Australian E-Commerce Website Evaluation of Term Paper

The site has also been designed to allow for browsing through a content-based taxonomy that makes the task of finding book areas of interest easily accomplished. This site also works to create a multichannel selling strategy by listing local bookstores retrieved when a visitor types in their postal code, and lists book signing in their area as well. What differentiates this site from many other book-selling sites throughout Australia is the support for features that include enhanced content by areas of interest, in addition to content relevant to specific books of interest. These areas of content include radio interviews, downloadable PDFs, and book reviews are on the website as well. The site also provides one of the most comprehensive lists of best-selling books from any site in Australia as well. Finally, the use of content management systems in the website to enable greater levels of support is also evident in the help desk facility on the website.

Drawbacks of this website include a limited amount of description and content for each of the books represented in the catalog, an area that could potentially be improved with greater coordination between suppliers and book wholesalers. There is also a limited amount of information regarding the books' prior review history, which signals the need for a more effective reputation management system for making customer references and comments more visible and prevalent throughout the site. There are also online prices listed yet no mention of what the in-store book price is and the level of discount given online. There is also the lack of real-time integration with the order management system and shopping cart, as the cart requires a click on it to see if an order has in fact been entered into it or not. There is also a lack of consistent approach to defining the checkout process as well. Given all these shortcomings however, the site does make a strong commitment of security, stating that any fraudulent charges to a credit card made from the site would not be billed to the customer.The bottom line is that across all these factors, Angus & Robertson shows a high level of supply chain, book wholesaler, and content management integration, yet suffers from a lack of depth of content that needs to be a shared responsibility throughout their supply chain to provide greater depth of content on a per book basis.

Summary

The perspective of a website being evidence of a highly synchronized supply chain that also has a content management system that drives the entire websites' content through catalogs and pricing tables is a necessity for any e-commerce strategy. it's because the product lifecycles are so rapid, the lifecycles of books relatively quick in popular categories, and the pressure on pricing so intense that this type of highly synchronized system is a necessity to stay competitive over time.

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