in the results. Out of the 10 top searches 4 are directly related to Dixons. To the right is also a list of rising searches that include Dixons in them. The main competitors are also in the list, pc world and Curry’s. Although Dixons is not in the top 3, it starts from the 4^th top search, but it is a bit disappointing to see competitors like Curry’s appearing before Dixons when it was Dixons that was being searched.

Now I am exploring another keywords search https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

The results shown for keywords here are spot on. This is far more relevant to the Dixons site with every returned result containing Dixons in it.

This has proven to be the best search for revealing relevant keywords for the Dixons site.

This is a list of the 12 keywords I have chosen:

Dixons

Dixon

Dixons UK

Dixons discount

Dixons co uk

Dixons counter

Dixons coverplan

Dixons shop

Dixons high street

Dixons retailer

Mastercare Dixons

Dixons online

Three other tools I could have used are:

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

http://www.wordstream.com/keywords/

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/keyword-research-tool.shtml

Q.13 For your selected e-commerce site, assess the ease (or not) with which you can find the site using a search engine. Type some of the company’s branded products or key themes into a search engine. Discuss what is returned. Pay particular attention to ‘paid for’ results. Check where competitors appear. Interpret the results. Provide recommendations.

Assessing the ease (or not) with which you can find the site using a search engine.

So for this week I am going to open up the search engine google, www.google.com and type in Dixons. From doing this, these are the results below.

As you can see from the screen shot above when I type in “Dixons” to the search engine, the first result is the www.dixons.co.uk website. This is a good result as my chosen site Dixons is the 1st page that comes up. This shows that results can be found for Dixons with great ease.

But I have noticed that on the results to the right hand side of the google page there is a sidebar called sposored links.

This is a good set up by these two competing sites, as they know Dixons is a main threat, they have created search results with Dixons in them as keywords, to return their site when Dixons is searched for.

Other related key themes

When I just type in “tv” to google you can see below that dixons was the second result after www.comet.co.uk/TVs

This is a good result for Dixons as if someone wanted to purchase a TV online there is a good chance they would be attracted to the Dixons website from the search results. A main reason for this would be that it is a commonly known trusted business.

When I insert other things into google and search them like computers, printers and scanners, cooking, games and household etc, these all bring up results somewhere along the lines of the page to link you to the Dixons website. This was a good result to find this out, as there is no point having a website and maybe only a select few knowing about the Dixons store, you want to attract their attention by what they search into the Internet.

So when they search for the key areas like, tv and dvd, laundry and dishwashers etc, all things related to the site, you want www.dixons.co.uk to be definetly appearing in the search results.

Competitors

From all the results gathered it was good to see that dixons was at the top of the list rather than its main competitors like PC World and Currys.

When searching Dixons into google, it is very rare to have a results link to a page because that specific page holds a paid-for link in the content of that page. As google is said to be “going to war with paid-for links” and it is rumoured that google is set up to block search results appearing on the google search results page that have paid-for links in them relevant to the search.

Here are an example of paid-for links in the style of vouchers found on a wedpage.

Interpret results

From my finding this week I have found out that when Dixons is inserted into google it is the main result that is shown on the page. And that when I type in related products to the Dixons website, reults come up with links to the Dixons site.

Funny picture sourced from google images:

Q.12 Carry out web research to find out what is meant by the term ‘Cloud Computing’. Describe in your own words what is meant by this term. Explain in your own words the impact that cloud computing might have in e-commerce. Ensure that you describe potential benefits and problems. Deadline is 6 pm Friday as originally indicated.

Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is initially a revolution. It is anything that involves delivering hosted services over the internet. The services that are provided are split into 3 categories.

-IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

-PaaS (Platform as a service)

-SaaS (Software as a Service) Cloud computing is closely associated with web 2.0. In particular a key element of both trends is the emergence of online applications known as SaaS

A cloud can be public or private. As a quick overview cloud computing is basically where data and software applications are accessed from a cloud of online resources. This is very useful as it allows individual users to access their data and applications from any device, this then allows businesses to reduce capital costs in their IT infrastructure as the overheads are reduced because they do not need to purchase multiple software and hardware for users. With cloud computing they are able to purchase software and hardware as a utility resource.

So cloud computing allows individuals and organisations to connect to cloud computing resources rather than having to install hardware and software to run on their own hardware.

The impact that cloud computing might have in e-commerce

With cloud computing becoming a great success it is of great benefit to organisations. With the resources being readily available to all sizes of business any company or any body can now connect to software or hardware as an online utility. This means less companies will now have to invest in a large scale computing infrastructure. In addition over the next few years fewer individual users will be tied to a particular device when they want to access their data and applications. This will make e-commerce businesses more profitable. Many companies like Amazon, Google IBM and many more have already embraced the cloud computing revolution. Now Microsoft face a bigger challenge if they still want to produce software that will still run on local hardware. If cloud computing ends up blowing out Microsoft this could be demolishing as Microsoft applications will not be getting produced to develop cloud computing.

