GamesEdge.com (B)

The main problem with GamesEdge owners is that they have a valuable equity, but they do not have funds to finance and make it profitable. They have to decide what structure their marketing website should take for future development. They also have to decide ways to make that development approach a reality.

At first they were not able not handle internet traffic after launching the website. The site was not properly designed to take care of high turnouts as the owners were not expecting huge traffic. A marketing promotion was carried out and another website was added to the promotion to enhance the click-through. This further increased the traffic to the website. So as sales improved, problems experienced became more. The site had a programming error which did not take care of out-of-stock objects as required.

GamesEDGE had solely outsourced the database from Beamscope. GamesEDGE designers did not correctly identified Beamscope storage updating measures. So this created problems for their site when some items were out of stock. The database their site was obtaining from Beascope contained only in-stock items. Once a product was out of supply at Beamscope, it was not available to viewers rather being available with a null quantity. Therefore, when GamesEDGE updated its products levels as compared to Beamscope product levels on file, out-of-stock products were not revised. So this led to customers viewing products at GamesEDGE as available while in the real sense it is out of stock. They then put orders and formed customer maintenance problems that the creators dealt with personally. This came as a result of poor planning and market research (Hatherell and Walsh, 2000). 

It was during Christmas when the site errors were highlighted. Pokemon Yellow was a hottest game title of the festive season. The toy first sold out in United States and led to parents passing boundaries looking for the available games. Some arrived at GamesEDGE and found it in stock while its level in stock was out.

Walsh and Hatherell (2000) were concerned about outsourcing problems. Beamscope had no capacity to satisfy their consumers directly and properly. In the initial agreement, they had arranged with Beascope to directly ship all games orders to GamesEDGE customers. This satisfied everyone concerned. So it became clear in December that Beascope was validating orders that they did not really deliver.  This resulted to the owners spending their time and money trying to fulfill each consumer personally. They had stop consumers placing more orders on the site. They had to supply the placed orders at their personal expense. They saw it better not to generate customers than to generate unhappy ones.

The root cause of the problems encountered by GamesEDGE is poor business planning. The Beascope's ability to fulfill consumer requirements was not considered in decision making. Another thing is that GamesEDGE had no financial ability to carry out it own shipments and storage. Furthermore, their website does not have options for customers to place orders. Another cause of their problems was making tough choices geared towards the sustaining of the business. Relying solely on e-commerce posed a great deal of problems to GamesEDGE. They did not also follow up the implementation of the project to see how Beamscope was carrying out the outsourced services (Hatherell and Walsh, 2000). 

One solution to the problem is to introduce in-house shipping. This is effectual in fully monitoring stocks in line with shipping. It will also result to improved quality control and consumer fulfillment.

Another solution is coming up with a program to monitor the whole process of placing an order. This will allow GamesEDGE to gather more information from within and give more of it to the consumer. This includes order monitoring codes, a thing which was not possible with Beamscope. This will allow a consumer to know when and whether a certain product is available. It also helps the seller to receive feedback from consumers and any other interested users.

Improving the GamesEDGE website is also a solution. This will attract more customers while assisting its administration. Loading of a webpage is crucial to users especially when there are many competitors offering the same product. Coming up with an efficient website will increase sales as people will have enough time to transact.

Another way for solving the problems is coming with an efficient business plan as well as a good project management lifecycle. This will guide the business through the various crucial stages. This will also help in controlling, managing and monitoring the business. It will determine what to be offered, when and at what price. The type of customers is also considered in this process.

One solution which may help is to choose a correct mixture of business. This could be by combining e-marketing with physical old type of business. This is achieved by coming up with an incorporated model where consumers could go to shop or place internet orders. They could also have fun games on a home area network. This helps in bringing the Internet community together with real physical communities. 

Including two-player gaming in the internet is a part of the treatment. Although this may not work for consumers with slower internet connection, it will serve as a promotional campaign for the website. This is one way of generating traffic because the customers will enjoy more when they play against each other.

Another option is to employ full-time people to gather for increasing orders. This will allow the owners to develop various marketing campaigns. They should also edit their website and add more options like current product selection. They could also develop partnership with other major market players. All these will increasing their marketing options and help them to specialize. In specializing, they could only deal with developing and let others do the marketing (Hatherell and Walsh, 2000).  

They could raise funds for expanding the project. This could be from personal financing like friends, family or interested investors. Though this may require quick returns in a shorter time frame, it is a viable source of funds. This however may not fund long time investment. 

They could also opt to build traffic in the site and afterwards sell the site to a more capable or larger e-commerce competitor. But the problem will be the determination a good price. An established company will afford to supply enough stock to take care of placed orders. Although they will loose the venture and eventually will not have direct relations with it, they could possibly get some good returns for their investments. This will take time, but they will get a fair return than opting to take a risk and continue with the venture. 

Implementing the above courses of actions could be incremental or through a quick rollout. Mediascape was incorporated at gradual cost, but to be feasible, a full integration should be implemented. Though this may decrease the amount of initial capital by bringing physical sites, it is worth. Gradual incorporation of Mediascape is a good idea. This could run parallel with borrowing funds from personal financing. This will aid in rolling out of the incorporation. As this source of funds is readily available, it helps much in short term venture. It will help in designing a new look HTML homepage to include current selection by customers.

In combining this option, the GamesEdge website will gather for customers who place orders. Mediscape will look into supplying the stocks and take care of constant supply. The rollout plan will be taken care of by personal financing. All these will make the business venture more feasible.