Week4

Q4.

According to [1], the monthly average of  unique visitors on the website is 29.657. The number visitors has increased slightly over the last year by 1.97%.  To compare, its competitors ‘Debenhams’ and ‘Marks and Spencer’ websites has 42870 and 54165 unique visitors, respectively. ‘Marks and Spencer’ visitors website has increased similarly to ‘Next’ by 5.39% over the last year, but the number of ‘Debenhams’ website visitors jumped dramatically by 85.77% over the same period of time. The average number of visitors on ‘Next’, ‘Debenhams’ and ‘Marks and Spencer’ websites is 40.000, 47.000 and 52.000, respectively[2].

Q5. 

1. Raising a purchase order – technologies used on client side:  browser – should comply with industry security standards such as Secure Sockets Layer (SSL); technologies used on seller site: website –  needs to be hosted on a server (needed: operating system(Linux), server – software such as Apache, database(Oracle, MySql)). Website is written in HTML, and its functionality can be extended using variety of technologies such as: PHP, Java or .NET.

2. Payment – Using a Credit/debit card is the common way to make purchase. Technologies above are also used to make online payments.

3. Product delivery – A product delivery depend on what kind of product is purchased. Product can be downloaded if it  is software or music, shipped to the customer or picked up from a store.

  Q6.

The number of smartphones sales exceeded the number of PC’s sales which proves that the usage of mobile devices is still increasing.  38% of U.S. consumers have used smartphones to but products or services [5].  In the world of PC’s, everything went on web (e-business), hence the same will happen on mobile. The most important in mobile business is to be consistent. Mobile marketing must be integrated with other advertising channels and visual branding and ad copy must remain consistent across different advertisements [6].

REFERENES

[1] http://siteanalytics.compete.com

[2] http://www.google.co.uk/insights

[3] ‘Purchasing Process’, Univeristy of  Bath, http://www.bath.ac.uk/purchasing-services/foi/PurchasingProcessesProceduresandGuidance072007.pdf

[4] ‘Online Shopping and Security’, Iowa State University, http://www.extension.iastate.edu/Publications/PM1789G.pdf

[5] ‘The future of mobile’, http://www.businessinsider.com/the-future-of-mobile-deck-2012-3#-29

[6] ’10 Winning Strategies for Mobile Marketing’,http://www.casinoaffiliateprograms.com/blog/10-winning-strategies-for-mobile-marketing/

Week2

WEEK 2 

Technology development, especially the Internet has had enormous influence on people lives recently. It is easily noticeable in the statistics that the percentage of population that uses the Internet has steadily increased over last years. According to the statistics in the table below,

YEAR	Users	Population	% Pop.
2000	15,400,000	58,789,194	26.2 %
2005	35,807,929	59,889,407	59.8 %
2007	38,512,837	60,363,602	63.8 %
2009	48,755,000	61,113,205	79.8 %
2010	51,442,100	62,348,477	82.5 %

available at the link http://www.internetworldstats.com/eu/uk.htm, the percentage of population in the UK using the Internet jumped dramatically from 26.2% to 82.5% and means that over 62 million people use the Internet.

According to the table below, that comes from the report published by the Office for National Statistics available at the link:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference-tables.html?edition=tcm%3A77-226727

77% households had access to the Internet in 2011, and this is 20% more than in 2006. This data comes from to report published by the Office for National Statistics.

Year	Households (millions)	Percentage
2006	14.3	57
2007	15.2	61
2008	16.5	65
2009	18.3	70
2010	19.2	73
2011	19	77

However, development of mobile technology has resulted in increase access to the Internet by mobile phones. In the research published website by Tecmark on the http://www.tecmark.co.uk/uk-mobile-internet-stats, the UK web traffic coming from mobile device went up from 0.02% to 8.09% over the period of last 2 years, which gives over 4000% growth. The below graph shows that dramatic increase in website traffic from mobiles.

Office of National Statistics also provides the most popular Internet activities. The top on the list is finding information about goods and services, with 77% users reporting this activity. 57% users use the social networking sites, eg Facebook or Twitter, and the same percentage of users use services related to travel and accommodation.

Downloading is also popular activity, and computer software including video games is purchased more often online than in traditional shops, according to the table below available on Office of National Statistic website.

Purchases downloaded or accessed from websites rather than delivered by post
	Per cent
Films, music	40
(Electronic) books, magazines, newspapers, e-learning material	29
Computer software including video games	54