E-Commerce Project

CSE455 E-Commerce

Dec 2014

Assessment Task 2: E-Commerce Project

Due date: 5:00PM Friday 30 Jan 2014

Weighting: 30% of final mark

Objectives

This assessment task addresses the following objectives from the subject outline:

1. Discuss electronic commerce and the stakeholders and their capabilities and limitations in the strategic convergence of technology and business.

2. Appreciate the global nature and issues of electronic commerce as well as understand the rapid technological changes taking place.

3. Develop skills in identifying the advantages and disadvantages of the various electronic payment options.

4. Understand the development of secure electronic transactions on the Internet.

Overview

Students will work in teams of three to prepare a report and tutorial presentation on a retail e-commerce company. The report will be divided into two main parts. Part 1 is to research and report on the company as it is today. Part 2 is to engage in a design thinking process to propose an innovation to the company’s business model. Part 3 of the assessment is the presentation.

Choosing your company

Each team should choose one retail e-commerce company from Internet Retailer’s Top 500 List. For example, you can choose one of the online following retailers:

· Academy.com

· Amazon.com, No. 1

· Autozone.com

· Babiesrus.com, No. 34 (Part of Toys ‘R’ Us Inc.)

· Basspro.com, No. 98

· Bedbathandbeyond.com, No. 221

· Bestbuy.com, No. 15

· Cabelas.com, No. 51

· Dickssportinggoods.com, No. 72

· Dollargeneral.com, No. 790

· Familydollar.com

· Homedepot.com, No. 16

· Jcpenny.com, No. 37

· Kmart.com, No. 6 (Owned and Operated by Sears Holding Corp.)

· Kohls.com, No. 23

· Lowes.com, No. 36

· Michaels.com

· Newegg.com, No. 17

· Officedepot.com, No. 9

· Oreillyauto.com, No. 188

· Pepboys.com

· Petco.com, No. 257

· Petsmart.com, No. 362

· Sears.com, No. 6

· SportsAuthority.com, No. 262

· Staples.com, No.3

· Target.com, No. 18

· Tigerdirect.com, No. 29 (Owned and operated by Systemax Inc.)

· Toysrus.com, No. 34

· Walgreens.com, No. 43

· More…

Alternatively, you can choose a retail e-commerce company in Vietnam, for examples:

- www.thegioididong.com/

- phongvu.vn/

- www.dienmay.com/

- www.bkc.vn/

- www.lazada.vn/‎

- www.hotdeal.vn/

- www.cungmua.com/

- www.nhommua.com/

- …

Each company can only be chosen once.

When your team has decided on a company, one member of your team must post the name of the company to the Major Project stream in the classroom.google.com (class code: a1tmkk) created for this assessment task. Before posting, you should read the other messages in the stream first to ensure that your company has not already been taken by another team. The first team to nominate a particular company gets it.

In the stream, post the name of your company for others to scan the list, please also mention the names of your group members, and which tutorial class you are in.

Report

Part 1: Research and report on the company

As a team, you should carry out independent research on your chosen company to find out as much as possible about them. You should again use the themes of business, technology and society to guide your research and must include research on all three of these themes.

Each company will be different, so it is difficult to define a single list of topics that must be covered. You should design your report format so that the structure of the report suits the company that you are dealing with. You should not however have headings in the report of “business”, “technology” and “society”. These are only your guiding themes, not your report headings.

Use the topics covered in this subject (and therefore in the textbook) as a guide. For example, you should start by considering topics like:

· Business overview (e.g. what they do, their history, statistics on size/growth, etc.)

· Business model (using the business model canvas – see below)

· Implementation technologies and/or infrastructure used

· Security

· Payment systems

· Marketing strategies

· Advertising / Marketing communications

· Ethical and Legal issues

· Online media

· Social Networks and Communities

These are a guide only – not all of them are relevant for all companies, and for many companies there will be other important topics that you will find through your research.

