BooksBay: E-Business Model Report, Strategy, and Analysis

This report details the transformation of BooksBay from a traditional business to an e-business using the Wix platform. It covers the aim, objectives, scope, and limitations of the project, along with background information on BooksBay and its value proposition. The report explores strategic goals, the B2C business model, and the marketing strategy, including PEST analysis. It delves into e-business infrastructure, hardware and software requirements, and addresses privacy, security, and legal issues. Challenges faced during development, resources used, and the benefits of the e-business model are discussed. The report concludes with recommendations for BooksBay's e-business strategy and includes an executive summary and references. This report provides a comprehensive analysis of BooksBay's e-commerce implementation, its challenges, and its potential for success.

Table of Contents
Reflections and Challenges......................................................................................................2
Resources Used........................................................................................................................2
Introduction..............................................................................................................................4
Aim...................................................................................................................................... 4
Objectives............................................................................................................................ 4
Scope....................................................................................................................................4
Limitations........................................................................................................................... 4
Background..............................................................................................................................4
Value Proposition.....................................................................................................................5
Strategic Goals and Objectives.................................................................................................5
Business Model........................................................................................................................ 6
Marketing Strategy...................................................................................................................6
Political Analysis................................................................................................................. 6
Economical Analysis............................................................................................................6
Social Analysis.....................................................................................................................7
Technological Analysis........................................................................................................7
E-Business Infrastructure and Payment Processing..................................................................7
Hardware Requirements.......................................................................................................7
Software Requirements........................................................................................................8
Privacy, Security and Legal Issues...........................................................................................9
Legal.................................................................................................................................... 9
Privacy and Security............................................................................................................ 9
Other Risks.............................................................................................................................10
Benefits.................................................................................................................................. 10
Conclusions & Recommendations......................................................................................... 11
References..............................................................................................................................13

Executive Summary
This report presents the transformation of a traditional business into an e-business with the
help of an ecommerce web-development suite. The web-development suite in question is Wix
Platform which allows for quick, efficient and feature rich ecommerce website development.
The report would presents the entire business including the marketing strategy and IT
Infrastructure requirements for the business. The report would also present reflections,
challenges and conclusions.
Reflections and Challenges
There were many challenges that came up during the project.
 Understanding of the editor and their working was one of the major challenges. The
grid systems that are used and applied in each of the template are different from the
other which was challenging to understand.
 The next challenge was to grasp the functioning of the back-end. There are many
components that are involved in the back-end in terms of plugins. Understanding the
nature and functioning of these modules was the most difficult part as they may
behave as extensions also and carry out the task of content display as well. The inter-
linking of these modules at the back-end was not easy to do.
 Menu management system and its working was also a major challenge that came up.
There were several menu items that were present in the default template and the first
task that was to be done was the development of the home page. The linking of the
two was a challenge as there was a little knowledge on the accurate selection of the
menu items. The content did not show up in several attempts because of the
compatibility issues which was later resolved as an in-depth understanding was
obtained. The technical errors that were coming up were not getting resolved after
multiple attempts. However, gradually the nature of the issue was researched and the
resources were used for resolution of the same.
Resources Used
There are many sources and references that have been used for the project so that the
understanding on the requirements and the project specifications could be achieved. Many of
the technical components were also involved and therefore, the following resources are sued
for gaining an understanding on the same.

To get an understanding on the basics of Wix,
https://support.wix.com/en/getting-started/templates website was referred.
Building up of a website using Wix and to understand the components involved, the source
that was used was https://smallbiztrends.com/2016/08/wix-tutorial-build-website.html.
The online store part of the Wix is one of the most significant components that is used in
Wox. There were various confusions and difficulties that came up with this particular
extension and it was made easy through the resource as https://guides.co/g/adding-an-
online-store-to-your-wix-site/21219
There are also many tutorials and videos that are available on YouTube that were referred
and used so that the details on the extension and its utility in case of Wix could be achieved.
Responsive printing could be understood by watching the video as
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRU83c06luM and by applying the same techniques in
the web sites. The rest of the information was acquired from the source as
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgf_oYibI5Y.

