8.

Doing Business Online

I.

II.

Answer the following questions:

How often do you shop online?
Are you concerned about Internet security and using your credit to purchase goods online?
What goods and services do you buy online?
What other goods or services would you buy online?
Which of the following is the most important for you when youre considering buying
something online: cheaper prices, an easy-to-navigate website, quick delivery service, good
customer service?
A. Read the following article to find out what makes the difference between success and
failure for online companies.
Net gains on the shop front

Cyberspace is increasingly the location of choice for many retailers. It is not hard to see why; online
retailing ore e-tailing is big bucks. The e-tail market, worth 14bn (E 21bn ) a year in the Uk alone, is
growing at an annual rate of between 30 and 40 %. In the six weeks leading up to Christmas, over 3.5bn
(E5bn) was spent online almost 7% of the total retail spend during the same period.
It is not just online retailers such as Amazon or eBay that have built successful businesses in
cyberspace. A huge number of retailers have some kind of presence on the Internet. Most high-street
names have fully transactional online operations. But many smaller retailers are nervous about the
potential of e-tailing, often perceiving it as a risk and an expensive distraction as much as an opportunity.
It is not a question of building a nice website and waiting for the money to come rolling it. It calls
for a new business model, which seamlessly connects e-tail with the rest of the business says Ian
Bathgate, a lecturer at the University of East London Business School. It only takes one mistake, one
oversight online, to not only lose huge volumes of sales, but cause serious damage to your brand and
reputation.
Research shows that e-tail customers are more demanding, less forgiving and more fickle. The Web is
fiercely competitive, and customers have access to unprecedented amounts of information. It takes more
than a flashy website to convince them to part with their cash. An up-to-date and user-friendly website is
taken as standard. The issues that are decisive in whether an online sales operations is a success and
which can create that vital competitive advantage are around good old-fashioned customer service and
order fulfilment.
An online operation that amounts to printing the English-mail orders at the end of the day, manually
checking they are in stock and popping them in the post, probably costs more in time and effort than it
earns and is unlikely to meet customer expectations in terms of accurate information on stock availability
and delivery times. You have to manage expectations from the very beginning. Its often assumed that etail is all about finding the cheapest product. Yes, price is important, but probably not as important as
delivery or customer service. Paying a rock-bottom price is no good if the product doesnt get delivered
when it should, says Andrew McClelland, head of projects and marketing at the Interactive Media Retail
Group, the trade body for e-tailers.
B. Read these sentences and choose the correct options. Read the first part of the article again and
check your answers:
1. The majority of well-known shops still havent invested in/ now offer online sales operations.
2. Many small businesses appear to be enthusiastic/ have mixed feelings about e-tailing.
3. The consequences of a problem with your website are loss of sales and the high costs of finding a
solution/ repercussions for the companys good name.

4. When online customers see a stylish website, they are no longer impressed/ more willing to make
purchases.
5. Manually dealing with online orders is unlikely to be cost effective/ a good low-cost option for some
businesses.
C. Find the following word partnerships in the article:
1. Two phrasal verbs which collocate with cash and money.
2. Three adjectives that collocate with website.
3. Three adjectives that collocate with customer and a noun phrase using customer.
4. Two verbs which collocates with expectations.
D. Now make up meaningful sentences with the collocations above.
III.
Match the words related to online shopping with the definitions:
1.(shopping) cart d
a. online retailer or Internet business
2. back-end systems h
b. exchange of services, information and products between
businesses via the web
3. cookie j
c. buying and selling goods and services and doing other
business over the Internet
4. banner e
d. piece of software that acts as an online sellers catalogue
and ordering process
5. pop-up ad g
e. small advertisement for one website displayed on other
sites; by clicking on it, the user is taken to the new site
6. browse i
f. someone who secretly gets into another persons computer
system in order to use the information or damage the system
7. hacker f
g. advertisement that automatically opens a new browser
window and covers the window the user was intending to read
8. B2B b
h. hardware and software applications that manage order
processing, billing, sales, inventory and shipping
9. dotcom a
i. move from place to place on the Internet, searching for
topics of interest
10. e-commerce c
j. piece of data that can be used to recognize an online
customer and personalise the webpage.
IV.
Provide the correct tense for the verbs in brackets:
1. The Internet ........................(to take off) so fast if people ........................(to be) a bit technicallyminded.
2. If everyone .....................(to own) a computer, the volume of e-commerce ........................(to increase)
rapidly.
3. If I .............................(to be) you, I ...............................(to contact) an Internet consultancy.
4. I wish all e-commerce companies ...............................(to have) to prove their value and reliability
somehow.
5. If the economic climate ...........................(to be) right, our e-commerce industries ............................(to
flourish).
6. Suppose we all ................................(abandon) old ways of doing business, what do you
think .................................(to happen)?
V.
For each sentence, find and correct the mistakes.
1. Although a lot of customers still lacking confidence in Internet security, there is no denying that
online shopping is growing in popularity in many western countries.

2. Not only does e-business enable companied to present their goods in a more attractive way and to
handle orders online, but they also result in improved margins for them.
3. The authorities have its reasons to stop online gambling advertisments and block people from using
credit cards to between online.
4. the use of e-mail has spread so rapidly since the last 15 years that it is hard to imaginate life without
it.
5. Everyone tries to rich a new set of customers in a way that provides appropriate compensation for
every parties.
6. Most publishers want to be include in Google News because they believe they benefit them and their
readers.
7. Googles grow power on the web has set off a round of fears between e-commerce and online medias
companies.
8. Despite of their very competitive prices, they failed to keep their customer basis.
9. There may be a lots of success stories, but starting a dotcom is no guarantees you will do money
immediately.
10. In September 20, three major Internet companies announced fundamental changes in their strategical
plans for acquiring more market shares.
VI.
Use the clues to complete the ecrossword.
Across
1. The Safebiz.com site gets over 500 ........HITS...............per day.
4. An even more popular .............SITE..................is Interbiz.com, with almost 10,000 visitors a week.
6. The equivalent of paper junk mail is called .........SPAM................
7. The Internet still means fun to a lot of people, but it certainly means .....WORK..............to business
people.
8. Businesses which .....FAIL.......................to seize the opportunities offered by e-commerce might not be
able to survive.
9. By ordering ..........ONLINE....................., the cost of a transaction is dramatically reduced.
10. An Internet site name is called .........DOMAIN..........................name.
Down
2. If you want your website to get a lot of ..........TRAFFIC......................., make sure you register it with
all the major search engines.
3. If you safe information from the Internet into one of your computer files, we say that you
..........DOWNLOAD..................the information.
4. e-commerce means buyers with browser- equipped desktop PCs can now ......SURF................a global
network of approved suppliers linked over the Net.
5. Many e-mail programmes .........ENCODE....................files before sending them in order to make
transmission easier and quicker.
6. A ........SEARCH..................engine is a programme that seeks out, visits and indexes websites.