o consumers often drives the purchasing decision in an Internet situation. Many retailers and other current customers of Lego Products will already be selling close to retail price. One advantage and problem to be considered is direct competition with traditional buyers. Pricing below retail is possible and would certainly pull traditional customers out of the stores and on to the company’s website. With the brand awareness that the company enjoys consumers who want to purchase a gift for their children will not think some “type of blocks” but will immediately think of the brand Lego’s leading the technical savvy customer to the site. Another advantage the company will have over the traditional type of retail is service. The site will provide a user community that allows children to share ideas of building robots and uploading and downloading programs for their robots. The company should post programs and ideas as well; this is perfectly in line with the firm’s enticing children by providing a playground for the children. LEGO.COM should appear to house the Mindstorm site because the site is already well known. Because of the time constraint, the total integration of the E-Commerce operations with the existing operations is not possible. The distribution and LEGO.COM will be used to support the new efforts as well as existing employees. In the future, efforts will be made to integrate the traditional with the E-Commerce efforts in most of the aspects of business. In particular the catalog sales operations will provide a great deal of support for E-Commerce operations. This decision reduces costs initially and allows the firm to move into Europe Asia and other markets and address the new issues for each location one by one in a thorough manner instead of jumping head first with little experience in E-Commerce. However, using the Internet to handle the entire process of sales from procurement to...
