The main objective of this project was to analyze the current state of Lamppuexpress.com, which is the Finnish web-store of the Dutch company Any Lamp BV, and to evaluate new possibilities for development. The thesis was conducted during an internship period at the company.

The basic purpose of the thesis research was to determine the reasons why the sales of Lamppuexpress.com had not developed to the same extent as the other Internet-stores of Any Lamp BV in other European countries. Also, it was necessary to understand why the site’s marketing efforts had proven to have no real results. Especially important was to formulate a clear understanding of the current situation of Lamppuexpress.com using the extended marketing mix as a tool. Another important purpose of the research was to analyze the main competitors and to evaluate their operations. The focus in this research was on pricing and product range. In practice the research compared a range of products, price levels, marketing tools on Google, as well as delivery methods compared to Lamppuexpress.com. Based on the research one could make a fair comparison between Lamppuexpress.com and its competitors, thus making it possible to develop new information that could be used in the overall development of the business operations of Lamppuexpress.com.

The research revealed Lamppuexpress.com to have a clearly lower price-level than the com-petition, but operating with a significantly different business concept, especially in terms of marketing. In addition, the product offering of the competition was clearly different from Lamppuexpress.om. The competitors were able to offer domestic shipping methods, which were believed to raise their credibility in the eyes of the Finnish customers. Based on this result it was evident how the business operations of Lamppuexpress.com should be improved.

The development proposals based on the results were: gaining more market-knowledge through further research and achieving better visibility in the eyes of potential customer. The means to achieve this was through better calibration of marking efforts combined with a more efficient use of competitive pricing. One key aspect was also the development of the web-site for Finnish users in the long run. There proposals were implemented by making the web-site more user friendly, by setting up a Finnish phone number for native customer service, and modifying the marketing operations to be more similar to those used by the competition both from the perspective of the product- and in terms of the use of keywords. A new area of marketing was introduced to attract more potential clients in the autumn of 2012, when Lamppuexpress.com initiated new offline-marketing operations. The first steps were to distribute flyers at a construction fair in Helsinki and to provide lighting tips in a magazine dedicated for decoration.

The new operations have worked well. The sales and visitor-rates of Lamppuexpress.com were clearly on the rise for the last quarter of 2012.