E-Business Paper Case

E-Business Paper

ACC/340

E-Business Paper

Electronic Stix is an electronic cigarette store based in Utah. They started out as a brick and mortar store in 2008 but quickly decided they wanted to put their products online as to better serve their customers. The integration of E-business into their day to day brick and mortar business was not a smooth one. After some trial and error they have learned what works for best for their business and for their customers.

Initial integration

Once Electronic Stix got their website up and running customers were able to place orders. Things seemed to be running smoothly for the first couple weeks. This is when they encountered their first problem. They were running out of inventory for their physical store locations because they weren’t compensating for business from the website. This seemed to be their biggest challenge. They, at the time, had three physical locations and would place orders for products and place them in inventory for their main store. From there they would supply their other two stores as well as the website. The other stores and the website didn’t have inventory systems of their own. They would simply call the main store and let them know they were running low or were completely out of a product. Before they launched their website this system worked well for them. So when their website went live they figured they would continue with the system and use the inventory from the main location to also fill orders from the website.

The launch of their website was right around the same time that electronic cigarettes were becoming popular. They didn’t anticipate the number of orders they would get from the website as well as the increase in business from the physical locations. They would run out of inventory at the physical locations and were unable to restock because they would first fill orders from the website with the main stores inventory before restocking their physical locations.

They soon realized that their old inventory system was not going to work with business they were getting from the website. To solve this problem they decided to set up a warehouse to keep their main inventory at. This is also where they would fill orders from the website at. Each store was given a physical inventory and a warehouse inventory count. This way they had a better view of what they had in each store as well as what they had at the warehouse.

The second problem that they encountered with the addition of their website was that they couldn’t keep up with demand. Since the internet is open 24 hours a day and orders could be placed at any time they would get so many orders for a certain product that it would deplete their inventory for the product. The website was not linked in any way to their inventory system so when they were out of a product people could still order it even though they were not going to be able fulfill the order. This resulted in customers having to wait extended periods of time to get their orders or refunds on their purchases because they were not able to get more of the product.