Analyzing Barnes & Noble.com

The Barnes & alarming online store www. bn. com was launched in March 1997. Among its primary strengths is its offline component the Barnes & overlord, Inc. which is a star(p) publisher and retailer involved in selling trade discs, stilt grocery storeplace paperbacks, childrens books, bargain books, magazines, music and movies. The big inventory of this online fetch is largely attributed to its offline counterpart. a nonher(prenominal) strength that Barnes & nonele. com has is its purchase of SparkNotes. com.This web commit is considered as the worlds largest educational localise which provides access to thousands of study guides on diverse poems, piddling stories, novels, and other literary pieces. When Barnes & Noble bought SparksNotes in 2001, the educational site already had six one million million registered users. This number is continuously change magnitude and this increase widens the market reach of Barnes & Noble. com. Apart from SparkNotes, Barnes & Noble. com is to a fault affiliated with the Barnes & Noble University.The university offers free courses and its students be potential targets which apprize be reached done the direct introduction and progress of the online store and its produces. Another advantage of Barnes & Noble. com is its acquisition of an online electronic book retailer Fictionwise. Fictionwise aloneows the online store to penetrate the e-book market and goodly compete with virago. com (its prime competitor) in distributing digital copies of books and other content. Before, the prime problem of the site was that it was not as user-friendly as Amazon. com.Fortunately, that has been resolved by changing the sites management team. Now, the major weakness that Barnes & Noble. com has is the point that it is unperturbed not as popular as Amazon. com. When it started its operation in 1997, Amazon was already twain years ahead in operation and it has already built a very big market of registered users in its d atabase. In 1999, it was noted that Barnes & Noble. com only(prenominal) had 1. 8 million names while Amazon had 8. 4 million. Another weakness is the fact that its product prices are not as competitory with Amazon especially when it comes to e-books.Amazon excessively has bigger storage capacities for its products and this enables them to provide service and ship their products very quickly. Fortunately, its recent affiliations with SparkNotes and Fictionwise pose many opportunities. Barnes & Noble. com management speculates that Fictionwise can help the company significantly reduce its marketing price in e-books. Moreover, the acquisition of SparkNotes increases the market database of Barnes & Noble. com by millions. The company can also go for its nationally stores as marketing venues which already have access to millions of Barnes & Noble customers.It can also foster affiliations with other online companies in locate to refine its market reach and increase probabilities f or future innovations. As for the threats, Barnes & Noble still faces challenges from Amazon. com, as well as other book sellers which adapted the Amazon concept of online retail. This includes Blackwell Synergy, Books-A-Million, and Powells Books. If these companies would merge to launch a immature online library and book retailer, Barnes & Noble. com might have suffer from fierce competition. A draw in the industryBarnes & Noble. com is considered as a leader in the online bookselling as it offers a wide selection of in-stock inventory three million from the companys online catalogueue and another thirty million listings from other book dealers of in-print books which whitethorn be new, rare, used, or out-of print. In addition to that, the website is also wind in the electronic books and publishing industry. The site has almost 5,000 e-book titles which can be purchased and right away downloaded from the site to any personal computer, laptop, or pocket PC.With its rapid in tricacy and tie-up with various online companies, Barnes & Noble predicts that it wont be unyielding before their site would offer digital companies of all of the companys book titles. Barnes & Noble. com is also leading in the music commerce. Recently, Forbes. com voted the website as the No. 1 music site. The music store of Barnes & Noble. com has been credited for offering not just great music of jazz, world music or Broadway. Instead, it also achieved recognition for its extensive and interesting editorial features for people who deficiency to retire much than rough the music that they are buying.Barnes & Noble. coms success is outperform demonstrated in its receiptss. Based on the company records, the sales of this online roadway have steadily increased in the ultimo few years. In 2006, its sales reached $433 million for the full year. In 2007, the sales were up to $477 million for the full year exhibiting about 13. 