English 420, Business Writing

This week, I have been trying to reflect on what my group should do in reference to our white paper. When we first started the project, I was under the impression that our groups job was to ultimately make and maintain a website so that we could start a branch of online sales for the Knight Corporation. After our group meeting on Friday, a lot of good points were brought up about starting this branch of the company. It seems that with this project, we have the choice to decide weather or not we think it is a good idea to start-up this branch. It seems to me that there is a lot of work that would go into making this online sales branch that I did not account for. First, we may need to hire more people to actually run and maintain this branch of sales. Secondly, we have to realize that our products are specialized. By our products being specialized, we may need to go on sales calls to get specific measurements for our products. It is very important that we realize that it may be hard to do that through a website since we can not actually get a look at the vehicle that we would be modifying. Lastly, by creating an online sales department for Knight, we may lose the one-on-one feel that Knight is known for. According to our assignment, this company has been around for almost 50 years. Obviously the one-on-one contact has been working for them. So, my question is, should we even start an online sales division, or should our white paper consist of reasons as to why a company like Knight should not enter into online sales?

As of right now, I would still say that our online sales division should still be started. Over the years, Knight has been doing its advertising through word of mouth, and we could tell our clients about the website through word of mouth as well. As far as Knights one-on-one contact with its customers, I think we should try to keep this intact as much as possible. So, I propose that we make our website to where people can place an order online, but we still have to come to their house or they must come to our store front for us to do the actual work. If we are to do business this way, we would put a 50 mile limit on how far away our clients could live away if they wanted us to come to their residence to do our work. We would also have charges for our online sales. Clients would be responsible for paying 20% of their bill online if they were coming to our store front, and 40% if they had us traveling to their homes. This is just my opinion to this point.