Mini Research Project

Golden Village and its I-Mode Ticketing service

Golden Village, a joint venture company between Australia’s Village Roadshow Limited and Raymond Chow’s Golden Harvest Group of Hong Kong. It was established to develop and operate modern, luxurious multiplex cinemas. Golden Village’s first imprint in Singapore was made on 28 May 1992. Today, Golden Village is the market leader with nine cinema located island wide: Yishun, Bishan, Tiong Bahru, Tampiness Mall, Marina Square, Plaza Singapura, Great World City, Vivo City.

http://www.gv.com.sg/ is the website of Golden Village Singapore that includes cinema and movie information, promotions, corporate information and tickets booking. Golden village website is classified as a B2C virtual storefront as customers can book their movie tickets online and select their seats. Customer can pay their online book through Visa and Nets.

Website Design

Having face stiff competition from Cathay, shaw and Eng Wah, Golden Village website was announced as the number one website in the Entertainment-Movie industry for 2007 in the latest Hitwise online performing award. The annual Hitwise Online Performance Awards recognize excellence in online performance through public popularity, awarding websites in various industry. The website was recently updated in June 2007, the enhancement included a new grid and improvement in overall layout, the quick search on cinema, firm, showtimes and a better booking system.

The webpage is filled with eye-catching pictures of the movies they provide. There is also a quick search on the top left hand corner of the webpage that enable users to cut down their search time.

The web site provides a list of the latest promotions. I personally love the promotion for the $6 weekdays student offer.
Overall, the website design is very user friendly. Most importantly , information are categorized mannerly hence it reduce users search time.

*More information about Hitwise is available at http://www.hitwise.com/

Product Differentiation

Senior Citizen Promotions
Like any other competitors, Golden Village offers promotions for students and senior citizen. However, Golden Village offers additional benefits to senior citizens which would encourage them to watch movies in Golden Village cinemas.

The GV Senior Citizen Movie Card is a loyalty programme that rewards movie-going senior citizens. Watch a movie for only $4, simply collect a stamp for each Senior Citizen movie ticket purchased and redeem for premium New Moon items when you accumulate 7 and 14 stamps!That’s not all, senior citizens also gets to stand a chance to win one Rice Cooker every month when card is completed and filled up with stamps.

Personalized Movie-Going Experience

Golden Village is the first local cinema to personalized movie going experience by launching Golden Village Movie Club ( GV movie club). The movie club is open for registration to anyone above the age of 12. There is no payment of registration fee need, the only requirement to maintain the membership is to clock in a minimum of four movies transaction in a calendar year. So how does joining the membership personalize one’s movie going experience? The website actually customized to suit each members liking. Members have a priority seat, timeslot and cinema selection before other non-members. Adding on, members are entitled to much more privileges like birthday treats, monthly promotions and draws and many other more.

More information on GV Movie Club is available at http://www.gv.com.sg/movieclub/gvmc.jsp

Payment Scheme -3 steps ticketing system

Step 1: Start by choosing your designated movie slots using the quick search

Step 2: Select your seats and payment method and submit

Step 3: End by filling in all your necessary particulars and submit

Security

Security over the modes of payment is important in safeguarding confidential information like our credit card numbers. The website will be unreliable if any of personal confidential information is being leaked out. Hence security plays an important part especially today where there is almost no geographical boundary. Transactions can take place at anywhere and anytime.
Since e-commerce are getting very popular these days, there would be increase likelihood of frauds to cheat customers of their credit card information. I believed that every e-shops should take precaution against fraudsters’ (e.g. Installing layers and layers of firewall to prevent hackers).


For security or payment, Golden Village was awarded the Trustsg seal and Consumer Tust seal. Golden Village uses VeriSign SSL verified by VeriSign Trust Network to secured confidential information. Hence customers who purchase movie tickets online need not worry about leaking confidential information in the process.



Strengths

· Improve communications - as all the latest information about Golden Village and promotions will be published in its website. Hence customers are able to get the first hand information about latest updates in Golden village. Whatever information that customer is looking for is nowhere but just a click away.
· Reduces search cost – as all the information are readily available over the internet, people do not have to incur additional cost to get the information. Users can make use of the internet to access the information they need. (e.g. customers do not have to go down to Golden Village cinema itself to make inquires)
· The 3 steps ticketing system is very user friendly and your transaction could be completed within minutes
· The secured payment via VeriSign SSL enables customers to proceed with their transaction safely.
· Overall, the website itself provides users with sufficient information on what they would like to find out. The design of the website is eye-catching but not overloaded.

Weakness

· In comparison, Golden village charge $0.50 more for movie tickets which will in turn encourage people to other movie providers like Eng Wah and Shaw.


The payment scheme for online customers is limited as they could only pay either with visa or eNets. However, recently the eNets system is unavailable thus customer would have little choice over the payment scheme. Golden village could have widen their payment scheme with MasterCard when all the other competitors payment scheme are inclusive of Masters, Visa and Amex.