B2C E-Commerce That Ebags Has Used to

¶ … B2C e-commerce that eBags has used to develop a competitive advantage over the traditional retailers of bags and accessories is the fact that shopping is more convenient and faster. Indeed, the eBags website provides 24 hours a day, 365 days a year access. Let us only consider a 'traditional' process of buying a bag. You have to go to a specialized store for this, which is most often open only 8-10 hours a day. It is more than probable that it does not work the weekends.

Compare this to a place where you can go online at 2 AM and buy the bag you need for your trip the day after tomorrow. It is obvious that if we are to compare the two retailers (brick-and-mortar and the eBags website), you will have a preference towards the first in terms of accessibility and convenience. The second advantage of e-commerce I would consider, especially in this case, is the offering. A traditional store will offer you certain types of bags, but a finite number of models.

As we have seen from the case study, eBags, through its partners, allows you to design your own bag, according to your own specifications. This second advantage, flexibility, provides an additional advantage over the traditional commerce. 2. Both technologies can provide a competitive advantage for eBags for one simple reason: it increases accessibility to the company's services, as well as the potential targeted market that the company has. Let us only take the example of m-commerce (mobile commerce).

This would mean a potentially high targeted market of users who buy goods using wireless data services. More accessibility and more ways to use eBags's services would mean a more profitable business. 3. I would consider Finali to be a complementor to eBags. Although it may be somewhat debatable whether Finali was an intermediary or a complementor, my final choice was based on the definition of the complementor function.

Thus, a complementor is "a company that "provides products and services better than their client companies can themselves (...) thereby extending its value-added capabilities to its customers." As we have seen from the case study, eBags has outsourced both its phone orders and the customer service calls to Finali. The company's specialization towards this area meant that better services could be offered, increasing eBags's real value.

Thus, eBags can specialize on offering the core segment of their business, while the complementary actions (call orders and service) were outsourced to a company specialized in this. In this sense, Finali is a complementor. 4. From my point-of-view, eBags represent an intermediary for Timbuk2. Again, in order to back this assertion, we have to check the definition for an intermediary and relate it to the case study.

Thus, intermediaries are "specialist companies that provide services better than their client companies can themselves." If we consider this definition, eBags is a specialized company in e-commerce and Internet retailing. Its sales are exclusively done over the Internet. The service mentioned in the definition that eBags offers to Timbuk2 is the possibility of the customer to built his own customized travel bag within the eBags website.

I would consider this, in my opinion, an e-commerce type of distribution, not to the point where eBags actually distributes Timbuk2 products to the customer, but to the point where the product is introduced to the customer and the "make-it-yourself" service is made available. The disadvantage for Timbuk2 from such a partnership is given by the fact that the customer who will build his own customized bag will not associate this facility with Timbuk2's brand.

Indeed, as we have seen in the case study, everything takes place on eBags's website and every association the customer may make will be with eBags. Additionally, I would consider eBags's advantage to be Timbul2's disadvantage. The fact that the customer is not directed to Timbuk2's website, spends more time on eBags's and may do some additional shopping there is equivalent to the fact that the customer does not do any shopping on Timbuk2's website.

The lack of contact with the supplier's website (in this case, Timbuk2) means that the advantages are all for the intermediary, in this case eBags. 5. The website states the following: "if you are.