Introduction
Aim
The aim of the report is to cover and discuss the details of the proposed solution for
BooksBay.
Objectives
The objectives of the report are to highlight the e-business model of the company along with
the details of the proposed solution in terms of e-business marketing, infrastructure, payment
systems, benefits and several issues.
Scope
The scope of the report is to cover the business, operational and technical details of the
proposed solution.
The information regarding the solution specific, such as, cost and schedule are not to be
covered.
Limitations
The report does not cover any of the assumptions, dependencies or constraints associated
with the solution that has been proposed for BooksBay.
Background
BooksBay is a company that publishes and sells books to its clients spread across different
locations. It is now looking to expand its business by emerging as an end-to-end service
provider in the industry. There are three primary areas that regulate the business of the
company:
 Sourcing of good quality books from the first-time and new writers that work
independently and are not associated with any other publisher in the market.
 Include the complete publishing operations in the business.
 E-commerce application for the customers providing them with the books written by
new and other successful writer.
As per the business model of the company, the primary sets of partners that are associated
with the company include authors, logistics partners along with printing agencies. The
primary sets of activities that are carried out include search for good and talented authors,

sourcing of good quality content and publishing of the books. The key resources include the
existing authors, customers and partners.
Value Proposition
Value proposition includes collaboration from the new and talented authors that are not
working with any other company and work on an independent basis. For the purpose of
finding such individuals, there will be monthly contests that will be organized by BooksBay
and the winners will be selected on the basis of the crowd-sourced readers from different
locations. The individuals that will score most number of votes will receive 30% of the
royalty fees at the time of the submission and publishing of their book. The rest of the amount
will remain with the company as they will have exclusive rights on the work. This will lead
to the benefits for the authors as well as for the company. The customers will also benefit
from this strategy as they will get to know and read the work of the fresh authors with their
interesting concepts and ideas. The overall cost will also come down as an online medium
will be used for marketing and sales along with customer interaction.
Strategic Goals and Objectives
In a nutshell, the primary objectives of the business are to provide an opportunity to the
newcomers to publish their work. There will be a few genres that will be targeted in the first
phase viz. romance, thriller, horror, fantasy and Sci-Fi along with the non-fiction books. In
the long-term, it is being aimed that the company will set-up its own publishing house which
will lead to increased opportunities to the new and existing writers to collaborate with the
company for publishing of their work. It will lead to the growth of the company as well as the
authors.
The company will have the exclusive rights on the work that will be submitted by the authors
and it could then be leased out to the third-parties to speed up the sales and increase more
profits. The in-house printing and publishing unit will further lower down the costs and the
company will be able to carry out all of the operations internally. It will lead to a string hold
on the supply chains (Brohi et al., 2016).
The e-commerce portal that will be set up will help in achieving the first objective of
identification of the new writers. The contest details can be shared on the portal and the
aspiring authors may submit their work using the portal. The judges will be able to easily

retrieve the details and content submitted by the candidates and the scoring process will also
be easy. The same portal may be utilized for announcing the results as well.
Business Model
The business model that has been proposed for BooksBay is the Business to Consumer or the
B2C model. There are further classifications of the B2C model under which a particular
business may have an offline as well as online presence (Martinez-Lopez, 2010). There are
also business units that deal with the third parties offline for increasing their profits and
maximizing their customer base. In case of BooksBay, the sourcing of the books from other
publishers and selling of the books to the customers will be done. It will make the company
as both a publisher as well as a seller. Amazon is one of the examples of such business units
(Pandya and Dholakia, 2005).
Marketing Strategy
The target set of users and customers for the e-commerce portal for BooksBay will be the
people in the age group of 18 to 55 years. This will include the people from all the genders
and the prime focus will be on the working class. This is due to the reason that these
individuals will have the higher probability of owing a credit or a debit card to make the
purchase. The background and region of the customers may be from any location. PEST
analysis of the company is covered below.
Political Analysis
Political factors and policies do not have a huge role to play in this industry. Some of the
common political factors include government stability, enforcement of new policies, change
in the taxation schemes etc. The book publishing industry is one of the industries that remain
least affected by all of such political factors. There are lesser chances of the development of a
government policy that may have a negative impact on the operations and working of the
industry.
Economical Analysis
There are various components that are to be considered from an economical perspective, such
as, economic cycles, rate of interests, unemployment etc. Any of the factors that may disturb
or may have an impact on the economy are significant in nature. However, all of these factors
and other components under the umbrella of economics have a less impact on the book

