Future Plans of Eat2Eat
To: Vikram Aggarwal
Re: Eat2Eat future plans
Issues: Eat2Eat as a restaurant reservation service is experiencing difficulties in penetrating the personal market in order to obtain a critical mass. This barrier is caused by a resistance to use new technology, fear of supplying personal information on the web and a lack of marketing promotions due to funding shortages. Furthermore, obtaining additional funding is becoming a concern due to poor financials, which is common for internet companies in its infancy.
Customers: Customers are attracted to using Eat2Eat acting as an infomediary [Appendix A] for restaurant reservations providing value added information such as type of cuisine, price range and reviews for a wide variety of restaurants. 1st Order Effects of E-Markets is evident with reduced transaction cost in booking a table in real time and reducing transcription errors. The main barriers to customer adoption are resistance to change existing booking procedures, giving personal information online and lack of awareness of Eat2Eat.
Restaurants: Restaurants are motivated to sign up for Eat2Eat to attract a larger market of potential customers, keep up with the competition and outsourcing the reservation system to a third party. Barriers to adoption are the commission fee and the fear of being exposed with negative reviews to Eat2Eat members.
Recommendations: The focus of Eat2Eat should be to obtain a critical mass of restaurants and customers. One critical area to increase customer adoption is to reduce the fear of supplying information on the web. This can be reduced by not forcing customers to put in more information than necessary for a restaurant reservation which should only entail a name and phone number. Although other information will be useful for web analytics, it should be optional and can be entered after a customer is more familiar with the Eat2Eat website.
To aid customers in transitioning to new technology, usability studies
Re: Eat2Eat future plans
Issues: Eat2Eat as a restaurant reservation service is experiencing difficulties in penetrating the personal market in order to obtain a critical mass. This barrier is caused by a resistance to use new technology, fear of supplying personal information on the web and a lack of marketing promotions due to funding shortages. Furthermore, obtaining additional funding is becoming a concern due to poor financials, which is common for internet companies in its infancy.
Customers: Customers are attracted to using Eat2Eat acting as an infomediary [Appendix A] for restaurant reservations providing value added information such as type of cuisine, price range and reviews for a wide variety of restaurants. 1st Order Effects of E-Markets is evident with reduced transaction cost in booking a table in real time and reducing transcription errors. The main barriers to customer adoption are resistance to change existing booking procedures, giving personal information online and lack of awareness of Eat2Eat.
Restaurants: Restaurants are motivated to sign up for Eat2Eat to attract a larger market of potential customers, keep up with the competition and outsourcing the reservation system to a third party. Barriers to adoption are the commission fee and the fear of being exposed with negative reviews to Eat2Eat members.
Recommendations: The focus of Eat2Eat should be to obtain a critical mass of restaurants and customers. One critical area to increase customer adoption is to reduce the fear of supplying information on the web. This can be reduced by not forcing customers to put in more information than necessary for a restaurant reservation which should only entail a name and phone number. Although other information will be useful for web analytics, it should be optional and can be entered after a customer is more familiar with the Eat2Eat website.
To aid customers in transitioning to new technology, usability studies