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Ecommerce
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| What
is eCommerce? |
| (Electronic-COMMERCE)
Doing business online, typically via the Web. It is also called
"e-business," "e-tailing" and "I-commerce."
Although in most cases e-commerce and e-business are synonymous,
e-commerce implies that goods and services can be purchased
online, whereas e-business might be used as more of an umbrella
term for a total presence on the Web, which would naturally
include the e-commerce (shopping) component. |
| Investopedia
Says: ECommerce covers everything from buying books and paying
bills, to providing a service online. |
Key
success factors in eCommerce
Several factors have a role in the success of any e-commerce
venture. They may include:
- Providing value to customers.
Vendors can achieve this by offering a product or product-line
that attracts potential customers at a competitive price,
as in non-electronic commerce.
- Providing service and performance. Offering a responsive,
user-friendly purchasing experience, just like a flesh-and-blood
retailer, may go some way to achieving these goals.
- Providing an attractive website. The tasteful use of
colour, graphics, animation, photographs, fonts, and white-space
percentage may aid success in this respect.
- Providing an incentive for customers to buy and to return.
Sales promotions to this end can involve coupons, special
offers, and discounts. Cross-linked websites and advertising
affiliate programs can also help.
- Providing personal attention. Personalized web sites,
purchase suggestions, and personalized special offers may
go some of the way to substituting for the face-to-face
human interaction found at a traditional point of sale.
- Providing a sense of community. Chat rooms, discussion
boards, soliciting customer input, loyalty schemes and affinity
programs can help in this respect.
- Providing reliability and security. Parallel servers,
hardware redundancy, fail-safe technology, information encryption,
and firewalls can enhance this requirement.
- Providing a 360-degree view of the customer relationship,
defined as ensuring that all employees, suppliers, and partners
have a complete view, and the same view, of the customer.
However, customers may not appreciate the big brother experience.
- Owning the customer's total experience. E-tailers foster
this by treating any contacts with a customer as part of
a total experience, an experience that becomes synonymous
with the brand.
- Streamlining business processes, possibly through re-engineering
and information technologies.
- Letting customers help themselves. Provision of a self-serve
site, easy to use without assistance, can help in this respect.
- Helping customers do their job of consuming. E-tailers
and online shopping directories can provide such help through
ample comparative information and good search facilities.
Provision of component information and safety-and-health
comments may assist e-tailers to define the customers' job.
- Constructing a commercially sound business model. If
this key success factor had appeared in textbooks in 2000,
many of the dot.coms might not have gone bust.
- Engineering an electronic value chain in which one focuses
on a "limited" number of core competencies --
the opposite of a one-stop shop. (Electronic stores can
appear either specialist or generalist if properly programmed.)
- Operating on or near the cutting edge of technology and
staying there as technology changes (but remembering that
the fundamentals of commerce remain indifferent to technology).
- Setting up an organization of sufficient alertness and
agility to respond quickly to any changes in the economic,
social and physical environment.
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