英语论文网

LF decided that an E-commerce strategy is necessary for LF. LF further decided the only way to be competitive is to implement the system in-house. LiFung.com was setup to form the in-house e-commerce incubation team by financing through Castle group. The Entire team was composed with both Castle and Li-Fung staff. The Business Strategy of Lifung.com was to target the SME market which is the small retailers/wholesalers. Further LF acknowledged that these SMEs had needs of diversification of products at a competitive price. They are also lack of up to date market information that would help them to make important decisions and they were currently served at the lowest priority in the old business model. These were due to that the traditional model wasn't cost effective to do so. With new B2B Portal, LF would be able to group the SMEs small orders in order to provide this customer with limited amount of customization, small batch ordering, and differentiated product range with a competitive price. Further the Business is planned to charge 10-15% of the commission in which the SMEs used to pay much more. Li-Fung.com interacts with LF as being one of its Group's key customers which linked the old business model with the new one. Further, internal training courses and daily exposure to new technology helped to demystify the fear of LF's veterans. LF described such IT strategy that would defend their position against online threats while simultaneously extending operations into the SME (small-medium enterprise) market sector. Finally, plan was also made ahead that in the future the dot.com will be able to serve the supplier more efficiently by aggregating the suppliers to post their inventory surplus on the net as well.

电子商务的风险 RISK of E-commerce

Although many benefits are associated with going online, risks accompany the new strategy. The risks are differentiated into the following area: Competitor, industry, Customer, People, and Financial. Financially, the cost of setup is enormous and LF would go into major financial problem if the project is not a success. People wise, existing LF employees would have some resent against this dot.com venture which would lead to lower working moral and higher employee turnaround rate. Speaking of the competitor, this business model barrier is not high; competitors could develop a much similar one overnight. Industry standardization of the software and hardware will further lower the benchmark and making the system of Lifung.com obsolete. Further by linking the internal system to the web, LF is exposed to a higher rate of virus attacks/security breach that would disrupt the entire system that might tremendous cause damage to LF. Within the area of customer, existing offline key customer (major importers, wholesalers) fear of Lifung.com will damage their business by the motto of ' eliminating the middleman'. Finally the whole business model is formed under the assumption of able to aggregate small orders to allow customization and competitive price. If the orders are not sufficient to justify, LF could only choose between satisfying their customer at the cost of ruin their overall margin; or by rejecting the order on the risk of tarnishing LF long established reputation.