publishing unit and industry. Some of the factors like change in the rate of interest or
inflation may have significance in this industry.
Social Analysis
Social factors may have a huge rule to play in the field of book publishing industry. For
instance, education and literacy rates were low few years back in many of the developing
nations. However, with increased awareness and realization of the importance of education,
the government has made it mandatory to meet minimal education criteria. The literacy rates
have also improved in many of the countries in the recent years. This may lead to increased
demands for the books which may be profitable for the company.
Technological Analysis
Technology also plays an important role in the book publishing industry. There are many
developments that are being done in the field of technology. For instance, there are
individuals that have expertise in the designing of covers for the books. There are automated
tools being used for the purpose and the use of colors, graphics and paper has also improved
in the printed books. It has led to decrease in costs as well (Pradhan, 2014). There are certain
negative implications of technology as well that have been observed. Due to easy availability,
the cases of piracy have increased. These pirated versions are available at extremely low
costs which may be negative for the publishing houses as well as for the authors.
E-Business Infrastructure and Payment Processing
Hardware Requirements
The amount of traffic that will be experienced by the e-commerce portal of BooksBay would
be huge. The hardware requirements for such sites are listed and described on the basis of the
following issues.
It may get impacted by the number of transactions that take place per second along with the
queries that are received per second. The number of queries performed by the databases and
the pages that are served per second will also be significant. There may be security issues that
may crop up and in such cases the power of the back-up servers will come into the picture.
Pentium II/III based Intel server on the operating system as Linux will be sufficient to serve
hundreds and thousands of customers per day. The payment gateway that will be integrated in

the system will also be significant. It shall be secured and encrypted so that the financial
information of the customers is protected at all times.
The infrastructural requirements are as listed below.
 A reliable tele-communication medium and network
 Integrated banking application for the processing of banking operations at the back-
end
 Implementation of WAN for the execution of the banking services
 Implementation of Electronic fund transfer (EFT) System
 Implementation of Electronic Clearing System
 Encryption of the information by making use of Public key encryption method
 Payment gateway for processing of the payments done by credit cards for local as
well as international customers.
 Inclusion of Foreign Exchange Remittance Mechanism on the network
Software Requirements
 Database tools
The back-end of the system that is the database will be implemented by making use of
the tools as Oracle database and Toad. There will be a huge number of customers that
will be accessing the site and the information that will be required to be handled and
processed will also be huge. Oracle is the database development software that will be
able to handle the requirements of the system. It will provide required support for the
integration of the Big Data tools and security will also not emerge as a matter of
concern. A rich graphical user interface will be made possible with the use of Toad.
 Coding tools
The front end of the application will be required to be developed in such a manner
that the users feel connected with it and it is also visually appealing. Adobe
Dreamweaver will be used in this case for the creation of the source code. The
programming language that shall be used for the development of the front end shall be
PHP. It will provide the required development framework along with the high amount
of security as well (Methodsandtools, 2017).
 Testing
There are many testing activities that will be required to be performed on the system
in terms of system and integration testing, unit testing and so on. The AppLause tools

shall be used for the execution of the testing activities so that the overall system that is
designed is free from any of the bugs and defects.
Privacy, Security and Legal Issues
Legal
The policies that make sure that the legal compliance and adherence to the regulations is
made shall be followed. For instance, the security of the online transactions, electronic
contract enforceability and the access control and authentication of the users shall be made.
It will require collaboration of the government agencies along with the private sector. In case
of the financial system, there will be payment gateways and foreign exchanges used. It will
also be required to make sure that the tele-communication mediums that are followed are safe
and make use of high speed lines (Uop. 2006).
Some of the legal issues that may emerge may include the political risks in terms of the
change in the policies and laws along with monetary policies, currency conversion
mechanisms, restrictions and constraints on the cash flow, access to the online payments,
restrictions on the small scale firms etc.
Privacy and Security
There will be many of the privacy and security concerns that may come up in the process of
implementation of the e-commerce portal for BooksBay.
The portal will be implemented online which will lead to the emergence of many of the
security and privacy risks. There will be a lot of information that will be associated with the
company and its portal in terms of the customer information, payment details, admin details,
and details of the authors, product details and many more.
The attackers may attempt to violate the security and privacy constraints and may attempt to
breach the information. Some of the information categories will be sensitive and critical in
nature, such as, financial details of the customers. In case of breaching, loss or leakage of
such information, there may be legal obligations that may emerge for the company along with
the loss of goodwill and reputation (Onebusiness, 2013).
There may also be many other forms of security and privacy issues that may crop up in the
form of malware attacks, network based security attacks, SQL injection attacks etc.