You should also compare your company with others that offer a similar product or service, i.e., you should present an overview of the competitive environment, and within that framework, focus on the value proposition and/or other unique aspects offered by your company. For Part 1, your report should include the context and broader environment.

Business Model Canvas

One topic that is common to all companies is their business model. Part 1 of your research report should describe the business model of your company using the Business Model Canvas presented in this subject. A link to the book and website describing the Business Model Canvas can be found in the lecture of week 2. Part 1 of your report should include a whole page showing your canvas, as well as additional description of each of the points as required.

While your team may decide to split up the research work between members, everyone in the team should contribute to the business model canvas, as it should bring together many of the topics you cover in your report.

Part 2: Innovate the company

The second part of your project is to apply a design thinking methodology to propose an innovation in how the company operates.

The design thinking process was covered briefly in the tutorial where you worked in teams to redesign a wallet. We covered a 5-stage design thinking process:

Empathize ó Define ó Ideate ó Prototype ó Test

To review the process, you are strongly encouraged to practice using the Stanford d.school ‘crash course’ below:

http://dschool.stanford.edu/dgift/

(make sure you view the virtual crash course video)

For your E-commerce Project, you need to engage with the process as follows.

This will only work successfully if you complete the activities as a team.

Empathize

As a first step, your team needs to interview some potential users of your e-commerce company who are not enrolled in this subject. The goal is to understand what users are looking for from your company. The people you choose to interview might be your family, co-workers, friends outside university or other students as long as they are not enrolled in this subject.

Briefly describe your company to the interviewee. Devise a set of questions that allow you to find out what they think about this company and its area of business, e.g. if your chosen e-commerce company sells t-shirts, you might ask questions like:

· Tell me about the last time you bought a t-shirt

· What kinds of t-shirts do you buy?

· Have you ever bought a t-shirt for someone else as a gift? If so, tell me about it.

· Have you ever bought a t-shirt online?

o If yes, why did you buy it online? Was it a good experience? What would make you buy more t-shirts online?

o If no, why not? Would you consider buying a t-shirt online in future? What could a company do that would make you more likely to buy a t-shirt online?

Your goal is to draw out the user’s good and bad experiences with both traditional commerce (physical shops) and e-commerce, with specific reference to your company.

You should aim to interview a minimum of 6 people if there are 3 students in your team.

If you are in a team of 2 or 4 students, adjust this accordingly. All members of the team should be involved in some of the interviewing process (although not all team members need to do every interview). It will help if one person interviews and another makes notes.

You must document your interviews and summarise these in your report.

Define

From your interviews, as a team you need to start by identifying needs and insights:

· Needs: what are the things they are trying to do?

· Insights: things you learned about your user’s view of the world and feelings and experiences (good or bad) that you can use later in your design

Create a persona that describes who your typical user is. For example, your typical user might be a 25yo woman named Jie who works as a business manager during the week, likes to go bushwalking on weekends, and can’t live without her smartphone. Your persona is not a real person, it is made up. However, it should describe one specific individual that represents a typical client of your e-commerce company (i.e. you shouldn’t generalise to “all men aged between 22-28 years old”, you should pick a specific person/age).

Finally, define your problem statement, using your persona. It should follow the form:

_____________ needs a way to ______________ surprisingly / because / but ___________

(persona) (need) (insight)

Ideate

Brainstorming is a form of ideation. As a team, come up with as many different ways as possible that you could solve the need you have identified. You should have at least 30, preferably 50-80. They can be as wild and crazy as you like – they don’t all need to be things that are possible at this stage of the process. Post-it notes can be useful. Document your process, e.g. by taking photographs. This should be done at a team meeting (not virtually).

Prototype

From your ideation, your team should pick at least 3 possible ways that you could meet your user’s need. At this stage they need to be solutions that are possible, i.e. things that your e-commerce company could actually do.

For each of your solutions, sketch the idea on paper to create a prototype of how the solution would work. E.g. you might draw a series of screen shots to explain your solution. Or if your solution is to create a new kind of product, you might sketch what this new kind of product might look like. Or if your solution is a new service, you might sketch out how the user might use the service.

