E-commerce

In the city of Paris in France, 10 years ago in 2000, Mobipocket saw light. This was the result of the collaborated efforts between Nathalie Ting and Thierry Brethes in order to fulfill the demand of an e-book reader that is secure and is also compatible with Palm OS, Symbian, Blackberry, Java Me and many other PDA operating systems. In the early months of 2000, the first version of the reader was introduced. Mobipocket succeeded in gaining a reputation of an innovative enterprise by introducing a new technology to a sector that was suffering from obsolete methods. In 2005, the company was acquired fully by Amazon which was believed to be a strategic decision to answer the Adobe systems to cease updating and supporting its e-book software and package. Today, with a concentrated strategy and a new owner, the company is selling different types of e-books as well as creating innovative and secured readers for the e-books. However, the company takes of Paris as its main headquarters.

The main website of Mobipocket,  HYPERLINK httpwww.mobipocket.com www.mobipocket.com, is a web 2.0 application and is dynamic in nature.  The website is developed with ASP in order to give the user an interactive experience with the interface. The concepts of marketing efforts have been changed by the internet. A successful marketing effort today means having a high traffic of online visitors and a high ranking on Google and other famous search engines. The wellness of Mobipockets indexing can be revealed by a simple search on Google for e-book readers. Moreover, a direct link to the books available at Mobipockets store has also been placed by Amazon.com in e-book formats. The two extensions that were introduced by Amazon .mobi and .prc became the most frequently used formats for e-books. Through these efforts, Mobipocket started noticing an increase in its traffic at alexa.com. Another important point to note is that Mobipocket relies on new technology being introduced which is secure as well as stable in order to build the trust and enhance the image of the company. Mobipocket is ranked among the top websites for e-books and is well known even though the marketing efforts are not strong.

Market of Mobipocket.com
Segments
Mobipocket is a company that introduces innovative technology to readers and is also a pure .com company. The segmentation of the market is done according to the technology that is used by the potential customer such as PDA, Computers and Mobile Phones. Sub-segments are also made by Mobipocket for each segment for example if the user uses a computer, what is the operating system used by him like Mac, Windows or Unix. Mobipocket uses psychographic segmentation as it is also an e-book store. According to the potential customers preference of genre, like fictional or non-fictional, the company sub-segments each criterion.

Targets
All types of readers are targeted by Mobipocket by offering different genre, but more accurately, the users who can read English, French, Spanish or German are the target market of Mobipocket, even though the technology is itself available to everyone.

Differentiation
The differentiation by Mobipocket is only being done from the competitors whose e-readers give access to screening reading of 40,000 books instantly to different electronic devices like internet retailer.com.

Positioning
The company has not only positioned itself in the world of e-books as a pioneer but also provided a unique technology that guarantees security from fraud and offers compatibility.

General GoalsObjectives
According to a press release, the goal of Mobipocket is to make sure that the technology is used and adopted by 50 million users in the next three years. The second e-commerce objective of Mobipocket is to increase the usage of its readers by retailers and publishers and to make use of its extension the most portable e-book format.

E-business Model
The E-business of Mobipocket has been a pure play as it is on the enterprise level and a pure dot com business. Since Mobipocket sells its products online directly to the consumers, most of the activities of the business are automated such as accounting, sales and also support. Instant interaction with the customer and use of content sponsorship is also offered by the company.

Marketing Mix
ProductService Offering
Two types of products are offered currently by Mobipocket, the online e-books that only the reader can read and the Mobipocket reader itself. Mobipocket created a new online brand, being a pure play firm. This strategy allowed the company to avoid any conflicts with the offline market. In order to benefit from the low prices, the customers do not have any other choices than to go online and participate in the e-business experience.

Pricing Valuation
A Hi-Low pricing strategy is used by Mobipocket which keeps different prices for each book and the prices are kept in accordance to the value that is given by a customer to that book. The prices are occasionally reduced when the demand from the consumers is low. A discount coupon is also offered to the customers to be used during a specific period which expires when the time is up and the prices are returned to normal levels. A boost is given to the sales during a period of stagnant sales with this strategy.

Supply ChainDistribution
Mobipocket uses direct marketing as most of the e-businesses do as it sells directly to the customers through the website. Any intermediaries are bypassed in attempt to sell directly to the customers. Moreover, the customers are redirected to the main site, which are on an affiliate site to conclude any sales. For example, the customers shopping on Amazon.com are redirected to Mobipocket.com if they are found to be interested in any e-book.

Integrated Communication Mix
The main aspect of any dot com business is communication as it is the key of development and innovation. Mobipocket has a wiki in order to inform its customers about the new advancements in the technology and also to attract any suggestions from the consumers. The forum also provides support to the users and developers, a knowledgebase and a platform to the users to give feedback anytime of the day.

Performance Metrics
The goals of Mobipocket have been customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and improvement of the customer perception of the product. To measure these goals, the company measures the number of abandoned carts and the number of complaints from the users. The number of purchases during a specified period is also measured in order to keep inventories including the percentage of refunds during a specified period.

The internal perspectives of the business are measured by online technical help, quality of online service and the size of operational web server size. In order to measure these metrics, the company measures the uptime percentage, the number of customers who use the services and the number fo problems covered on the wiki and the forum FAQs.

The learning and the growth of the organization is reflected by the innovation in online service which is measured by the number of new products or services to market in a year.

The goals of financial perspectives of the firm are increase in profit from individual customers and enhancement of conversion rate. These goals are measured by the average value of an order and the total number of orders or visitors.