DEBREMARKOS UNIVERSITY

INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
DEPARTMENT OF IT

E-Commerce – EtMusic Shop Business

Plan
Group Assignment

Group - 5
Name ID
1.Amanuel Worku 1364
2.Melese Abebe 1389
3.Yimegnu Yishak 1407
4.Adugna Adane 1359
5.Yibeltal Getasew 1466
 Table of Contents
1.1 Executive Summary..............................................................................................................................2
1.1.1 Our Website.............................................................................................................................2
1.1.2 Our Mission....................................................................................................................................2
1.2 Business Description........................................................................................................................3
1.2.1 Product and Service Description..............................................................................................3
1.2.2 Future Products and Services..................................................................................................4
1.2.3 Location......................................................................................................................................4
1.2.3.1 Access to resources...............................................................................................................5
1.2.3.2 Social/networking advantages..............................................................................................5
1.2.3.3 Talented millennials.............................................................................................................5
1.2.4 Source of Revenue.....................................................................................................................5
1.2.5 Distribution..............................................................................................................................6
1.2.6 Advertisement.........................................................................................................................6
1.2.7 Competitors................................................................................................................................7
1.2.8 Marketing Strategy.....................................................................................................................7
1.2.9 Management Summary...............................................................................................................7
1.2 Business Process Diagram................................................................................................................8

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 1.1 Executive Summary
EtMusic will offer the buying public a superior shopping alternative, with a huge
selection of school band and orchestra instruments, plus guitars, keyboards and accessories, at
reasonable prices. Our products will be supported by skilled repair services and
a knowledgeable and friendly staff, as focused on educating the customer as on closing the
sale. We will exploit our competitors’ weaknesses by offering ongoing music community events,
from free lessons, to music clubs, to after-sale follow up to turn one-time shoppers into lifelong
customers. Our unique marketing schemes include “You Play, We Pay” (whereby a portion
of instrument sales and rentals are donated to local school band programs) and “100% Money
Back” trade up programs, where customers receive 100% of their purchase price toward
upgrading their instrument within one year.

EtMusic will focus on the novice, hobbyist, and semi-professional musician; these three
groups are seeking value, customer service, and knowledgeable assistance in making what can
be a rather significant purchase. EtMusic will gain a reasonably large percentage of market
share in a short period by immediately differentiating ourselves from our competitors. We will
establish our branding with our superior service and selection, the excitingly modern look of
our retail environment, our “hands on” merchandising approach, and a series of ads with our
motto: Stop Dreaming, Start Playing. Once in the store, our clients want to come back often for
the special treatment they receive here and nowhere else.

1.1.1 Our Website

Well deploy our website with a domain name “etmusicshop.com”. EtMusic will have an
informational based website containing hyper-links to our main manufacturers’ home pages.  We will
also offer promotional coupons to entice Web surfers to visit our storefront.  We haven purposely
chosen to avoid a sales engine, as we believe our major Web competitors could easily beat our local
price.  The User Interface we envision will be easy to page through, with exciting graphics and again it
will be geared toward steering visitors to our storefront.

We will work with an outside website design and hosting service to create and maintain our website.

1.1.2 Our Mission

EtMusic provides musical instruments to the community. We separate ourselves from

our direct competitors by paying intense personal attention to our customers, and educating
our clients about the products they need or desire before, during, and after the sale. We offer
creative programs to reward customer loyalty, and we provide on-site repair services for the
items we sell. We consider our staff our partners and insist they prosper equitably with the

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growth and success of the company. We will have the largest selection of School Band and
Orchestral instruments in Addis Ababa, and will use that advantage to separate ourselves from
the competition.

1.2 Business Description

Products and Services
EtMusic will sell new and used musical instruments and accessories. Our primary items
will be new band and orchestral instruments, electric and acoustic guitars, amplifiers and
electronic keyboards. In addition, we will have a full service, on-site repair and customization
department (band instruments, guitars and electronics). We will offer a “state of the art” music
lesson program featuring top degreed instructors, as part of our overall focus on educating our
customer base. This program will include private and group lessons, as well as outreach to local
schools. We will also develop music clubs geared to children and seniors, to further serve our
local community.

Although offering school band and orchestral instruments, service and lessons will be
our main competitive advantage, guitars will remain the primary revenue producer for musical
instrument stores for the foreseeable future.

