This article is about how some organization used the SWOT Analysis to gain the necessary competitive advantage.

There are several examples how SWOT Analysis can be utilized, whether to analyse capabilities in terms of the four factors:- Strengths; Weaknesses; Opportunities and Threats or you use it to formulate strategy for your internet business.

As your business progresses, you may faced with different challenges and most of the time, you are defensive to protect your own turf. If you remain this way for long, you will not get out from the competition race and will not lead you to be the strongest among your competitors. One of the obvious reasons for this happened is merely the strategies you have developed may be survival in nature i.e. to improve to an acceptable level of performance.

In order to have competitive advantage, your improvement initiatives must be competitive in nature. To achieve this, your SWOT Analysis should focus on analysing competitive factors in a very competitive business environment.

What are some of the example of competitive factors?

If you ask around, there are numerous competitive factors that help an organization to success and stay competitive. Some succeeded on merger and acquisitions; strong market presents, niche products for niche market, sole source, excellent customer service, high product quality and many more. The question is any one of these good for you? What else you can focus? I would advocate you research into competitive factors that lead and sustain a world class organizations such as the
A World Class Business Model : Baldrige Criteria

A FREE down of this business model titles: Articulated Baldrige Values and Concepts when you subscribe to TQM Ezine Community at this link http://article.tqmcasestudies.com

Perform a SWOT Analysis for eBay Auction Business.

I attended a 3 days workshop conducted by Adam Ginberg in a 5-star hotel on 22-24 Aug 09. A total of 75 participants took part of which 35 of us are paid participants.

The workshop was conducted quite professionally with co-trainer Mr. Micheal whose role is to break the ice and give motivational talk before a session starts. We were taken to some “soul searching” why are we in the training and why do we want to do eBay Auction Business. He was very competent, in my opinion, to break the ice and get us motivated before Adam Stanberg took over to give us some tips on photography.

He is a professional photographer as well as a software programmer. I learn a lot of photography techniques for static objective for the purpose of listing into eBay. It really made a static “live”. He explained that a lively looked item attracts more viewer in eBay and hence get better chance of a sale. When I make a comparison with the regular eBay listing, I appreciated what he said. Take a look at this item:-

View monitor
The slideshow above gives you a better perspective how the blood pressure look like as compare to a static picture. This technique is very useful for anyone who wants to succeed in eBay auction business.

After I the photography session, Adam Genberg started the training on eBay listing technique and the use of a listing software In the eBay Auction training, Adam taught us what eBay is about and how Auction at eBay can take us into a real business. The later of most of the time spend on teaching and practicing how to use a eBay listing software which come along editing of item.

At the end of the 3-days training, I managed to list 3 items to eBay Well, that was the outcome of 3-days eBay Auction Training. How to I take the training into a real auction business? Let me try to use the SWOT Analysis Template to analyse the Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-threats and to formulate a strategy to work on this eBay Auction Business. Here it goes …

SWOT Analysis – STRENGTHS factor

1. gain knowledge in eBay listing
2. have access to an auto listing software
3. have access to Adam’s support center

SWOT Analysis – WEAKNESSES factor

1. has not establish credibility in eBay – No feedback
2. no familiar to list item – take alot of time
3. still skeptical about the auction business

SWOT Analysis – OPPORTUNITIES factor

1. Vast market in eBay (14% of online sales come from eBay)
2. Online purchases in US, Uk and Australia is big
3. Online purchase in Malaysia is growing

SWOT Analysis – THREATS factor

1. eBay has the prerogative to shut close my account
2. competition is very keen in certain niche
3. credibility may drop due3 to negative comments from customer

The next task I need to do is to validate the SWOT Analysis factors for its probability and impact. After I have confirm the key SWOT Factors, I shall use the SWOT Matrix to formulate my strategies in eBay Auction Business. I use this SWOT template to perform for blogging business as well.

SWOT Analysis Template | Matrix

is a common tools and form an integral part of a strategic planning process to derive business plans. A business plan is a description of your business which should provide adequate information about your business which shall describe but not limited to the following examples:-

• Your company and industry
• Your direction
• Your strategies
• Your market segment and marketing approaches
• Your products or services
• How your products or services are produced and delivered
• Who is your customer based

In order to formulate the above informations about your company, it is crusial that a systematic method is used to derived them and they should be as factual as possible. A common known method called Strategic Planning Process is deployed. As this method is quite a complicated affair, SWOT Analysis Template | Matrix is commonly used to guide the company to evaluate and formulate the appropriate strategies.

What is SWOT Analysis?
SWOT Analysis in short called the S.W.O.T. is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunites and Threats. These four factors which are commonly group into a SWOT Analysis Template or aSWOT Matrix. And it is used to guide you to collect data pertaining to these four factors. It is interesting to note that the four factors can be grouped into an external and internal factors. The External Factors are “Opportunities” and “Threats” wherease the Internal Factors refers to the “Strengths” and “Weaknesses”.

In order to collect the external factors, for example: you need to evaluate the “political”, “economical”, “societal” and Technological” aspect of your business. These are external factors. Obviously, those possitve aspects are grouped as opportunites while those negative aspects are grouped as Threats.

Then, you look into the Internal factors. Fortunately, being internal, you are the expert to do such evalaution yourself. Fro example, my view of internal factors are pertaining to internal capabilities in your own operations, examples; business processes, delivery channels, customer services, market researches, new product launching etc.

From the example stated in the above, it may end up a long list of factors. The next logical steps is to use a systematic approach to prioritise them based on its imapct and alignment to the companies direction so that it is value add to the business in a timely manner. The criteria for such a prioritization depends largely the decision made by the management team rather than a fixed guidelines. However, you should always remember to evaluate its impact to the bussiness and to some extend the urgency of such a factor.

The proper use of the SWOT factors are easily understood if we were to group them into the appropriate factors using a SWOT Analysis Template or SWOT Matrix