Group Project Guideline

Since the Internet-based electronic commerce businesses are booming, your group decided to establish your own E-Commerce business (assume that your group has sufficient amount of fund). The best way to establish the company will be benchmarking of highly successfully companies such as ebay.com and the benchmarking company will eventually become your target competitor. Your task is establishing an E-commerce company based on below requirements. Following is the reference website for the project - Managing the Digital Enterprise: Business Model on the Web.

Deliverables: please make sure to submit all the below requirtements together thru Blackboard

• Proposal (using Microsoft Word)
• Data Model (using Lucidchart.com and Microsoft Word)
• Website (using Microsoft Web Expression 4). Make sure to compress ("zip it") the webiste folder for submission. Otherwise, you will not be able to submit the website.

1) The first task is to develop a proposal of E-Commerce business based on following guidelines:  

• Company name (i.e., Amazon, Inc., Ebay, Inc, esystems21, Inc…)
• Company Internet address (i.e., www.amazon.com, www.whatever.com…)

1. Your address must be unique.

2. Using the follow website:  www.register.com, you can check whether your address is already used by others or not.

3. Just check uniqueness of the address (FREE SERVICE), do not buy any services from the website

• Company’s mission

• Introduction of company

• Industry analysis using 5 Competitive Forces Model

• Company strategy

• Company IS strategy - based on company  strategy

• Business description
  1) What you will be selling? Products, Services, or Both?
  2) Is it Business to Business, Business to Consumer, or both?
  3) Where you will be located and why? Will locate the business on a major Internet backbone such as San Jose or other big cities? – if not – please explain why.
  4) What will be your major source of revenue? - If the site sells products and services, the revenue stream is observable and is considered “straight forward”. If the revenue is produced in another manner, the revenue stream must be clearly presented. It is assumed the web site is a “pro-profit” entity.
  5) How will you attain distribution?
  6) How can you make sure that your company exists? If no one knows your web site exists, your company can be put of business sooner or later.
  7) What will be your competitive advantage? – cost leadership, differentiation, focus, or something else
   

• Project schedule (Gant Chart) - MUST use Free Trial Microsoft Project Professional 2013 SW (free for 60 days)
  - Using "Microsoft Project Professional tutorial 2013" as key word, you will be able to find a lot of GOOD tutorials on the Internet.
  - Also, try following website for understanding some of project related terms: What is "Gantt Chart", "PERT", and Critical Path Method (CPM)."

2) The second task is about developing Data Model (example of below activities). You must develop the data model using Lucidchart.com (Free!) and here is the YouTube Tutorial;

• List of entities & descriptions and List of attributes & descriptions
  • Minimum of Ten entities are required
• Conceptual data model using entity relationship diagram
• Business Rules (create yours by bench marching competitors’ rules) based on business operation manual, procedure, and standard

3) The last task is about developing a website for your company.

The last task is about developing your company's website using Microsoft Web Expression 4 (FREE software). It might be a good idea to utilize "Small Business" template of Web Expression 4 for developing your website. Please CLICK HERE to see example of E-Commerce website. The followings are essential web pages that you MUST include in your website:

• Company home page
• Introduction of Company’s Management and Employment page
• Product or service information page
• Product or service order form page (Ok to use Sunny website order form page!)
• FAQ (frequently asked question) page using the FAQ template
• Contact page (e.g., company address, email, phone number….)
• Product returns policy or service quality guarantee policy page
• Customer feedback page
• Link to other company’s site as an extra service to customers
• Other relevant pages for you web site (e.g., security policy, order tracking page by a delivery company such as Fedex or UPS…)