Group opinion and why we selected these places
Ratings for PARIS Mini Baker
Tastiness: ★★★★☆
Selectivity: ★★☆☆☆ (Only offers puffs and ice-cream puffs)
Speed: ★★★★☆
Value for money: ★★★★★ (Being able to eat such a big scoop of ice-cream with a freshly made crunchy puff with only RM2 nowadays is really a "wow"!)
Overall ratings: ★★★★☆
Ratings for Summer Dessert House
Tastiness: ★★★★☆
Selectivity: ★★★★☆
Speed: ★★★☆☆
Value for money: ★★★☆☆
Overall ratings: ★★★½☆
We select these places simply due to 1 reason -
convenience. Firstly, we only have bicycles as a transportation mean in Kampar. Hence, we cannot go very far away from Kampar New Town. We select these places because they are in Kampar New Town so it is very convenience for us to go there. Secondly, since we have 5 members, it is not easy to meet what every member wants to eat at the same time. So we just choose a convenience place that offers a variety of food and drinks options - the Summer Dessert House. Besides, Kampar, like many other places in Malaysia, is very hot. So we choose PARIS Mini Baker to enjoy after-meal dessert - ice-cream puffs!
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Classification of e-commerce
Business to consumer (B2C) is sell the products or services directly to personal use customers. Since the transaction are involved individual transactions and eliminates the wholesale purchaser, so that the seller can make a higher profit when consumer spending. Furthermore, B2C is effective for smaller companies since individual consumers are not as concerned with company recognition as they are with getting the product for the best price (Dana, n.d.).
In Summer Dessert House, laksa as the famous local food is using B2C as transaction. This is cash and carry stall. Customers come to the shop and order the food they desired from the seller. They are less worry about the freshness of the food since it can be observed through the real food served on. After that, the food will be served to the customers. The customers will pay the products they order by monetary transaction directly. This is the process of seller sell the services or product to the customers and customers made the payment. Besides that, Summer Dessert House has a high reputation which can be observed through the shop always crowded of people at there. Their shows their loyalty by repeatedly have a food at there and the existing customer use viral marketing to introduce their friends to have a try the best laksa in the town.
Paris Mini Baker also is B2C transaction and effective in using social network such as Facebook to communicate and updated the information to their customers for informing their operation time, or even the emergency case need to close early to bring convenient for customer in terms of prevent them come over and taste nothing. A strong relationship between seller and buyer is essential to obtain long term survival for business. B2C applications are beneficial to existing retail stores as this innovative application allows them to enhance the customer base in term of loyalty and revenue.
Business model
A business model is a method of doing business by which a company can make money to sustain itself (Turban, King, Lee, Liang, & Turban, 2012). Besides, it shows how an organization delivers value of products and services from their business by what activities they can provide to their target consumers. One way for businessman to generate larger sales is engaging in selling and promoting their products and services via the Internet.
Furthermore, there is a common business model applied to both shops that we have selected which are the PARIS Mini Baker and Summer Dessert House. Viral marketing model has been adopted by both shops. According to the viral marketing model, people use social networks for spreading word-of-mouth advertising. Thus, the brand awareness will be widely increasing by inducing people to send influencing massages to other people to join certain programs (Turban, King, Lee, Liang, & Turban, 2012). It is basically a Web-based word-of-mouth advertising.
For PARIS Mini Baker, the first main tool is Web 2.0 - Facebook, which is used to generate their sales. They created a Facebook page to introduce their products and services and post the latest status to their fans or customers. The brief history of their business and other details such as operation time are clearly stated in the page to bring some knowledge to their customers or Facebook users on what actually their business is doing. Besides that, they will try to keep interaction with interested customers from time to time such as they will inform their customers in case of any emergency to close early or they have any out-of-stock product in order to bring some convenience to their customers. Sometimes, PARIS Mini Baker will encourage their customer to upload photo of their ice-cream puffs or check in when they visit the shop and then give special offer to those who do so like 10% discount as rewards. This approach has attracted peoples’ intention to buy their products. That is also a best way to enhance customers' trust and loyalty. In the other hand, they will create and post delicious dessert images to catch customer’s attention through social network to attract people to try their desserts. By using Web 2.0, they not only focus on the people nearby, they can attract people from different locations to go and try their products.