• Push vs pull supply models
• Vertical integration vs disintegration vs virtual integration
• Evidence of value networks
• Evidence of efficiencies in supply chain

This week I am looking at supply chain management related to my chosen site www.dixons.co.uk. Supply chain management is also known as SCM for short. SCM is basically the organisation of the supply actions from the suppliers and partners to their customers. In SCM their are two types of this management, upstream and downstream.

The upstream supply chain in Dixons would be the transaction between Dixons and it suppliers. Then the downstream supply chain in Dixons is the transactions between Dixons and its customers. So this is Dixons supplying the customer with the goods whereas upstream is the suppliers supplying Dixons with the goods and the transactions they carry out.

The main thing in SCM is that it is efficient, as if it is not efficient there is no point it being in place.  Dixons is a Pull Supply Chain, with Dixons motto being Latest Technology Low Prices this show that they are aiming the emphasis on delivering value to the customers. By this strategy they are pulling the customers in. Their motto is a good example of this. Here is a picture of their motto and logo below.

Dixons logo and motto

Driven by the growth in on line sales and home delivery, Dixons decided that they wanted to upgrade operational performance. This was to give more automation to Dixons supply chain, which in turn will lead to greater efficiencies in the supply chain. The main place Dixons wanted efficiency was in the warehouse, to increasae capacity and output. With the improvements made in Dixons supply chain they where able to offer additional services through their webpage to their cutomers.

Here is a few bullets points from Dixons improving their supply chain:
 • 55% of all orders received daily are now ‘Cross Docked’
Being able to select carriers at 2 different points in the order process has reduced the warehouse space that would have been required to cope with increased volumes. It has also meant less time is being spent on placing items in stock and daily pick.

 • Number of parcels being shipped per employee, has increased from 13 to 55 per hour
At the same time the cost of producing additional inserts and the time it takes to fulfil them is also reduced.

 • Reduced carrier costs
DMS CarrierLink is an efficient back end solution that minimises failed deliveries. It does this by assigning individual consignments to the best carrier for the job and provides Dixons with the opportunity to drive down the cost of Premium Services by leveraging carriers core competencies: am or pm, Saturday, remote versus city postcodes.

 • Maximum flexibility in the despatch area
Standard Stationery has meant Dixons packing stations are now more efficient and the floor space required to house individual printers and despatch bays are no longer required.

This  shows good examples of efficencies in the supply chain.

Dixons uses the virtual integration approach with it having a co.uk site, this is virtual integration as it shows use of communications technology and flexibility and response related to delivery. Also Dixons provides other functions to third parties for example using couriers like parcel link or dhl and others to deliver the goods to customers.

Dixons also uses a value network. Also known as VAN(value-added network) this supports supply chain business processes like inventory management, efficient placement and procurement. This also allows trading partners to share informatinon and generate data based on fluctations in consumer demand to help manage the inverntory.

Q.10

This week I have been asked to do a e-business strategy on my chosen website www.dixons.co.uk

To carry this out I am going to follow the Porter’s five forces for the industrial analysis and business strategy.

The threat of substitute products and services

With Dixons main selling market being Electrical goods they are at threat by many other companies worldwide never mind in the United Kingdom (UK) With other main shops and sellers like PC world, Curry’s and Tesco aiming slightly at the same market. With the Internet making the introduction of products and services so readily available Dixons have to make sure they are on the ball with the user friendliness of their site. This is done by making sure that they are trying to draw the attention of customers to buy their products by making their sites more appealing than the competitors.

The threat of the entry of new competitors (barriers to entry)

With all companies nowadays expanding their businesses into different aspects of what they produce and provide Dixons need to watch out for new competitors jumping into their market share and taking sales. Especially with the sale of electronic items overall you need to make sure you are keeping on top of technology and make sure you are supplying all the new goods and gadgets. Again, I state, with the Internet so readily available you can not keep tabs on what way other businesses are looking at your site and whether they are sighting ideas from the Dixons website to imitate their service and follow the procedures they have in place. In effect this will make it easy for new businesses to creep up on sales. Partly due to good layouts and business ideas and structure.

The intensity of competitive rivalry

Dixons have intense competitive rivalry especially with PC World and Curry’s. They compete with each other through the idea of, who can sell their products at the cheapest price and still remain a profitable sale to be the one attracting the customers to encourage the sales. This is known as price wars. This is seen through all aspects of business no matter what the trade, good or service supplied is. A business would do anything to make it be one over on its competitors and the main aim at this is Price.

