IT Generatied Competitive advantege at Tesco.

The most abvios competitive advantage Teco has its 70,000 orders per week through Tesco.com and its 8 million club card memers. Apart from that, the fact that Tesco did not over estimated the demand for on-line shopping, and decided to provide the e-costumers with the existing infrastrucre, gave Tesco a Huge advante. This advantage consist on reducing their initial investemt on aditional warehouses and continue to provide better prices, service and rewards for their costumers. On the other hand, Tesco has a unique advantage of having loyal cosutmers.  During the history of this company, the managers have always taken risks on order to provide the costumer a “better deal” than the competition. This strategy has clearly worked over the years and now they are the leaders on their industry. Said that, I really think that another comeptitive advante that brings to Tesco is the fact that they can do promotions to incentive the e-shopping. Having such network has a huge competitve advantage because you can reach them personally, you can inform them about the benefits of e-shopping, among other benefits.

Combining their 8 million club card members and the allready existing 280,000 orders each month through the web, Tesco has a huge advantage over its competitors. Their grand “asset” are their loyal costumers that recive information about your stores. Such information in a personalized way and very targeted on your likes and needs. That kind of advantage its very difficult to have! This advantage can be easily used by the IT depatment inorder to increase their monthly orders through the net. Once you explan to the costumer the advantages, and you communicate the posibility of buying through the web, some people will definitly have in mind  Tesco.com.  On the other hand, the web is an adittional service that Tesco is providing. Instead of thinking that the turnover of Tesco was ,through e- grocery, was only 1.5%, it should be though as a adittional revenue that people that were busy  would not have bought  if the sevice would not be available. On the other hand, the cost that the costumer has to pay to buy throgh the web is  a cost that some costumers are more than willing to pay in order to save time.

To conclude, the web has to be seen as an aditional service that Tesco offers to its clients. Also it has to exploit the posibility of letting the custumers know about the benefits on using the web. Also it will be necessary to include the member card costumer a kind of promotion for the custumer to try the sevice. Tesco will have to incentive people to use the service and to try out this efficent way of shopping. I rally think that promoting the e-comerce you do not canibalize you stores, but on the contrary. I really belive that the number of times the same costumer buys at your store increases because having the on line resource you can always order somethings that other wise you will definitly not go to the store.

 

Meneame.net

Meneame. net its a grate example on what you can achieve on the web. A teacher that launched his web page in order for the users to rank the content  that is being posted. It seems a very simple thing but its a great idea that it is based on few users that feed the net and those few users make the page rich and desirable for the rest of the users. The majority of the users benefit from the input of some few users and depend on the quality of the input of this minority. So the page becomes a "reliable" source of information. 

On the other hand, making this scheme profitable would only be feasible, in my opinion, based on charging companies interested on reaching this particular community and not charging the user. Also taking into account that Meneame.net is based on trust or credibility on the ranking, it would be a very bad bet to let the sponsors intervene with this process, but you can let them post their information on the side that does not intervene with the essence of the page. Also we have to do a very big assumption and this is that the users will not interpret this making money practices of the web page as a possibility of  affecting the rankings and comments. Also you run the risk that your "costumers" interpret advertisement as a way of the page of  being biased and even that a authentic good comments appear on a article posted on Time magazine, for example,  and Time magazine is actually paying tho post its information, users can easily thing the companies are intervening   with the content of the page, even if a user made the good comment. 

Under the assumption of working in mename.net I will suggest to include the possibility for the user to reach the newspapers, books, magazines, etc. This means to become a broker for subscriptions to all forms publications. We already know that our costumers like or have a tendency to read all this kind of publications and if we offer the possibility of subscribing to a magazine that the user reads comments about very often can be a very profitable idea. So the users feed the page on what their interest  are and we can offer related publications in order for them to buy them. 

 

Jambo!

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