Electronic Commerce: Dell

Nowadays e-commerce has become an undeniable part of the business plans and strategies. E-commerce, in turn, is the process of buying and selling, or exchanging services, products, or information through web and Internet. Present days, almost any business involves e-commerce for interaction with their customers and consumers. However, there were early birds, who started using e-commerce in early 1990s. A good example of such companies is Dell. Dell is one of the leading technology companies, offering a broad range of products, including desktop PCs, servers, networking products, storage, mobility products, software and peripherals, and services. The company mainly works in the US. Its main office is situated in Round Rock, Texas and employs 96,000 people including 1,700 temporary employees.

The company’s customers are categorized as: large enterprise, public, small and medium business (SMB), andconsumer. Thus, Dell uses two types of E-commerce transactions: Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B). However, the main profit of company comes from B2B transactions.

Extensive variety of customer foundation provides the company with expanded revenue flows. As the Company Profile states (2010), during Financial Year 2010, the company generated 27% of the total revenues from large enterprise, 27.4% from public clients, 22.8% from SMBs, and 22.8% from consumers.

Dell Inc. 2010, Datamonitor: Company Profile, retrieved 19 January 2011, from www.search.ebscohost.com

Ewing, J. 2007, “Where Dell sells with brick-and-mortar”, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, september 27, 2007, retrieved 15 January 2011, from http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/sep2007/gb20070927_440600.htm

Holzner, S. 2006, How Dell does it, New York: McGraw-Hill.

Schniederjans, MJ & Cao, Q 2002, e-Commerce operations