The bargaining power of customers/buyers

With customers now being more in the “know” of what they want to buy, especially with computers Dixons has to deal with a great bargaining power. With other companies like Dell being so specialized in that you can design your own computer or laptop from scratch, customers could be lost by this. In the other aspect of bargaining power Dixons need to be careful sales are not lost, especially with their being such a wide variety of prices for certain goods online and other offers available, customer knowledge to the price transparency is so open.

The bargaining power of suppliers

When it comes to buying in the goods for the business Dixons are in a good position with the supplier because 90% of the time when purchases are made many of the goods are in bulk and even if they are not in bulk there are many items bought. With this in hand, Dixons turn into close command and can negotiate the prices extensively. With this being able to take place the supplier does not mind as they know they will get repeat business. Saying that the supplier will always try to bargain with the business as they are trying to make profits as well but to big time buyers they usually give in and complete big deals.

I have went onto the Dixons site and scrolled to the bottom and clicked on the terms and condition page. At a quick glance the terms and conditions are very long winded and and seem to be a hard read to work your way through them. The terms and conditions where last updated on the 16th March 2009. The introduction sentence to the terms and conditions is just like the typical start of any terms and conditions page stating: These Terms and Conditions apply to all transactions on this site. Please read them carefully. They do not affect your statutory rights. Here the site is making clear that all the terms and conditions noted are to do with all and every transaction on the site.

But then they start another paragraph which seems a bit irrational describing how they can just change the terms and conditions and they are turn into effect the day they change them and post them on the site. Whose to say everytime you buy something every customer goes and reads the whole ream of terms and conditions applied to the company.

This is the paragraph stated: 

We may change these terms and conditions at any time. Any changes will take effect on the date they are posted onto the site (see date above). You will be asked to read and accept the terms and conditions each time you place an order, to ensure that you are familiar with the most current ones.

Another thing I have taken as unusual from the site is their terms and conditions on deliveries. Especially to where they will deliver. They will deliver to the United Kingdom but then go on to say that there are a few exceptions to this. On the terms and conditions this is what they state on deliveries: Where We Deliver
We can deliver all large appliances to any address in the United Kingdom excluding the Channel Islands. For customers living in the Isle of Man, the Isles of Scilly and some of the Scottish Islands we recommend that customer’s choose a private courier on the mainland to which we can deliver, who can then ship to them directly. Customers are responsible for bearing the cost of private courier arrangements.

So basically they are just going to leave you responsible for setting up the delivery if you live within the following above.

The return policy is very good for Dixon, they allow you to organize a suitable to to collect the product from your address as long as it is not damaged and you have it in the origional box. And the policy compared to competitors seems basically the same as pc world and currys, this is due to all 3 being owned by DSG Retail Limited.

Q.8 Examine the registration process for your site, from the perspective of security. Is your data encrypted? What does this mean?

The registration process for the Dixons site looks fairly straight forward. On the homepage when you click to register with the site a simple easy to fill out form comes up, which is shown below.

Register page

This is basic and simple and looks plain so its not to complicated to fill out. This is good for customers because nobody likes filling out time consuming forms. It is set up as a well displayed user interface for easy interaction. Once this page is completed and filled out, when toy click continue you are then brought to the Personal Details page shown below.

 Again this page as the previous is ery user friendly by being clear and easy to view with few pieces of information needed. Once you have filled out this page you are now registered with Dixons and can browse the site and buy your desired products. When logged iinto your account this is the user page for the account shown.

Account page

This is very basic and lets you view your orders and do others usual things like change password and email for the account and continue shopping. When you go to enter your payment details for your account the site becomes secure by the SSL lock on the webpage. This data once inputted e.g. Account Number for bank details is sent in encrypted code so it cant be deciphered so no one can convert the code into ordinary language. Here is a good definition I found on “Define” in google on what data encryption is: Encryption is a secure process for keeping your sensitive and confidential information private. It is a process by which bits of data are mathematically jumbled with a password-key. The Encryption process makes the data unreadable unless or until decrypted.

Q.9 Does the site use cookies? Find out what cookies are, and explain how cookies are used in, for example, your site.

A cookie in computing is a small piece of text stored on a users computer by a web broswer. A cookie consists of one or more name-value pairs containing bits of information such as  user preferences, shopping carts contents, the indentifier for a server-based session, or other data used by websites. I gathered this informatino from wikipedia.

www.dixons.co.uk does not use cookies. I know this because I cleared my cookies then opened up internet explorer and went to the dixons site, then went to start and typed in Shell:cookies, in the vista search and the folder opened was empty as shown below.

Cookies folder

To find out information on my site I went to www.alexa.com and typed in www.dixons.co.uk in the data search bar and found out the following information.

Dixons Reach (Percent)

This graph shows the visits to my chosen site. Now with this information I am going to show a graph comparing dixons to the currys website.

