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:

System need to be out in the market before competitors make a start in copying ideas
Technical advantage is converted into brand advantage
Provide better and better services to the customer

Sustainable competitive advantage appears to be more common with internet e- commerce:

The element of surprises can be greater.
Entry cost is low
Regular development in the sites and services

Comments

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