E-Commerce 2012 What is Electronic commerce? Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, ecommerce, e- commerce or e-comm, refers to the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. The use of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at one point in the transaction's life-cycle, although it may encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail, mobile devices and telephones as well. Electronic commerce is generally considered to be the sales aspect of e-business. It also consists of the exchange of data to facilitate the financing and payment aspects of business transactions. How to Start a Successful Ecommerce Business:- a) Market research on your product's merchantability, demand, supply and competitors. Market research and business plan are the important steps in starting any online business. Based on your product type, business category, supply and demand for your product, your would perform a different market research. If your product is a common product with a lot of demands, it requires different marketing than if your product is unique and specialized. . If your product is unique, you need to create interest by writing articles, do some PR, and start a buzz.
Transcript
E-Commerce 2012
What is Electronic commerce?
Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, ecommerce, e-commerce or e-
comm, refers to the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as
the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has
grown extraordinarily with widespread Internet usage. The use of commerce is conducted in this
way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic funds transfer, supply chain
management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data
interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.
Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at one point in the
transaction's life-cycle, although it may encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail,
mobile devices and telephones as well.
Electronic commerce is generally considered to be the sales aspect of e-business. It also consists
of the exchange of data to facilitate the financing and payment aspects of business transactions.
How to Start a Successful Ecommerce Business:-
a) Market research on your product's merchantability, demand, supply and competitors.Market research and business plan are the important steps in starting any online business. Based on your product type, business category, supply and demand for your product, your would perform a different market research. If your product is a common product with a lot of demands, it requires different marketing than if your product is unique and specialized. . If your product is unique, you need to create interest by writing articles, do some PR, and start a buzz.
b) Design a site with a personalityHire a creative team or designers with background experience in branding, concept marketing, usability, customer behavior. It is important to design a site with personality that can tell a story. This will create a landscape where your visitors would remember your site and would talk about it with others. This will create buzz and therefore would draw new and returning visitors to your site.
c) . You need a user friendly and no hassle ecommerce shopping cart such as:-
Easily, fully manage your online store and shopping cart pages.- Write a comprehensive descriptions of each one of your products- Organize and structure your products and categories so your customers can easily navigate and find a product.- Being able to optimize your shopping cart pages with the proper keywords for best search engine indexing- Ability to display related items for up selling to your customers- Capability to send out email marketing, monthly coupons or newsletters.
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- Site statistics reporting to help you analyze your traffic and make future advertising or marketing decisions.- Capability for groups or memberships discounts and promotions.- Ability to track orders and delivery dates.- Flexibility to customize the delivery and shipping chargers based on item weights, pricing, shipping states, etc.
d) Marketing and advertising:-e) Now that your site is designed, your shopping cart is live and functioning smoothly, your
items are properly entered and comprehensively described, you used the CashCowCart's search engine optimization feature to add all proper keywords to your shopping cart pages, you are ready to advertise and market your site.
f) Marketing and advertising would play a big part in the success of your ecommerce business. To benefit from your ecommerce site, at minimum, you need to do some keyword and directory advertising. Every business situation requires a different marketing game-plan and advertising methods.
g) A good marketing team would analyze your industry, competitors, audiences, business environment and would suggest the best marketing strategy tailored to your business
Different types of Websites:-
Search engine-These are some of the most popular types of web sites in the world. Some search engine companies, like Google or Gig blast, prefer to keep their homepage simple and stress on only one service, while Yahoo! and MSN have a more "portal" like look via which many services are pushed to the surfer like email, news etc.
Top search engines:
1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. Bing
4. Ask
5. Aol
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Social networkingThe new mantra on the web is social networking. These web sites can be classified as Web 2.0 sites but their sheer number and popular demands we have a separate category. Face book, Orkut, LinkedIn, Twitter have been the rage past couple of years. From helping you locate schoolmates and past colleagues to "microblogging" (whatever that means), these web sites have a whole array of utilities and features with more being "invented" and added each day. The main types of social networking services are those that contain category places (suchas former school year or classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages), and a recommendation system linked to trust. Popular methods nowcombine many of these, with Face book, Google+ and Twitter widely used worldwide.
Company web sites
Most company web sites have just a few pages of information on the business, its services and clients. These are more like "online brochures”. This is the first step for most companies when they decide to build their home on the internet. Corporate websites are pretty much like corporate presentation in a web friendlyForm. They provide information to users about the company and also provide contactInformation. The corporate website is useful for companies who are planning to use theWebsite as a marketing tool.Some examples of Corporate Websites are:1. Microsoft office2. Sony3. Adobe4. L’Oreal Paris
History of E-Commerce
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Early development
Originally, electronic commerce was identified as the facilitation of commercial transactions electronically, using
technology such as Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). These were both
introduced in the late 1970s, allowing businesses to send commercial documents like purchase orders or
invoices electronically. From the 1990s onwards, electronic commerce would additionally include enterprise
resource planning systems (ERP), data mining and data warehousing
By the end of 2000, many European and American business companies offered their services through
the World Wide Web. Since then people began to associate a word "ecommerce" with the ability of purchasing
various goods through the Internet using secure protocols and electronic payment services.