1.2.1 Product and Service Description

EtMusic will offer several name brand instruments such as:

 A large selection of band instruments by Selmer/Bach, Yamaha, and Leblanc with an

emphasis on the intermediate level instruments.

 Electric and acoustic guitars including Albuquerque exclusive lines by Fernandez, Suzuki,
Wechter and other nationally known brands, such as Takemine, Ovation and Martin.

 Amplifiers by Crate, Kustom, Traynor and Hiwatt to support our guitar sales.

 Keyboards by Yamaha, Suzuki and Korg.

 Sound reinforcement products will be exclusively Yorkville. We will be the only dealer in
Addis Ababa, and will offer a rental program for local bands and schools.

 A very well stocked accessory department to support the above items. A recent Music
Trades article found that 80% of the buying public considered this the most important
reason they buy from a musical instrument dealer.

In addition to complete repair services for our products, we will emphasize upgrades and
customization items to develop other income streams our competitors have not considered.

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When carrying a brand name item conflicts with giving the customer the best all-around value,
we will always pursue the product that best suits our client’s interest.

1.2.2 Future Products and Services

EtMusic will rotate its stock so that new products are always available. The store will
balance what is popular today with what will be popular tomorrow. We will institute the
following programs in order to ensure expansion of the store:

1. We hope to become the only store in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to institute the “Weekend
Warrior” program, sponsored by the National Association of Music Merchants
(N.A.M.M.). This program is responsible for bringing back into the fold many who had
given up on music. The program has successfully raised income opportunities for the
stores who have implemented it.

2. By the end of the first year of operations, we must place major emphasis on developing
our own school band instrument rental program. This rental program will allow us to
insulate ourselves from any large-scale competitors that might locate here, and
generate consistent year-round high profit income opportunities.

3. EtMusic will take advantage of the internet as a major tool for passing along information
about our store and products to potential and current clients. We will maintain this site
as a local site, geared toward information and service. We believe that placing a sales
engine in our website would only lower our initial profit margin and limit sales
opportunities, so we will avoid this for now.

4. We hope to start music clubs geared to children and seniors. These will be clubs that we
can support with little cost, but which can generate additional sales not actively
targeted by our competitors.

5. In the long term, there are many avenues we can explore, such as traditional piano
sales, professional sound installations, and service contracts with the public and private
school systems.

1.2.3 Location
Addis Ababa is a BIG city. Whether your company is an established, mature business or a
start-up, locating in a big city has several benefits. The hustle and bustle of a large metropolis
seems to transfer its energy to the businesses and residents.

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 1.2.3.1 Access to resources
By definition, a big city has a ton of resources that smaller cities don’t have. Whether it’s
investment groups, venture capital funds, entrepreneurship centers, or ample suppliers and
contractors, big cities tend to have more to offer to growing businesses and their owners.

While access to resources may not be as essential as it once was—thanks to the growth of
the Internet—there’s still something to be said for being able to walk a few blocks and meet
with someone face to face.

And along with increased access to business resources comes more personal access. For
wealthy entrepreneurs and their families, there’s simply more availability in big cities

1.2.3.2 Social/networking advantages

If you’re going to talk about big city living, you have to mention the social and networking
advantages that can be gleaned. Not only are there advantages for you to personally meet
people and grow your professional network, but—piggybacking on the last point—large cities
actually draw in more people with “social intelligence skills.” And according to one study, the
representation of social intelligence skills actually increases with the size of the city.

“Social intelligence skills in particular are found in the largest cities and metro areas,” writes
Richard Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute, referring to a 2010 study on the
topic. “And the largest cities have increased the proportion of social intelligence skills they
account for over the past decade. Larger cities not only draw more educated and innovative
people, but more people with the critical social skills required to turn new ideas into successful
enterprises and industries.”

1.2.3.3 Talented millennials

Millennials and young professionals are attracted to living in cities, being inspired by city life
and the interesting people they can meet. Young professionals want to live in a city, walk or
bike to work, and work with other creative people.

