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Ratty, Ronan (2017) ClevaDeals: Final Report. Undergraduate thesis, Dublin, National College of Ireland.
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Abstract
ClevaDeals is a web application that is primarily aimed at helping local businesses to attract more customers. Over the past 20 years’ internet shopping has grown exponentially and by 2021 it is expected that Irish consumers will spend €14.1 billion online (The Irish Times, 2017). While the growth of online shopping has been hugely beneficial to the consumer and has resulted in much greater ranges of choices of products at times lower prices this has not been a wholly advantageous development.
Of the €14.1 billion that is expected to the spent only half of this is expected to be spent purchasing goods from Irish businesses with the other 50% going to overseas companies (The Irish Times, 2017). Indeed, by 2013 high street retail sales had fallen by 25% from their pre-recession levels and this trend has continued in recent years (The Irish Times, 2017). This not only has a negative effect on the retailers, with that amount of money leaving the local economy it has a knock-on effect to entire locality.
However, there are a number of advantages that local retailers and businesses have over online stores such as the fact that being local customers can call into the store and physically see the product before they purchase it. Also, some products and services are by their nature more suitable to local sales, such as food and drink or items that are large and bulky where delivery costs may be expensive.
To try and attract customer’s businesses often try to offer special promotions where for a limited time or at specific periods they make their products and services available at reduced prices. While this is a tried and tested way to attract customers one of the drawbacks of this is while the special offers may be attractive to customers they can be in-effective if the customer does not know about them.
While technology and the internet in particular may appear to be the main protagonist for the continued increase of online sales they can also be utilized by local shops and businesses to counteract the negative effects of the e-commerce revolution. In fact, there is already a cross-over between local and online stores. 42% of consumers while shopping in store use their smart-phones to research products (KYROS, 2017)). This can be to check availability and price in other local stores or to check for other customer reviews before purchasing.
The aim of ClevaDeals is to create a platform that will allow local shops and businesses to promote these special offers while allowing customers to search for them. The challenge, as is the case for any new online application, is to not only create the service but to also make it attractive so people want to use it. To this extent ClevaDeals is not a simple website but it also includes features that make sure it will continually engage with users to ensure they will want to use the application on a regular basis.
Part of this process was also determining that there was a real need for this type of service and to fulfil this requirement market research was carried out. This market research involved identifying a number of questions that were then put to local businesses and consumers. The results of this research confirmed that there is an appetite for this type of product and also helped identify the design and requirements that would need to be included.
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