Internal

Strengths

Weaknesses

1. Global reach of business
2. Low cost to maintain and enhance the site, not restricted by foot print
3. Stock is recognized brands
4. Purchase price can be less than off line shops
5. Strong competition for warehousing and distribution keeps costs down
6. Easy to remain in touch and build relationships with customers (Email, SMS, e'zine)
7. Use existing distribution networks (Postage)

1. No shop front to accept returns
2. People need to find our site, there is no other marketing
3. Lack of shop brand recognition
4. Hard to scale up to respond to peaks and troughs in demand
5. Limited financial capital to fund web site optimization
6. Larger or heavy toys have high delivery cost diminishing the online price advantage.
7. Low web development skills in house we are reliant on outsourcing

External

Opportunities

Threats

1. Established traffic and high number of repeat customers may enable increased sales through the addition of complimentary product lines
2. Increased use of the internet for shopping with the 18 to 35 age group suggests that additional sales may come from stocking toys for this age group
3. Improve organic search ranking to reduce advertising costs

1. The internet has no barriers to entry which means a better financed business or an established retail business may seek to compete in this niche.  
2. e'Bay and other online auction sites have traders selling similar products
3. Buyer reluctance to shop over the net (Diminishing)
4. Quality issues from overseas suppliers damaging the reputation of brands we sell
5. Lager business with greater buying power may undercut our prices to gain online market share

Sample SWOT Analysis Summary

Trading online has become quite competitive with Search Engine Optimization critical to a businesses online success, whilst internet business can undercut traditional retail businesses once the online business exceeds the “run from home” size it begins to incur additional warehousing and distribution costs.

Instead of large growth in traffic the business may prefer to look at slow growth combined with additional products to increase overall revenue per customer.

The business would do well to identify multiple potential suppliers to offset any risk from their current suppliers.