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Competitive Advantage - Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Sustainable competitive advantage may be realised by adoption of e-commerce strategies and business models. Rather than simply exchanging procurement transactions as with e-commerce practices, leading enterprises are executing e- commerce to share intellectual capital with their trading partners working as a value chain that provides a competitive advantage for the development and distribution of their products.

The idea of giving the customer access to tracking information via the internet was a new one that had considerable appeal to the customer.

For example, the use of new system also had considerable advantage to FedEx who no longer had to deal with a vast number of calls checking up on progress of consignment; because the customer could now access the system themselves. But e-commerce development and implementation could not be entirely private- customer had to become involved at some stage. The competitor was quick to catch on to the idea and UPS (United Parsal Services) was soon able to make available a similar system built onto their internal IT infrastructure for tracking packages. DHL, on the other hand, were unable to react as quickly because of technical difficulties in implementing and integrating a competitive system.

To gain advantage: 
  1. System need to be out in the market before competitors make a start in copying ideas 
  2. Technical advantage is converted into brand advantage 
  3. Provide better and better services to the customer 
Sustainable competitive advantage appears to be more common with internet e- commerce: 
  1. The element of surprises can be greater. 
  2. Entry cost is low 
  3. Regular development in the sites and services


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