On the other hand, Summer Dessert House is using the same business model like PARIS Mini Baker. It highly depends on their customers by web-based word-of-mouth since the owners are inactive in social network. Its main objective is to provide the best service and quality to meet their customer needs. For instance, Laksa is one of the top-rank food. Loyal customers will recommend it to those people around them especially their family members and friends. The owner believes that the social recommendation is the most trustworthy sources. This is one of the successful strategies they are using. Other than that, the reasonable price for the foods and beverages without any GST charge is also a good strategy to increase the competitive advantage in the market. They try to set the price as low as possible in order to increase the competitive advantage. It is possible in increase the business profit by getting a larger group of loyalty customer, and using the power of customer to help you to promote your services with free of charges. For examples, a creative use of hashtags also helps them to generate larger sales and customers. Some of their customers will share their photo on Instagram or Facebook together with the hashtag function which allows other people to find more about the content and details that have been tagged. For examples, the hashtag #laksa will provide the signal and allow other people to find more information as containing laksa. Therefore, their customers are the more reliable source helping them to promote their business.
For every business, the most important thing is the business must have a strong customer relationship which is able to grow their businesses and gain trust with their customer. With trust, they have customers for life, for grow their business. Without trust, the business can survive or stay in a longer period. Customer is the most important resources that help every types business to generate the daily business income, else your business can’t be successful anymore. Building trust takes time and a lot of hard work. Paris Mini Baker, they are more focus on social network to build trust with their customer. For instance, they are very responsiveness to reply the message drop by their customers. They also will try to follow up with customers for more business development opportunities. They try to improve their business review the feedback from customers, to see what the customer needs in their business. For Summer Dessert House has provided a very good service to their customer. They always serve their customer from their deep heart and treat them like a friend. The boss always shows a smiling face when serving their customers, however, this action will try to make others emotion leisurely especially for those who waiting the food for a long time. Thus, build a strong trust with customer is a most important concept by generating greater revenue without any special treatment.
Marketing and advertising
The basic approaches used in marketing and advertising we referring is the marketing mix elements being applied for both stalls in promoting their products and services to the customer.
Paris Mini Baker
In term of product, it provides 2 flavours and 8 flavours for the puff and ice-cream puffs respectively. This is able in catering different customers’ preference accordingly. Thus, varieties of flavour of product can be an attractiveness to customers. In term of price, the unit price of the products is selling in RM2 which is relative affordable for everyone. Thus, it is able to penetrate to the market in Kampar. In term of place, it is located nearby the Grand Kampar Hotel which is the iconic place in Kampar. This provides the convenient to the customer to find it’s location easily. In term of promotion, it provides the discount for the puff in lower price as for more quantity being purchased by customer. Thus, it would motivate the customer to buy more.
Summer Dessert House
In term of product, it other than selling laksa, it also provides various of fried foods(sausages, yong tau hu), desserts (Tong Shui) and fresh fruit juice. These foods and beverages are become the supplement while tasting the laksa for the customer. In term of price, it is relatively reasonable and it is counting according to which have being ordered by customer supplemented with the laksa. In term of place, it is located adjacent to the Maybank ATM branch which is a high traffic place for pulic or pedestrian. Customer could easily to get reach to the place and it is able to attract the potential customer in among the pedestrian.
Recommendations
Along with the internet and web-based technologies, electronic commerce (e-commerce) acts as a medium for the transaction of goods and services in terms of B2C, B2B and C2C, enhances and changing the shape of the business and competition (Anjali, 2014).
As for recommendation towards the both business of Paris Mini Baker and Summer Dessert House through e-commerce, these 2 businesses could try to engage the online selling service. As mentioned previously, Paris Mini Baker and Summer Dessert House have did well in promoting, handling and maintaining the customers in the aspects of information and brand awareness, but they could try to provide the services that the customers to purchase or order online through the internet that might add on along with the delivery services. In this way, the efficiency, image and sales of the business are surely to be improved although effort and cost of labor or personnel are required.
Generally, conducting businesses through e-commerce are highly concerning with the social network media. Therefore, Paris Mini Baker and Summer Dessert House could try to integrate their business with more than one social network media, such as Instagram, Twitter and so on to ensure the amount of attention are generated from the large portion of audiences existed in the social network media sites.
Another essential point to be considered in terms of e-commerce is the power of presence. In other words, Paris Mini Baker and Summer Dessert House have to put some effort for organizing the online websites well to ensure the easiness for the visitors to browse and search. Normally this process is called search engine optimization, this is a way which allowing the businesses’ websites are highly visible in the results of search engine that required the good name structure of the website and the amount of the website been visited.
Gupta, A. (2014). E-commerce: Role of e-commerce in today's business. International Journal of Computing and Corporate Research.
Dana, G. (n.d). Explain the business to consumer model. Retrieved March 1, 2016 from http://smallbusiness.chron.com/explain-business-consumer-model-2258.html
Turban, E., King, D., Lee, J., Liang, T. P., & Turban, D. (2012). Electronic commerce 2012: A managerial and social networks perspectives (7th ed.). New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