1.2.4 Source of Revenue

Our major sources of revenue are in our product selling and service charge profits. As we
mentioned earlier, the products, we receive from manufacturers will have a great discount as
we are distributors and that is a great deal of advantage as we can sell products with more
profit. The service we give to our dear customers also will be our great source of income. We
will hire very experienced persons for the purpose of service. Customers may request for
professionals to install the instruments or thing they bought from us. Then we’ll offer them that
we have the professional they need to install them. That way we can outperform the

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competitors around us. Being placed in the capital city will have a great advantage that many
on the people in the country live in the capital and are more near to the musical world.

1.2.5 Distribution
We decide to use the direct sale distribution strategy. We chose this strategy to satisfy
our customers. We have the following options for getting our goods to our customers.

1. We regulate transporting the goods yourself: These goods are centrally located in a
large warehouse or multiple warehouses. We either use our own employees and means
of transport, or those provided by the warehouse.

2. We use a shipping service provider like DHL, UPS or Hermes to deliver the goods. Using
a shipping service provider will allow us to save on employees and transport vehicles,
but we will be giving up on being able to regulate all aspects of the process that ensure
punctual, reliable delivery.  

3. We link our online shop to local outlets where customers can pick up their goods.  The
goods are stored either on site in the respective branch, or in a central warehouse. We
can arrange transport either through in-house employees or through the external
shipping service providers already mentioned.

1.2.6 Advertisement
 Paid Advertising: Our music retail business can employ paid advertisements to get our
message in front of even more customers. We can purchase advertising through popular
search engines, social media platforms, popular blogs in our niche and more. While it
will cost us a bit of money to purchase the ads, prices have come down a lot in recent
years, making online advertising more accessible to small businesses.
 Review Marketing: Satisfied customers are some of our strongest marketing tools. We
encourage our customers to leave reviews on online platforms like Yelp or directly on
our website. When prospective customers see lots of positive reviews of our store, they
are more likely to choose us over our competitors. To increase the likelihood that our
customers will write reviews for us, we may wish to offer a discount or giveaway for
those who contribute online reviews.
 Social Media: is a powerful marketing tool and allows us to build a community of loyal
fans around our products and services. We share updates about our business, details of
some of your popular products, industry news, interesting articles about music and
anything else we think our customers might enjoy. We encourage them to leave
comments and share our posts to grow our reach even further.

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 1.2.7 Competitors
Our competitors may be some of the music instrument shops that are deployed and already
working on that aspect of business. Some of them may be online stores only.

Our most critical competitive edge will be the way we treat our customer base. We must
deliver greater interaction and satisfaction than our peers to every consumer from the start, in
order to win their trust and earn their repeat business. Musical instrument consumers in the
Albuquerque area are used to poor service and the apathy of local dealers. We must break this
chain if we are to differentiate ourselves from the competition and excel. Our unique marketing
plans and repair/customization services will also make us stand out from the crowd. We will
have a multi-faceted plan of attack in place to accommodate our prospects from the beginning
to the end of their shopping experience. We will also go a step further through our customer
retention plans, by keeping our store in the minds of these customers after they leave, so they
will want to return. None of our local competitors actively does this.

1.2.8 Marketing Strategy

The marketing strategy is as follows:

 Emphasize our superior service and support.

 Aggressively expose competitors’ weaknesses in order to attract new clientele.

 Key in on consumers who have been pushed out of the market by local dealer apathy.

 Educate our clients and respect their needs. Address these needs to keep them coming
back.

 Exude our excitement and enthusiasm for music to our customers.

 Always, always differentiate ourselves from our competition.

 Consistently end all of our advertising with our motto, “Stop dreaming, start playing,”
to make our advertisements easily recognizable to the public.

1.2.9 Management Summary

EtMusic will initially maintain a small staff of over-achievers in order to take advantage of the higher
overhead of our key competitors. We will operate with a staff of four full-time employees and one to
three part-time employees as needed. It is our philosophy that each employee should be empowered to
make crucial decisions on the spot where it benefits our approach to customer satisfaction. 

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Our management team will have the following persons with their qualifications.

a. Yibeltal Getasew – Operations Manager

 CEO/COO level responsibility.
 Ability to get others to produce to their potential.
b. Yimegnu Yishak – Store Manager
 Ability to get others to produce to their potential.
 Ability to get others to produce to their potential.
 Ability to get others to produce to their potential.
c. Adugna Adane – Service Department – Manager
 Ability to get others to produce to their potential.
 Ability to get others to produce to their potential.

1.2 Business Process Diagram

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