The measures that will be necessary to be taken in order to avoid such risks will include a
combination of technical and administrative measures. For instance, Secure Socket Layer
(SSL) and digital certificates shall be used during the information sharing and execution of
any transaction.
There are many of the latest encryption algorithms that have also been created which shall be
used to encrypt the information to its cipher form. This will make sure that the attackers do
not misuse the information. There are many of the automated tools which have been created
for the purpose of ensuring security. These tools like anti-malware and anti-denial tools along
with network based intrusion detection and prevention systems shall also be used.
There are also Business Intelligence tools that may be used to analyze the details and patterns
associated with the attacks. Data mining and data analysis tools may be used for the purpose.
Other Risks
BooksBay is making a late entry in the business of the online world which is already being
used by many of its competitors. It will be difficult to explore this new world and set the
roots strongly to achieve quick profits.
There are also many of the market risks that are associated with the e-commerce portal for
BooksBay. This is due to the reason that the market trends and demands are being changing
frequently. The customer expectations and needs may change rapidly and it may become
difficult to maintain pace with the same.
There will also be many of the changes that will be introduced with the implementation of the
solution which may be difficult to manage.
Benefits
Customers that are associated with BooksBay and the ones that may be associated with any
other book store would want the books from the best collection to be offered to them. Also,
the reasonable allocation of the prices is also one of the significant demands of the customers.
Apart from the best and extensive collection of the books, it is also desired by the customers
to have a good experience with the e-commerce portal of the company. They wish to make
the payments securely and also wish to browse through the site easily without any issues or
lags. In terms of the delivery, they expect the e-books to be delivered instantly and the
paperback books to be delivered in a maximum of 2-3 days.

In order to meet the customer expectations, the company will collaborate and make contract
with numerous other publication houses to include their collection on the company website.
The company will also carry out many initiatives to come up with new and independent
authors and their work. There will be contests that will be organized for the purpose so that
the new talent is highlighted and is used well.
The designing of the website will be done by using responsive web design as the design
methodology which would allow the website to have a good degree of responsiveness to the
user actions (Wills, 2014).
These efforts and the proposed business solution will have many positive impacts on the
company in terms of the customer base and engagement. The customers will be able to
experience all of their demands at a single place and will not have to go anywhere to search
for their favorite books and authors. They will get a chance to explore the work of the new
authors and will be able to make payments from any location. This will lead to the increase in
the customer trust and satisfaction levels which would improve their engagement with the
company (Khurana, 2017).
There will also benefits to the company in terms of the higher revenue and profits along with
the competitive edge in the market.
Conclusions & Recommendations
It has become mandatory for the business units to have an online presence in order to reach
out to more number of customers. The decision has been taken by BooksBay and the solution
that has been proposed to the company is an e-commerce website.
The website that will be designed for the company must stick to certain design principles. It
shall be based upon responsive design as the methodology and must also include the elements
of customization, consistency, easy navigation, error resolution and simple layout. The
customers shall understand the web site features on their own and must not get stuck
anywhere.
The changes that will be introduced with the implementation of the web site for the staff
members must be handled by making use of a change management plan. This plan shall be
developed in advance and must focus upon the type of changes along with their need.

The entire project shall be carried out in a series of small phases. This will make it easy to
achieve the short-term goals to achieve the final goal and objectives from the proposed
solution. It will also enable the management to keep a track of all the activities going on in
the project. There must be a methodology used and applied for the development work and the
management processes. It must be ensured that the project planning is efficiently carried out
so that the objectives are met.

References
Brohi, H., Prithiani, J., Abbas, Z., Bhutto, A. and Chawla, S. (2016). Strategic Marketing
Plan of Nike. SSRN Electronic Journal.
Khurana, A. (2017). Why E-commerce Is Taking the Retail World by Storm. [online] The
Balance. Available at: https://www.thebalance.com/advantages-of-ecommerce-1141610
[Accessed 21 Sep. 2017].
Martinez-Lopez, L. (2010). Intelligent e-services and multi-agent systems for B2C e-
commerce. Internet Research, 20(3).
Methodsandtools (2017). Software Development Tools: Java, JavaScript,.NET, PHP, Ruby.
[online] Methodsandtools.com. Available at:
http://www.methodsandtools.com/tools/tools.php [Accessed 21 Sep. 2017].
Onebusiness (2013). The Legal and Privacy Issues of Doing E-Business. [online] Available
at:
https://www.onebusiness.ca/sites/default/files/MEDI_Booklet_Legal_Privacy_Issues_accessi
ble_E.pdf [Accessed 21 Sep. 2017].
Pandya, A. and Dholakia, N. (2005). Conceptualizing B2C Businesses as a New Category of
Services. Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organizations, 3(1), pp.1-12.
Pradhan, S. (2014). Total Quality Management in Service Sector: Case Study of Academic
Libraries. Journal of Business and Management Sciences, 2(3A), pp.29-32.
Uop (2006). E-Commerce Legal Issues. [online] Available at:
https://www.uop.edu.jo/download/research/members/tisgway_ecom.pdf [Accessed 21 Sep.
2017].
Wills, B. (2014). 18 Major Benefits of e-Commerce Business for Retailers & Customers in
2015. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/@briannawillsss/18-major-
benefits-of-e-commerce-business-for-retailers-customers-in-2015-63c5fc87f679 [Accessed
21 Sep. 2017].