Analyzing Barnes & Noble.com

The Barnes & no(prenominal)le online store www. bn. com was launched in prove 1997. Among its primary strengths is its offline component the Barnes & fearful, Inc. which is a leading publisher and retailer involved in selling trade bulks, mass commercialize paperbacks, childrens books, bargain books, magazines, melody and movies. The big line of descent of this online channel is largely attributed to its offline counterpart. An new(prenominal) strength that Barnes & majestic. com has is its purchase of SparkNotes. com.This web internet site is considered as the worlds largest educational site which provides access to thousands of study guides on various poems, short stories, novels, and other literary pieces. When Barnes & Noble bought SparksNotes in 2001, the educational site already had six million registered implementrs. This number is unceasingly increasing and this increase widens the food mart reach of Barnes & Noble. com. Apart from SparkNotes, Barnes & Noble. com is similarly affiliated with the Barnes & Noble University.The university offers free courses and its students are capableness targets which screw be reached through with(predicate) the direct introduction and promotion of the online store and its convergences. some other profit of Barnes & Noble. com is its acquisition of an online electronic book retailer Fictionwise. Fictionwise allows the online store to penetrate the e-book market and effectively compete with Amazon. com (its flowering 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 attention team. Now, the major weakness that Barnes & Noble. com has is the fact that it is quiet not as popular as Amazon. com. When it started its operation in 1997, Amazon was already two geezerhood ahead in operation and it has already built a very big market of r egistered users in its database. In 1999, it was noted that Barnes & Noble. com scarce had 1. 8 million names while Amazon had 8. 4 million. Another weakness is the fact that its product prices are not as competitive with Amazon especially when it comes to e-books.Amazon also has bigger storage capacities for its products and this enables them to provide services 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 beau monde 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 utilize its nationwide stores as marketing venues which already subscribe to access to millions of Barnes & Noble customers.It can also foster affiliations with other online companies in order to expand its market reach and increas e probabilities for 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 new online program library and book retailer, Barnes & Noble. com might have suffer from fierce competition. A leader 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 catalogue and another thirty million listings from other book dealers of in-print books which may be new, rare, used, or out-of print. In appendix to that, the website is also leading in the electronic books and publishing industry. The site has almost 5,000 e-book titles which can be purchased and readily downloaded from the site to any personal computer, laptop, or pocket PC.With its rapid expansion and hold fast with various online companies, Barnes & Noble predicts that it wont be long 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 pauperism to know more about the music that they are buying.Barnes & Noble. coms mastery is best demonstrated in its revenues. Based on the company records, the sales of this online channel have steadily increased in the olden few years. In 2006, its sales reached $433 million for the total 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-commer ce site Barnes & Noble. com is patterned later 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 through the site. The orders can be placed and paid through the automated ordering forms and shop 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 utilized only at a minimal level in order to avoid comprising the sites book selling and promotion process. Marketing on the web Barnes & Noble. com tries aims to appeal t o 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 Membership Program which offers bonuss to shoppers of the companys products online and offline. The most beneficial incentive is the discounts which range 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 conjugated their physical stores to their site. Included in their previous strategy was to provide incentives for customers who give away their e-mail addresses to them. through with(predicate) their university, Barnes & Noble gains access to the e-m ail addresses of students as well. The e-mails are then 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 merchandiser 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 made 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), magazines, and CDs and DVDs of v arious 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 generally via book clubs and the Barnes & Noble University. Barnes & Noble. coms success is best demonstrated in its continuously increasing revenues for the olden 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 make 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 twinge Release Barnes & Noble Reports 2007 Year-End Sales, Released 03-03-200 8.Retrieved 03-15-2009 from http//www. barnesandnobleinc. com/newsroom/press_releases_list. html 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 Group (2007). Barnes & Noble Reports Preliminary 2006 Results Issues First Quarter 2007 Guidance. Published 03-22-2007 in Business 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 Battle 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 Service CDs At Stores Nationwide, Released October 16, 2000. Retrieved 03-15-2009 f rom http//yhoo. client. shareholder. com/releasedetail. cfm? sh_print=yes&releaseid=173692 Barnes & Noble Website http//www. barnesandnobleinc. com