Business plan development for an e-commerce product service offering

Creation Business Plan

The Creation

Creation is an online store that will offer a wide range of unique and beautiful accessories for home. This store is especially for those people who want to decorate their homes with some unique and distinctive things. In addition to this, the store aims at serving those people who do not want to visit shops and then select any particular accessory for their home. Due to this reason, creation is an online store, which deals with its customers through internet. Acceptance of order and payment al are done online while sitting at home and just pressing some buttons.

SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS

As far as the internal and external environment of the store is concerned, the external environment is very competitive. It is because of the fact that a number of online home accessories stores are already doing good business and they have a good will among customers. On the other hand, the internal environment is very dedicated and motivated towards achievement of the objectives. Though the external environment is quite challenging but since creation has a wide range of unique collection, therefore it is firmly believed that the store will ultimately meet its desired goals (Blackwell, 2011).

Market

In the year 2001, the home decor industry faced a minor fall of one percent in its overall sales. The total revenue of this year was 54.6 billion as compared to the revenue of 2000, which was 55.2 billion. It has been predicted by various researchers that the trend of purchasing home decor accessories will get increase day by day. It is evident because the percentage of people who own their own homes has been increased by 8.8%. Besides this, income of more than 50% people has reached to $60,000 (Botha, Bothma, & Geldenhuys, 2008). This income levels depicts that people will definitely prefer to buy some decor collection for their homes. Not only is this, but home has also become a status symbol in the society, due to this, people are striving hard to get their homes. Since this ratio of love for home increases, it is apparent that the people will also love to decorate it.

OBJECTIVES

The core objectives of Creations are as follows:

To set a price at which at least fifty-five percent of the profit can be gained.

To minimize the cost.

To generate annual revenues of $626,000.

STRATEGIC PLAN

The strategic plan of Creations is to become a pioneer in the home decor accessories industry. The competitive edge will be of having the unique decorative items, which are not available with the other online stores. This is achieved through implementing the great marketing and promotional strategies, grabbing large number of customers and maintaining quality.

DESCRIPTION OF THE Management TEAM

There are two co-owners of Creations, Marry Anderson and Sara Michael. Both of the owners are around thirty-five years of age. Marry is an interior designer whereas Sara is a graduate in fine arts. Both of them are passionate about home decoration. All the strategic and business planning and management is the responsibility of Sara, and Marry is responsible for inventory management. Sara and Marry took these responsibilities by their will because they have good experience in it.

VALUE CHAIN

We share pictures of our items with the customers, and then the customer asks for its price and other features, after the customer places that final order. Once the order is confirmed we ask our sales person to deliver the item at the particular address given by the customer.

TARGETED SEGMENTS AND POSITIONING

Creation has divided the market segments into three main classes, which are upper, lower and middle class. From this, two sections that are the upper and the middle class are selected. Our main target customers are the middle class but we do target the upper class for some of the luxurious goods.

In order to get a unique and distinctive position in the minds of the people, we focus on preparing some unique and classy decorative items for our customers and give priority to the best quality.

SWOT ANALYSIS

Strengths

Our strength is our idea of producing some unique and new decor pieces for homes rather than the traditional old ones (K2Commerce.com, 2010).

Weaknesses

Lack of finance for producing some extra ordinary items is our weakness.

Opportunities

It has been observed that until now there are very few stores who offer after sales services with the decor items. Therefore, it is an opportunity for us and we have plans to garb it.

Threats

Since there are many competitors in this, market who have a good will among customers so this is a threat for us.

The creation seek to exist in the market by obtaining a unique edge through its product offering, the level of scope and service provided by them and the expertise of their labor.

PRODUCTS: Since the goods will be directly obtained from the manufacturer, their quality can be ensured issuing and overall satisfactory statement. The range of products will be unique, with little crossover to other retailers within the Atlanta marketplace.

SERVICES: Involving and establishing relationship with customer is the key to success. With the help of personalized design services, educational decorating workshops, gift registry, realtor programs, ASID discounts, gift certificates, gift wrap and preferred customer recognition programs, The creation will provide its customer with products not found in the market or not commonly available in this type of business format. It is our wish that customer can seek to us a as a resource fulfilling objective to achieve a personalized home environment.

EMPLOYEES: Employees of The Creation will enjoy a friendly, hard and innovative work and will support and encourage new and creative ideas. Learning from our mistakes and developing ourselves, as a long-term business is our utmost objective. Not only staying long-term but also managing the human resource and retaining employees on long-term basis to create expertise and consistency in customer service.

Marketing Strategy

In addition to price, discounts and item promotional announcements (Reynolds, 2004), The Creation will focus more towards marketing itself n the advertising vehicles. It will also promote itself with the following:

Local and Regional Magazine Publications: The vehicle based advertising lines up nicely and provides a good demographic base with the coverage of these vehicles for The Creation.

Direct Mail Postcards: The Creation will seek to inform and aware their customers, retaining their existing customer and attract new customers for sales of product. These mailings will be done and carried out on special occasions and will facilitate sale of slow moving products through negotiated specials.

Spring Festival -- 10% to 20% savings opportunity.

Open House -- 15% to 20% savings opportunity.

Holiday House -- 10% to 20% savings opportunity.

All these activities which will include new offering and promotions and seminars that ha taken place will be communicated and conveyed to customers through their magazines.