E-Commerce in the confectionery market: analysis of Ferrero's case

The purpose of this thesis is to understand the benefits for a company to own an ECommerce enabled website. The study will be executed by analyzing and defining ECommerce and the elements that support it. Once that E-Commerce is defined, the advantages and opportunities will aid the answering of the research question, as well as the difficulties and disadvantages that will be analyzed in order to understand whether the company will benefit from the implementation. The implementation and changes of ECommerce will be investigated and explained to inform and to suggest what will happen when such a big change is introduced. Furthermore, the thesis will give a brief overlook of how the implementation can be managed as its effects various structural and cultural aspects within a company. The effects will also be analyzed on the Porter Value Chain, which taken together with the implementation of E-Commerce will be called E-Value Chain, to examine in depth the changes that occur within the core activities of the organization. After the theory is investigated, an analysis of Ferrero, a large Italian organization, is performed, to answer the research question. Moreover, the analysis shows that Ferrero's brand reputation and profits would benefit from an E Commerce enabled site.