Business applications of E-commerce:-
Some common applications related to electronic commerce are the following:
Document automation in supply chain and logistics
Domestic and international payment systems
Enterprise content management
Group buying
Automated online assistants
Instant messaging
Newsgroups
Online shopping and order tracking
Online banking
Online office suites
Shopping cart software
Teleconferencing
Electronic tickets
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Some important types of E-Commerce:-
Business-to-business (B2B)
It describes commerce transactions between businesses, such as between a manufacturer and
a wholesaler, or between a wholesaler and a retailer. Contrasting terms are business-to-consumer (B2C)
and business-to-government (B2G).
The volume of B2B (Business-to-Business) transactions is much higher than the volume of B2C
transactions. [1][2][3] The primary reason for this is that in a typical supply chain there will be many B2B
transactions involving sub components or raw materials, and only one B2C transaction, specifically sale
of the finished product to the end customer. For example, an automobile manufacturer makes several
B2B transactions such as buying tires, glass for windscreens, and rubber hoses for its vehicles. The final
transaction, a finished vehicle sold to the consumer, is a single (B2C) transaction.
B2B is also used in the context of communication and collaboration. Many businesses are now using
social media to connect with their consumers (B2C); however, they are now using similar tools within the
business so employees can connect with one another. When communication is taking place amongst
employees, this can be referred to as "B2B" communication.
Business 2 Consumer (B2C):-
Business-to-consumer e-commerce, or commerce between companies and consumers, involves
customers gathering information; purchasing physical goods (i.e., tangibles such as books or consumer
products) or information goods (or goods of electronic material or digitized content, such as software, or
e-books); and, for information goods, receiving products over an electronic network.
It is the second largest and the earliest form of e-commerce. Its origins can be traced to online retailing
(or e-tailing). Thus, the more common B2C business models are the online retailing companies such as
Amazon.com, Drugstore.com, Beyond.com, Barnes and Noble and Toys Rus. Other B2C examples
involving information goods are E-Trade and Travelocity.
The more common applications of this type of e-commerce are in the areas of purchasing products and
information, and personal finance management, which pertains to the management of personal
investments and finances with the use of online banking tools
months later, the company sold its first book on flipkart.com - John Woods' Leaving Microsoft to
Change the World Today, as per Alexa traffic rankings, Flipkart is among the top 30 Indian web
sites and has been credited with being India's largest online bookseller with over 11 million titles
on offer. Flipkart broke even in March 2010 and claims to have had at least 100% growth every
quarter since its founding. The store started with selling books .As of today, Flipkart employs
over 4500 people.
It was never going to be easy since India has had bad past experiences with e-commerce trading. It was not an easy segment to break into, people were very particular in paying money for something which they had not seen and received. The trust was missing in the Indian customers. So what Flipkart had to do was to instill trust and faith in their customers. And they did exactly the same, will discuss more on how they did so later in the post.
Flipkart began with selling books, since books are easy to procure, target market which reads books is in abundance, books provide more margin, are easy to pack and deliver, do not get damaged in transit and most importantly books are not very expensive, so the amount of money a customer has to spend to try out one's service for one time is very minimal. Flipkart sold only books for the first two years. Flipkart started with the consignment model (procurement based on demand) i.e. they had ties with 2 distributors in Bangalore, whenever a customer ordered a book, they used to personally procure the book from the dealer, pack the book in their office and then courier the same. In the initial months the founder's personal cell numbers used to be the customer support numbers. So, in the start they tried their best to provide good service, focus on the website - easy to browse and order and hassle-free, and strove hard to resolve any customer issues. Since there were not any established players in the market, this allowed them a lot of space to grow, and they did in fact grew very rapidly.
Flipkart had a revenue of 4 crore in FY 2008 - 2009, 20 crore in FY 2009 - 2010, 75 crore in FY 2010 - 2011, and the revenue for FY 2011 - 2012 which ends on 31 Mar 2012 is expected to be 500 crore. This is indeed a massive growth. The company targets revenues of 5000 crore by 2015.
The company started from 2 employees and now has around 4500 employees. Flipkart started with consignment model as discussed above, since most of the customer issues like delivery delays etc. result from procurement model, the company started opening its own warehouses as it started getting more investments. The company opened its first warehouse in Bangalore and later on opened warehouses in Delhi, Kolkatta and Mumbai. Today the company works with more than 500 suppliers. As on date more than 80% orders of Flipkart are handled via warehouses which helps in quick and efficient service.