Dixons compared to Currys

Percent of global Internet users who visit dixons.co.uk:

The following information was gathered from http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/www.dixons.co.uk

From the traffic that visits Dixons it is ranked the 515th most visited site in the United Kingdom.

Dixons.co.uk users come from these countries:

• 86.6% United Kingdom
• 1.9% India
• 1.6% United States
• 1.0% China
• 0.9% Germany

• 0.7% Netherlands
• 0.6% Denmark
• 0.6% Greece
• 0.5% Ireland
• 5.7% OTHER

Where people go on www.dixons.co.uk:

• 98.3% dixons.co.uk
• 1.4% emails.dixons.co.uk
• 0.1% reevoo.dixons.co.uk
• 0.1% ww.dixons.co.uk

The following information was gathered from http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/www.dixons.co.uk

Q.5 Explore the processes involved in purchasing on your chosen site. Describe the different steps in these processes, in terms of the technology that is being used, from typing the web address into the browser to a product being delivered to your door

Purchasing from the Dixons site is fairly easy as they have created a user friendly interaction process to carry this out. Making it a simple and enjoyable experience for the customer. I will go through step by step how this is carried out.

Steps to purchasing online from Dixons-

Firstly to get started simply type www.dixons.co.uk into the internet browser.

You will be taken to the Dixons Homepage.

Now you can see the homepage, and for the purpose of this demonstration I am going to show how you would buy the Panasonic 32U10
32″ 1080p LCD TV from the “Deals this week” section from the website.

When I click to view the product it bring up a page to view the product in greater detail and more photos are available to view. On this page thier is a add to basket button. So I click this.

On clicking this button I now come accross a page offering finance and other related products and extra products that go well with the tv. So I then just click to go to checkout.

The page then ask for delivery details and payment details. This page is secured and protected by SSL also known as the padlock at the bottom of the page.

Once all the payment details are completed the product should arrive at your door in no more than 5 working days.

Q6. New channels to market for e-business are increasingly being used. Such channels include mobile device access as well as digital television access. Consider and describe the potential future impact of ONE of these channels for your e-business from the perspective of the e-business. What strategic choices (if any) need to be made.

The website I have chosen is www.dixons.co.uk This website provides the selling of such goods and offers low prices on the latest technology electrical products, including TVs, Home Cinema, Laundry, Refrigeration, Cooking, PCs, Laptops, Cameras and lots more. It is one the leading electrical sellers online. This below is a screenshot of the homepage of the Dixons site.

Dixons Homepage

Q.2 Use some search engines or industry sources (e.g., trade magazines online, Financial Times, etc) to carry out desk research to find out specific quantitative information about the size of the business behind the web site. Try to determine figures for turnover, number of employees, and profit for specific (recent) years. Please do so without directly contacting the company.

Dixons is an online retailer in the UK. The company is owned by DSG international plc. The business was founded in 1937 and sells mostly electrical goods, white goods, telecomunications and information technology. The industry is retail.  Dixons turnover varies from 5 to 10 million. Dixons have a few 100 employees in the UK and ireland based in stores and in the HQ. There are not many dixons store about due to its better online demand.

Q.3 Take some time to research the business behind your site. Is the web the only channel to market for this business? If so, please describe your understanding of how this business came about. If the web is not the only channel, please describe the other channels in detail. Use Channel Chain Maps (see Week 2 slides here) if possible. Try to find out how much business is won by each channel.

From the research I have carried out on Internet usage in the United Kingdon (UK) I have found that in the years 2006-2008 that the use of the Interet has had quite a considerable rise.

Statistics I have gathered from the Internet show that in 2007 there was an internet usage boom. This was evident as almost 37 million people went online in an average month. This is a very high amount of usage and at that time, was over 60% of the population.

The Internet usage this year is looking the same aswell and with this rate of usage, by 2012 the Internet is predicted to have reached approximately 70% of the whole of the UK.  This is commonly due to the UK having the most experienced and active online population in the world.

This is also due to the increase of business online also known as e-commerce or e-business. With e-commerce growing on the web this is having a knock on effect on internet usage. Reports state that the UK will account for at least 40% of the 2008 online sales in Western Europe.

One of the main reasons for the internet usage increasing was due to businesses using it more withing their organisations with the use of email etc. And people use email now and the internet for social networking world wide instead of making those dear long distance telephone calls.

Here is a graph demonstrating internet usage from a survey carried out to find out what people mainly used the internet for.

Computer Internet Usage

From this we can see that the results from reports are true as this shows that the highest use on this graph is for research/study and socialising and email. More and more people are using the web every day and more often and its usage will continue to soar.

Information and Resources gathered from:

http://www.oesr.qld.gov.au
http://www.emarketer.com