Casadellibro.com
The online venture casadellibro.com started in a difficult moment. The dotcom crash, the economic downturn after September 11th and the implementation problems of the platform forced management to rethink the business idea.
Casa del libro was number two in the Spanish book market with 12 stores in the main Spanish cities. They were selling books online since 1995. One big competitive advantage is their database, which is the most complete and up-to-date in the industry.
It was the goal of Planeta - the main editorial group in Spanish and owner of casa del libro - to achieve leadership in the Spanish book market trough the online presence. Therefore, Casa del libro teamed up with AOL to get synergies from their starting ISP activities.
The management has to decide now - in a very difficult market situation - whether to continue with the complex and expensive Unix platform or to rescale the project and continue with a less powerful, but also less expensive and less complex platform of Microsoft.
To take a decision, we have to consider several points:
First of all, it has to be defined well what services should be offered on the site. The requirements have a significant influence on the needed performance of the site. Whether customers should principally get access to the database, or whether they should principally shop online, changes a lot. If there is ecommerce on the site, the requirements for performance, security and availability increase.
Secondly, it is important to have clear ideas about the market growth of online shopping in the book sector. If Casa del libro is convinced that in the future the majority of the book sales will be made in their stores and not in the net, it is probably wrong to invest that much in the project. But as it is Planetas goal to become the leader in Spain in the book market, it seems that they are convinced that the online market will grow strongly. In the traditional distribution channel they are competing with El Corte Ingles, which has a multiple of the outlets of Casa del libro. Therefore the online strategy seems an interesting one. Taking a look at the competitors is also worthwhile. Amazon was at that time already successfully selling books online.
Projecting the market growth means projecting the traffic that Casa del libro will have on the site. They can also profit from their experiences, even though the website was only very basic so far. The decision depends a lot on this projection. If the system needs to be scalable and ready for heavy traffic and ecommerce, the more expensive solution seems adequate. The money invested so far can be seen as sunk cost. Whichever decision they will take, these expenses are lost. So this shouldn’t influence the decision.
In the comparison of the two alternatives, there has also to be taken into account the maintenance costs of the systems. If the new system is a lot cheaper to maintain, it could pay in the long run, even though it is more expensive to scale it when the traffic gets heavier.
As Casa del libro has a competitive advantage with the most complete database, it seems to be a very interesting venture to add powerful ecommerce functionality to the site. Therefore my recommendation is to choose the more expensive, but also more powerful and scalable system. The economic downturn is a short-term phenomenon, whereas the consumer behavior will influence the business in the long run.
