Research on Target Corporation Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

On Target Corporation - Research Paper Example Other than food items and household essentials, all merchandise categories found in physical stores are available for sale on the online shopping site. The credit card segment offers credit and debit cards under the â€Å"REDcards† brand to qualified customers. Currently there are three â€Å"REDcard† options: Target Visa and Target Card credit cards and Target Debit card (Target 10–K Part 1). Therefore, the company’s revenue model is on sales markups from retail sales and credit card fees and interest. In the retail segment, Target’s biggest competition is Wal-Mart and Costco. However, due to the broad category of merchandise that the company offers, all other forms of retail commerce are potentially competitors. Nevertheless, Target has been able to compete successfully by differentiating itself through a combination of price, merchandise assortment, convenience, customer service and marketing efforts. An example is how Target has deployed diffe rent store formats – CityTarget, SuperTarget, Target Greatland and Target stores – to capture different customer segments. ... Networking ensures that all Target stores are interlinked such that supply chain management is effectively managed to match consumer demand. This way the company can maximise on its mark-ups while it keeps its inventory costs at a minimum. On the other hand, CRM is vital for Target’s online business as it enables the company to perform customer analytics to improve targeting and customer segmentation. Order Fulfillment Process Analysis As an online shopping site, order fulfillment is a major process at target.com. In this study we selected the most straightforward way for making an online purchase at target.com as a new customer. Order fulfillment starts immediately after online shopper has selected the item he/she wants to buy. This item is added onto a virtual shopping cart. The first input in order processing is the item to be procured. Once an item is selected Target’s system checks if the item is available within its inventory. The output is immediately delivered w ith the publishing of either â€Å"in stock† or â€Å"not available†. When you add an item on the shopping cart, target.com opens a mini-window with three options: checkout, continue shopping and view and edit cart. The next input, strictly speaking, is the selection of any of these three options by the customer. The site always provides customer with the option of returning items to cart and continue shopping as one proceeds to checkout. The next set of inputs is customer shipping address, selecting form of payment and billing address. Repeat customers may opt to create an account with target.com, in which case they would not have to keep entering any of these three sets of data each time they want to make a