4% increase as compared to 2006. The revenue model of the E-commerce site Barnes & Noble. com is patterned after Amazon. coms web catalog revenue model. Like other booksellers, Barnes & Noble.com get their revenues when customers choose from the on-site product catalogs and buy finished the site. The orders can be placed and paid through with(predicate) the automated ordering forms and shopping cart of the website. Whats good about this model is the fact that it acts as an online extension of the companys nationwide stores for its in-print products. Since the model is implemented at an online level, the revenue generation becomes more effective as potential customers can access the site, view their choices, and buy products anytime that they want to.Although there are other methods of earning which Barnes & Noble. com can use (i. e. advertising through editorial content and ad spaces), such must be apply only at a minimal level in order to avoid comprising the sites book selling and promotion process. merchandise on the web Barn es & Noble. com tries aims to appeal to the general audience. To attract the target market and maintain a great share of loyal customers, the company employs various promotional methods both offline and online. Offline, www. bn.com is introduced through the stores of Barnes & Noble. It is also popularized through the Barnes & Noble social rank Program which offers incentives to shoppers of the companys products online and offline. The most beneficial incentive is the discounts which order from ten to ninety percent. The marketing campaign of Barnes & Noble. com is a lot more aggressive. Foremost of these is the promotional mailing. The online book retailer attempts to pitch various book clubs including the 5. 5 million members of the Bertlesmann.In addition to that, they have linked their bodily stores to their site. include in their previous strategy was to provide incentives for customers who give away their email addresses to them. Through their university, Barnes & Noble ga ins access to the e-mail addresses of students as well. The e-mails are and so supplied with promotional offers, flyers, brochures, newsletters and product catalogs. In addition to this, the online book seller is promoted through advertorials and advertisements in Yahoo. In 2000, Barnes & Noble.com initiated a partnership with Yahoo. As a result, the site became the premier book seller that is featured in the Yahoo directory. The site was also the featured merchant on Yahoo Shopping. Moreover, graphic links of Barnes & Noble. com were presented in every search result page and in all the book category pages of Yahoo. Conclusion Barnes & Noble. com has achieved its position as a leading online bookseller through its successful acquisition, affiliations and merging with other online companies such as Yahoo, SparkNotes, Spinway, and FictionWise.Moreover, a great part of its success must also be attributed to the fact that it has a big inventory of books (in-print and e-books), magazin es, and CDs and DVDs of various music and movies. The online book seller also has an efficient marketing campaign online and offline through Yahoo. com, Barnes & Noble physical stores, and through its aggressive promotional mailings distributed primarily via book clubs and the Barnes & Noble University. Barnes & Noble. coms success is best demonstrated in its continuously increasing revenues for the past few years.Furthermore, this success is seen in its rapid expansion and continuously increasing inventory. To keep up with this success and the fierce competition with Amazon. com, the online company should discharge sure that it can keep up with the new innovations in marketing, new methods in presenting online product catalogs, and more efficient processes in shipping their products. It should also increase its inventory storage capacity through the acquisition of more warehouses. References Barnes & Noble (2008). Barnes & Noble crusade Release Barnes & Noble Reports 2007 Year- End Sales, Released 03-03-2008.Retrieved 03-15-2009 from http//www. barnesandnobleinc. com/newsroom/press_releases_list. hypertext mark-up language Danielle Belopotosky (2009). E-Book Seller Fictionwise Bought by Barnes & Noble. Published 03-05-2009 in New York Times Online. Retrieved 03-15-2009 from http//gadgetwise. blogs. nytimes. com/2009/03/05/e-book-seller-fictionwise-bought-buy-barnes-noble/ Gale classify (2007). Barnes & Noble Reports Preliminary 2006 Results Issues First Quarter 2007 Guidance. Published 03-22-2007 in transaction Wire, The Free Library. Retrieved 03-15-2009 from http//www. thefreelibrary.com/Business+Wire/2007/March/22-p53 Larry Light (1999). Barnes & Nobles New combat Plan for the Cyberbook War. Published 07-07-1999 in Business Week Online. Retrieved 03-15-2009 from http//www. businessweek. com/bwdaily/dnflash/july1999/nf90707a. htm Yahoo. (2000). Yahoo Press Release Barnes & Noble Announces Availability Of Free Unlimited Internet dish CDs At Stores Na tionwide, Released October 16, 2000. Retrieved 03-15-2009 from http//yhoo. client. shareholder. com/releasedetail. cfm? sh_print=yes&releaseid=173692 Barnes & Noble Website http//www. barnesandnobleinc. com