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3.2 Case – W.L. Gore Expands Using Demandware
Respond to the questions in detail, in two – three pages or 700-1000 words.
Use the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzhXHMwUSzs
Case W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc. is a privately held American manufacturing company headquartered in Newark, Delaware. The company specializes in products derived from fluoropolymers, which are highly resistant to acids, bases, and chemicals. Best known as the developer of waterproof, breathable Gore-Tex fabrics, the company was founded in 1958 and has grown from the basement of founder Bill Gore into a multinational corporation with $3.2 billion in revenue and over 10,000 employees. Although the company continues to manufacture electronics, industrial products, and medical products, many runners, cyclists, and lovers of the outdoors associate W.L. Gore with its fabrics division. This is because of the remarkable qualities of Gore-Tex. Gore-Tex is a waterproof, windproof, lightweight fabric used in a wide variety of outdoor apparel manufactured by W.L. Gore. Gore-Tex is a mainstay for runners and cyclists looking for an extra edge in battling the continued
Expert Answer
WL Gore is a technology driven company which makes synthetic fibre based clothes. When it had to go e commerce way to connect with its customers, it had an option of in house vs outsource. It used outsource since, the learning curve would have been very steep and the current business does not afford the opportunity foe such long learnign times and mistakes. By outsourcing, management focus remains on the developing and marketing the products instead of utilizing times in deciding UI and UX of the website. Outsourcing also offers an opportunity where you can connect with a subject expert who has requisite expertise to bring a website live in minimum time. Their outsourcing partner PFSWeb provided end to end solution for e commerce. It included management of website as well as maintainign the payment gateway. PFSweb had a prior experience of doing such work and was an expert in e commerce sites and hence, was an attractive partner for them. Any launch happens in a phased manner and since, US was the most important market , they had gone live first in US followed by other European countries. Every region has diferent demand patterns as well as one needs to understand those changes thoroughly before bringing it live on online platform. Moreover, payment gateways issues may have a different bearing from country to country. Hence, reflecting those changes may have took sometime in getting those websites launched. European sites took lesser time to launch than the US site because many themes of website are replicable. Moreover, the learnign curve also helps in compressing the time requirements for the website. The newfound customer data ban be used to in many ways: It can help one to understand online buying patterns, preferences, online behaviour, decision making time etc which helps a company to better its website in terms of ease to use. Big data, as mentioned above, not only helps in making a site more dynamic, it may also have implications for offlien markets too.
