Business Case
Project Overview
Team Carbon will be developing a site that sells hospitality supplies to hotel chains and individuals. Rather than compete with existing sites that sell virtually all products that a hotel might need, we will be specializing in branded items. Initial product offerings will include linens (sheets, towels, table clothes, etc.), bathroom supplies (soap, shampoo, lotion, etc.) and clothing items (bathrobes). We will also offer customization options for a wide variety of our products including stitching and embossing. And large hotel chains that are able to commit to purchasing a certain amount can receive a discount contract price on items.
Value Proposition for the Web
Luxury Hotel Supplies is a leader in providing high end products and customizable services. This gives Luxury Hotel Supplies an advantage, not only by offering its customers products tailored to their specifications, but also by giving them the ability to customize these products upon request.
Luxury Hotel Supplies provides quality products and services, it offers a full-service e-commerce solution to conduct all its transactions with both its B2B and B2C customers. This allows us to know what our customers' needs and expectations are from product specifications and customized services all the way to the delivery of a product.. Although, we are actually dealing with both products and services at Luxury Hotel Supplies, this approach looks at both as a service allowing us to focus on our customer’s needs while providing the best products availble to a hotel chain.
Category of E-Commerce
Luxury Hotel Supplies conducts business under two different categories, Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C). The first category, B2B, is with our business customers, the hotel chains, as they can access our website and order the products they want and the customizations they desire.
The second category, B2C, covers the guests who stay at the hotels we supply with customized products, and would like to purchase some of those items to take with them. The guests are able to visit our website and purchase any of the customized items they saw at the hotel.
American Hotel Register Co. - www.americanhotel.com
HD Supply - www.hdsupplysolutions.com
National Hospitality - www.nathosp.com
Intended Customers of the Site
Luxury Hotel Supplies targets two types of customers, businesses and individuals. The age group for individual customers is 21 and above and since businesses cannot be specified with an age and rather by size, Hotel Luxury Supplies targets large hotel chains.
Individual customers can be either adult men or women who are purchasing our customized products for their own collection or as gifts. Businesses need to have at least three or more hotels and 2 or more chain brands.Luxury Hotel Supplies is currently offering its products to hotel chains with hotels located in the North America and Canada. This also applies to individual purchases.
The reason for specifying an age and customer group is dependent on hotel policies, which requires adults to be of age, 21 and above, in order to make reservations and stay at their hotels. This can apply to either women or men. Therefore, the guests who stay at hotels fall within this group and are interested in purchasing the products they have used while staying at a specific hotel.
Luxury Hotel Supplies conducts business only with large hotel chains as these companies are interested in branding most or all the items they use in their hotels. This generates interest in our products and services. And the selected geographical areas are due to limitations in suppliers and distributors.
How We Intend to Attract Different Types of Customers
ImpulseTo attract impulse buyers we are going to offer a section for a special offer and add an area for featured products on the home page. We will also provide a quick and easy for users to navigate the site and an upsell feature which will help us get impulse buyers to add more to their cart. For impulse buyers that are logged in we are going to provide site branding and some customization and a list of recent purchases on the home page.
PatientTo attract patient buyers we are going to provide a favorites list to allow them to keep track of items and sort them based on category or collection. We will also provide enhanced search capabilities that will allow users to compare item pricing, features and customizable options.
AnalyticalFor our analytical buyers we will provide detailed product data on our product details page, product collections information (ex. Nivea product collection), and an area where they can break down products by hotel area. On the search page we will also provide comparisons and a quick view that displays the most pertinent information about a product without having to click into the full product details page.
UtilitarianTo appeal to our Utilitarian users we are going to provide a clean and clear navigation and search to help get the user to the item that they need quickly and an efficient checkout process to their cart processed quickly. For logged in users we also provide an option for a quick checkout or one click checkout, favorites lists for quicker access to items they like and a list of recent orders for re-ordering.
HedonicTo appeal to our hedonic users we will provide demos on products and a customer review area. We will also provide an area for users to blog on or research information on the hotel industry. And the quick view and product details page will allow hedonic users to view product details, images and collection information interactively and provide a more in store experience.
E-Commerce Value Chain
AttractLuxury Hotel Supplies is a B2B hotel supply company, with specialization in towels, linens, and bathroom supplies. As there is competition in this space, we are differentiating on the ability to provide both hotel chain branding on our products, but also branding for personal hotel customers. Understandably, this is more of a niche play to a smaller, upscale segment, but we feel this positions us uniquely in the hotel supply space.
As a result, our method of “attracting” customers will need to be different. While we will leverage traditional online and offline channels to conduct advertising and marketing, we feel that we will need a more personal connection with our customers, both businesses and end hotel patrons.
To build brand awareness, we will market via email, web targeted banners, and have a social media presence. However, to penetrate the B2B market, we will need to have a strong presence at tradeshows, and have a team of relationship managers cater to the specific needs of each of our high valued hotel chain partners.
From the personal end consumer standpoint, we need to be where the customer is. Many customers make their hotel reservations online, so we will need off-us integration with our lead hotel chain partners to upsell our offering to the consumer during their online reservation process, both on full sites and mobile experiences. Additionally, we would like to have on-site check-in integration where we are able to offer the personal branding towels, for example, to the hotel customer when they check-in with a hotel representative in-person or at a hotel kiosk.
