RB is a Dutch niche e-commerce player, specialised in creating their own bikes, selling other niche branded bikes, bike components and bike accessories. RB has one offline shop and it is used for warehousing as well as a showroom for their customers, where customers have the opportunity to test the products before purchasing. Online, RB has a main webshop, where one can buy bikes, fixed gears, accessories and bicycle bags. Furthermore, they have 6 other web-shops, which are solely focused on certain bike components or accessories, e.g. Brooks saddles or Ortlieb bags.
The organisation’s mission is to become one of the top 100 e-commerce players in the Benelux. Simultaneously, RB plans to follow the online to offline strategy by opening a brick-and-mortar store in the city centre of Rotterdam
For the blog, we will discuss the strengths and the weaknesses from the SWOT analysis and the proposed digital strategy.
SWOT Analysis
For analysing RB’s market position in relation to its competitors, we will be using the SWOT analysis, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. The goal is to identify the major factors affecting competitiveness before crafting a new digital strategy.
Strengths
- The webshop features a wide variety of 16.000 specialised products, covering necessary needs for the bike e.g. bike locks, child seats, saddles, parts of the bikes.
- Despite that the organisation is an e-commerce player, RB has one physical store / warehouse that allows customers to test the products. A competitive advantage as customers value testing before buying expensive products.
Weaknesses
- Web-shop design layout and multiple web-shops lacks integration and consistency. The navigation on the online shops is inconvenient, incomplete, and the quality of the product images is low.
- A small part-time workforce of 2-5 employees, leads to inconsistencies of tasks performance, since multiple employees are doing the same tasks; high turnover due to no full-time positions
Proposed Digital Strategy
The proposed digital strategy focuses on transforming RB’s business through eliminating the organisation’s weaknesses, while capitalising on its strengths. The strategy will consist of two parts, namely, web experience and customer service / engagement. Both parts feature transformational initiatives such as unifying the seven separate web-shops and the implementation of the CRM system, as well as complementary initiatives like smart filter, QR Code, Social Media, and FAQ.
Web Experience
- Unifying the seven separate website back ends with total products of 16.000 products into RB’s main web-shop.
- Integrate a smart-filter for all seven web-shops’ from frontend, in order to reduce choice overload for customers.
- Integrate QR codes in RB’s online to offline strategy – bridging RB’s online presence with it soon-to-be-opened offline store.
Customer service / engagement
- Implement a CRM system to enhance customer experience and engagement while standardising work processes for RB’s short-term employees.