Test

Take your prototypes (note: more than 1) back to your potential users. Briefly describe to them your proposed solutions and ask for feedback. Document their feedback. Multiple team members should be involved in this process.

Don’t worry if you can’t go back to all of the users you originally interviewed. As long as you can find some users to test your solutions on, that’s OK.

Refine / Iterate

Based on user feedback, choose one of your solutions and refine it further to address the feedback you received. This will become your proposed innovation for your e-commerce company.

The most important point is that your proposed innovation is something that addresses your user’s needs. It is not about what you want to do, it must be about what users want to have based on insights about the users themselves. In your report, you must describe how your proposed innovation addresses the need you identified in your problem statement.

Note that your innovation can be very small or very large. There is nothing wrong with proposing a small change, if you can demonstrate how it will help improve the company.

Business Model

For your proposed innovation, create a new version of the business model canvas that captures how your idea will integrate with the company’s existing business model. While you don’t need to repeat the full textual description of what is on the canvas, you should highlight what has changed from the version in Part 1.

“The Pitch”

The final thing you need to create for Part 2 of the assignment is a short “sales pitch” that would convince the company’s owner(s) to adopt the innovation you are proposing.

This should take the form of an executive summary or pitch (maximum one page) that is addressed to the owner of the company, and describes:

· What they should do (brief description of your innovation)

· Why it is a good idea (rationale)

· What the expected benefits would be to their company

· What kinds of costs or other investments or changes would they need to make?

Note: you should write the pitch as though you were selling your idea to the owner of the company, not your university lecturer!!

What your report needs to contain

For Part 2, your report needs to contain:

· A detailed description of the process you followed

· Outputs produced at each stage of the process. Because much of the work will be done away from a computer, you may like to photograph and/or scan images and documents to include in your report.

· Your revised business model canvas

· Your pitch to the company owner

Part 3: Presentation

Your team needs to prepare a presentation of 10-15 minutes duration, to be delivered in your tutorial class in weeks 9 and 10.

The presentation should include:

· An overview of your chosen company (highlights from Part 1 of your report)

· Information about your empathy work/interviews: details of who you interviewed, what kinds of questions you asked, and what kinds of responses you received

· The needs and insights that you identified, and details of your user persona. As part of this you should describe your problem statement.

· “The Pitch” – what you are proposing and why, and what benefits the business will gain?

By the end of your presentation, you should have convinced the audience that the company should adopt your proposal.

Format of Deliverables – Report

Your group’s report should be around 4000-5000 words in length. The final size of your report will typically be around 12-16 pages, depending on the number of diagrams, sketches, photographs, etc. you have.

This report size is for a group of 3 students. If you are in a group of 2 or 4 students, the size can be adjusted down or up accordingly.

The second page of the report (after the title page) should contain a description of what tasks/activities each team member contributed towards this assessment task. Most teams will choose to divide the work up, so this page is to help the marker understand which students were responsible for which parts of the overall report.

The report should contain a cover page, the page describing each student’s contribution, a table of contents, an introduction, body (Part 1 and Part 2), summary/conclusion and list of references.

You are required to include a list of references (especially for Part 1), and these should be in an accepted academic referencing style, e.g. Harvard style. Your report should also include in-line citations as well as the list of references at the end. If you need assistance with referencing, please consult the resources at:

http://www.ntnu.no/viko/english/papers/harvardlist

Failure to properly acknowledge your sources may be regarded as plagiarism.

Submission Instructions

Your report must be uploaded to this dropbox. Your folder name should be [EIU.EC.Asst2.<Student_ID>-<Student_Name>]

Marking Criteria

The marking criteria below relate to the “group mark” for your project. As mentioned above, your individual mark will be calculated by taking your group mark as a starting point and using information from your own contribution in the report to adjust it up or down.

Also note that in Part 2 of the assessment task, the marks are awarded for your level of engagement with the design thinking process, not on the quality or significance of the final innovation that you propose.