As we are a luxury brand, we will opt for more of a personal one-on-one type of tactic, keeping our top chains and luxury consumers happy, and striving to capture large volumes from them.
InteractAssuming we are effective in the “attract” stage of the e-Commerce value chain, our approach will move into the “interact” stage. Here, we will be focused on converting the interest and intrigue of our customers into sales. Our teams’ belief and mission is that with our very personalized and customized offering, we can provide a unique offer to each and every buyer, both business and personal consumer.
Our site will be designed in such a way that it is very easy and intuitive to navigate. With learnings from future usability testing, we will continue to refine, iterate, and update the features and experience of the site. Product search and the associated filters relating to that particular product will be critical. For example, we will want our customers to be able to sort towels by color, size, fabric, etc. and then even be able to choose from a variety of font styles when they personalize. Long-term, our vision would be to understand what users are searching for, collect that data, and use it to better structure our site.
Layering in transparent feedback, we would want to collect user feedback on the site so that other users could reflect positively and negatively on each product and provide ratings and reviews. We will also consider the feasibility of site feedback tools, like Opinion Lab, that allow users to self-report feedback on the site itself.
When selecting a product itself, and adding personalization, users would be able to preview the product at different angles and zoom in and out to inspect their final product before purchasing.
Overall, these concepts and ideas will be vetted be our team and evaluated for feasibility with the goal of providing an interactive user experience that provides as close to “one- click” experiences as possible, minimizing scrolling and multi-step processes.
ActAfter we nail this interact stage with the customer on the site, it will be critical for us Luxury Hotel Supplies to close the sale and have a smooth, seamless checkout experience. We believe that providing an authentic, genuine checkout experience, with minimal to no cross-selling, will reduce clutter and distraction, and get users through payment to confirmation. To this end, we will allow a user to view their shopping cart, verify their order, provide their billing and shipping information, and confirm.
As we go through information architecture, design, and usability rounds we will refine this experience, but our expectation is to provide transparency to the end user. Sincere and grateful messaging will be provided, addressing the user by their first name and thanking them for their business. Customers will be allowed to checkout by manually providing debit or credit card information from the four major credit card networks (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, or Discover) and may be provided PayPal and Google Wallet checkout options, too. Cash and checks will not be accepted as we do not want to have manual processing as a part of our organization.
Customers may be provided the option to store profile information on the site for future use, to enable faster checkouts in future purchases. This opt-in will be integrated into the user experience for those without information saved.
All in all, we will strive to provide a clutter-free, transparent, and clean checkout process to minimize breakage and capture as much sales as possible. Long-term, and likely beyond the scope and time window of this engagement, we would evaluate opportunities that Amazon, Google, eBay are considering, around the notion of same-day shipping, which we believe would be a superb and differentiating experience, especially for our B2C business. A segment of those consumers may be booking last minute, thus requiring us to deliver in a short amount of time. Integration with apps such as Hotels Tonight, may be a strategic avenue for us to consider long-term.
ReactFinally, one of our core tenets would be in the realm of customer service. As many of us can attest to, the quality of hotel hospitality can make or break your hotel experience. This can also be said for Luxury Hotel Supplies and our business with our B2B and B2C customers.
To provide customers “choice,” our site would provide multiple options for customer service needs catering to the preferences of our end users. Direct access to a live customer agent on the phone would be available 24/7 (and staffed according to peak business hours). For customers hoping to avoid calling a live representative, we would explore vendors providing click-to-chat solutions. Additionally, the option to email customer service and receive a response within 24 hours would be provided. Lastly, a Help Center, with a knowledge center of FAQs categorized by frequently asked topics would be provided.
Our hypothetical customer service team would be down-to-earth, personal, and armed with a wealth of data about the customer. Ideally, we’d implement solutions that would allow those servicing the customer to know the customers profile, what they’ve bought, what they’ve added to their shopping cart and not bought, which pages they’ve visited, where they have experiences errors, etc. This information would allow the customer service team to service better and narrow down to specific issues faster.
Overall, the “react” portion of the e-Commerce cycle would be very responsive to customer needs, and we would argue that we would like to be as proactive as possible, identifying issues before they require servicing. If we can create an experience for the user that is so simple, easy, and seamless, allowing the customer to accomplish their main tasks with great satisfaction, we can increase the probability that we create a sticky website with repeat visitors and buyers.
Technical and Design Overview
Our team decided to use ASP.NET as the primary coding language and HTML, CSS and jQuery as front-end languages. As our website is based on a B2B and B2C model, we will implement features such as a my account module, customization module, and product search module.
On the site users will be able to search for, order and customize various supplies used in hospitality industry. Once the orders have been placed we will process the orders and send the information to our suppliers. All the web data will be stored in a Microsoft Access database on DePaul’s ECT server along with the source code files of the website.
For architectural and maintainability purposes we are going to split the different business requirements of the site into modules and divide the code into the following layers: Data Access Layer, Business Logic Layer, and Web Layer.