1. KARZ
The Dilemma
By- Group 10 (Sec-H)

2. What services provided by Tmall were considered most critical to Karz
What services provided by Tmall were considered most critical to Karz? Was Tmall’s support sufficient?
Among all the services provided by Tmall, according to Chen of Karz the ones most critical for them were firm infrastructure, marketing and sales and after sales service. Because Karz was a new company, it relied heavily on these services provided by Tmall to drive its sales. The main services used by Karz were:-
Single’s Day special promotions on Tmall
“Gold Coin, virtual currency
Firm Infrastructure: It helped Karz in a series of systematic ways like organizing the layout of products on the store page, processing transactions and deliveries, and to incorporate software to their business management.
Marketing and sales: It increased Karz’s sales performance.
Tools and tracers that could give data on the most searched keywords for women apparels
After sales Service: It helped in maintaining good credit score.
HRM video tutorials
COD
But they also felt some service were not up to expectations like
Ineffective Inventory management- as they could not say how many products of a specific model and color and size were sold or left. For that Chen had to write his own MySQL queries
Confusions during peak times regarding dispatching of products as some get stranded in warehouses

3. What e-commerce services were provided by other competing online platforms?
Shop.qq
Plan to make it open platform for designers
Bonus to stores performing good
Pop out advertisements
Inventory management tool compatible with various platforms
Firm’s infrastructure
Outbound logistics
Marketing and sales
Customer Service Management
Amazon.cn
Inventory management
Distribution
Bar code scanning system
Super-fast dispatching
No fees
Gift cards
Professional logistic service
Training operations

4. How would you compare the services provided by different platforms?
Amazon.cn excelled in logistics owing to its exceptional distribution capabilities.
While Tmall offered infrastructure, Shop.QQ was going to make it open platform leading the way to better infrastructure.
Amazon did not have any membership fee and provided rudimentary function but excellent whereas Tmall, Taobao market place and Shop.QQ provided many tools.
Also Shop.QQ incentivised well performing stores by doling out bonuses.

5. From Karz’s point of view what was the best option?
As Karz has already invested into making customised inventory manager for Taobao platform with MySQl, also Tmall was offering an easy switch to Taobao market place, it should move to Taobao market place till it can raise money to host itself or move back to Tmall and also expand by Brick and mortar outlets.
The tools offered were mostly same as Tmall with only a few critical differences that Karz with its capabilities on software side could easily over come
It offered free use of Taobao Wangpu
Ran promotions that could raise transactional volume
And as Chen pointed out, it would save a lot of operational costs as Tmall ad Taobao Marketplace are similar