E-Commerce

What kinds of e-Commerce does the Coca-Cola Company use?

Coca Cola Co uses business to business or B2B. Electronic commerce has fast become a preferred method of doing business for the grocery industry. Major retailers have seen the rewards of enhanced supply chain efficiency and increased business automation. As a result, more major consumer goods companies are start to use the Internet to do business with retailers. Therefore, Coca Cola being an important supplier, needs to provide its customers with a fast and reliable way to take purchase orders.

Coca Cola Co uses business to consumers or B2C. They created cocacolastore.com, an online shop designed to expand Coca-Cola's distribution of branded merchandise. The site features Coca-Cola brand products from clothing to cookware to collectibles. Innotrac Inc. is the e-commerce partner in the venture. The agreement calls for Innotrac to design and develop the site as well as manage all aspects of order processing, fulfillment, and customer care.

What types of internet business models are used?

Internet has made it possible for Coca-Cola Company to build a strong relationship with its bottling partners. Although in most cases they operate as two independent companies, internet makes it easier for them to interact with each other. The Coca-Cola Company’s business is focused on creating and marketing our brands and trademarks, while Coca-Cola bottling companies produce and package the finished beverage products and then sell and distribute them to our retail and wholesale customers Coca-Cola Company's work together with more than 300 bottling partners globally and operate the most extensive beverage distribution system in the world. This Coca-Cola system owns, leases or operates more than 800 plants around the world. Coca-Cola's bottling partners range from international and publicly traded businesses to small, family-owned operations. Their governance and management structures are separate from those of The Coca-Cola Company. There are more than ten local bottlers in Canada but the vast majority of Coca-Cola products are manufactured and distributed by the Coca-Cola Bottling Company (CCBC).

What type of marketing mix does it adopt?

Coca-Cola uses two types of search engines in order to follow its B2C model; Crawler based search engine and human powered directories. Both of these search engines gather information in different ways. Google is considered a crawler based search engine and automatically creates a list. For example, if you change your web pages, crawler based search engine eventually find these changes and that can affect how your website is listed. Page tittles, body copy and other elements all play a role. This makes it easier to find what you are looking for. Human powered directories depend on humans for its listing; you site they review.
A search looks for matches only in the description submitted. Yahoo is considered a human powered directory where you can type in a word in the search query, and a bunch of sites would show a description. You can search Coca-Cola on Google, Yahoo and other website and you will get a bunch of links related to Coca Cola such as http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/.

Putting online advertisements, also known as banner ads, is rapidly growing in today's business. Thus, Coca-Cola has adapted to these new changes by putting its online ads on today's most visited websites such as Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter. In addition, Coca-Cola has created its own page on Facebook, and Myspace. Coca-Cola is in the lead compared to its competitors with over 4,000,000 fans. This shows that Coca-Cola is surely doing its job to compete with other lead brands of soda. Coca-Cola gets its brand to the viewers.

Coca-Cola's fan page shows links to the blog, live positively, products and more. Facebook gives opportunities for consumers to become part of the advertising industry. Also, Facebook gives opportunities to share expressions about a product, whether people would recommend it or not.

What payments systems are used?

Coca-Cola accepts many different types of electronic internet transfers payments though their virtual online shop at the cocacolastore.com. Innotrac Inc. is their e-commerce partner in the venture which manages all aspects of order processing, fulfillment, and customer care. They accept all major credit cards through their encryption secured website which include Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and also electronic Gift Certificates. In addition with being able to use their secured website for payment transactions, Coca Cola also offers customers the option of using PayPal for their transactions. Customers may opt with either way of payment, whichever they choose to be more convenient or feel comfortable with.