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The Increasing Popularity of E-Commerce and the Effectiveness of Online Retail

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The Increasing popularity of E-Commerce and the effectiveness of online retail The increased usage and awareness of E-Commerce and online retail has greatly affected the way in which products are bought and sold in today’s society. For this assignment I will be researching the effectiveness and efficiency of offline and online retail environments of clothing products. I will be using Porter’s Value Chain Analysis to evaluate how value is created in e-business and I will then suggest significant improvements which I feel can lead to increased consumer use of online purchasing. There are many differences between the online retail environment of clothing and offline retail environment clothing. The main differences between the two can be …show more content…

Porter’s Value Chain identifies key activities which most businesses have in common. The following is a diagram representing Porter’s ideas.-http://www.themanager.org/models/valuechain.htm The first activity Porter addresses is “Inbound Logistics” which involves how the raw materials are received, stored and distributed to manufacturing. In the case of an online clothing business this would involve gathering all the materials (silk, satin, denim, cotton, nylon etc) necessary to meet the demands of the thousands of online shoppers, to make each item of clothing and ensuring there is sufficient storage space in the warehouse for them to be stored in the best way possible, to avoid any deterioration with regards to the quality of the materials. Businesses should ensure they have an appropriate size of a warehouse also. It should not be too big as this would see the business lose potential profit as they wouldn’t be making efficient use of their full capacity. The materials are then transported to the manufacturing station next. The second step Porter refers to is “Operations” which entails all the assembling, machining and testing needed

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