Question

- Put yourself on a small business owner shoes, what are the factors that you will consider before choosing an e-commerce?

-From your personal experience, have you ever experienced a fraud while using an e- commerce website, tell someone`s experience if you don’t have your own?

-talk about the essentials to e-commerce success that are affecting the customer`s shopping experience? (Acquiring customer , Maximizing web site preformance, Retaining customer ).

Answer 1

The factors before choosing an e commerce option is the scale of business, nature of commodity the business deals in, spread of customers in term of geographical area, their lifestyle, constraints and aspirations, competitive scenario, availability of financial and technical resources to establish and support such initiative, and rate of growth of the industry among others. In short, the viability of an e commerce business can be judged by the fact, that will it add value to the existing purchase patterns of the customers, or will it help to reach out to the clients which are willing to buy the commodity and constrained by the distances or time., and above all, do the growth prospects warrant such an investment, and how long will it take to recover the investment through increased profits.

Yes. I have seen many e commerce companies commiting fraud to their customers. One incident which i remember was a company selling clothes online. I was lured through a social networking site and was prompted to buy a very good looking shirt that was manufactured by a renowned company. On receiving I realised that it was aseven year old item which started fading. I contacted this company for return which was to be made on my expenses ( as per conditions of sale, which were in very fine print). The refund was denied because I was responsible for "damage" to the product at my end. I could have gone for a legal action, but decided against owing to time constraints and a paltry sum involved. It was a lesson to me to purchase only from renowned e commerce players.

The e commerce success can be attributed to efficient and user friendly customer interface, robust IT infrastrucutre, safety of payment methods, prompt delivery, returns and refunds etc. The customer acquisition and customer retention can be made possible by leveraging on the social connections of the users who are also present on web, through doling out discounts or referral programs, loyalty bonuses or cashback schemes on purchase above certain amount, collaborating with banks to give additional discounts to users, and running different schemes during different time of the year to plan the sales campaign in such a way, so as to prompt the customers to buy more and more merchandise / products.