A humble beginning from books, Flipkart now has a gamut of products ranging from: Cell phones, laptops, computers, cameras, games, music, audio players, TV's, healthcare products, washing machines etc. etc. Still, Flipkart derives around 50% of its revenue from selling books online. Flipkart is the Indian market leader in selling books both offline and online, it enjoys an online share of around 80%. The electronic items have a large number of players like Naaptol, Letsbuy, Indiaplaza, Tradus, Infibeam, Yebhi etc. The electronic market share is distributed among them in different unknown proportions.
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Funding
Initially funded by the Bansals themselves with 400 000, Flipkart has since then raised two rounds of funding
from venture capital funds Accel India (in 2009)and Tiger Global Management (up to the tune of US$20 million)
(in 2010)
Acquisitions
2010: WeRead, a social book discovery tool.[10] The stated goal was to give Flipkart a social
recommendation platform for buyers to make informed decisions based on recommendations from people
within their social network.
2011: Mime360, a digital content platform company.[11]
2011: Chakpak.com is a Bollywood news site that offers updates, news, photos and videos. Flipkart
acquired the rights to Chakpak’s digital catalogue which includes 40,000 filmographies, 10,000 movies and
close to 50,000 ratings. Flipkart has categorically said that it will not be involved with the original site and
will not use the brand name. [12]
2012: Letsbuy.com is India's second largest e-retailer in electronics. Flipkart acquired it with the strategic
goal of building dominant shares in all categories. [13]
Business Results
Flipkart's reported sales were 4 Crore in FY 2008-2009 20 Crore in FY 2009-2010 and 75 Crore
for FY 2010-2011. In FY 2011-2012, Flipkart is set to cross the 500 Crore (US$ 100 million) mark as Internet
usage in the country increases and people get accustomed to making purchases online. On average, Flipkart
sells nearly 20 products per minute and is aiming at generating a revenue of 5000 Crore (US$ 1 billion) by
2015.[
Locations
The company's headquarters is located in Bangalore's Koramangala neighbourhood. Flipkart has
offices, warehouses and customer service centers across India. Warehouses are located in the following cities,
often near airports.
Bangalore , Karnataka
Chennai , Tamil Nadu
E-Commerce 2012
Delhi
Kolkata , West Bengal
Mumbai , Maharashtra
Noida , Uttar Pradesh
Pune , Maharashtra
Kochi , Kerala
Products
Flipkart started with selling books. In 2010, they added to their catalogue media (including music, movies and
games) and mobile phones & accessories.
In 2011, product launches included
a) Cameras
b) Computers
c) Pens & office supplies
d) Computer accessories
e) Home and kitchen appliances
f) Personal care & health care
g) Gaming consoles
h) Audio players and televisions.
In November 2011, Flipkart launched a new Electronic Wallet feature that allows shoppers to purchase credit to
their Flipkart account using credit or debit cards, and can subsequently be utilized to make purchases on the
site, as and when required.
Marketing Strategy of Flipkart:-
A Brief interview of Ravi Vora, VP, Marketing, Flipkart.
What kind of strategies drove you to go for TV commercial for Flipkart and what objectives in terms of branding and visibility you want to achieve through TV commercials?
While most consumers in Flipkart’s core target group understand the benefits of online shopping, such as selection, price and convenience, many are held back by apprehensions associated with online purchase of physical goods. These range from reluctance to divulge credit card details online to what happens if the product I receive doesn’t work as desired.The campaign talks of some of our path-breaking initiatives like 30 day replacement guarantee, Cash on delivery and Original product warranties to address these concerns and bring those shopping offline into the online space.Do you think TV commercials would help you to penetrate Flipkart in tier 2 and 3 cities?Flipkart is already the leader in the e-commerce space in India. Though majority of our customers come from metros and tier 1 cities, we have seen a big rise in our customer base in tier 2 and tier 3 cities as well. To reach out to this large consumer base traditional mediums like TV, outdoor and print are more appropriate not only due to their reach but also the higher level of engagement they enjoy.For how long Flipkart would be pursuing TV commercial aggressively?We will continue with our current strategy as long as it takes to meet the broader goal of making Flipkart the most preferred destination among all the shopping options available to the Indian consumer.
Other marketing strategy:Flipkart has been mostly marketed by word of mouth advertising. Customer satisfaction has been their best marketing medium. Flipkart very wisely used SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Google Ad-words as the marketing tools to have a far reach in the online world. Flipkart.com official Face book page has close to 9 lac 'likes'. Flipkart recently launched a series of 3 ads with the tag line - "No Kidding No worries". Kids were used to create the adverts to send out the message - if a kid can do it, you can also do it.
The message is very clear to make people more comfortable with Flipkart, to generate a great customer relationship and loyalty on the basis of great product prices and excellent customer service. All in all to create a great customer experience.
Analysis of website as per HTML:
I presume that the logo of Flipkart website is made by using img tag <img>. And there
And on the home page of flipkart.com there is a list of many Flipkart
Categories which I think is made by
Using ordered list tag i.e. ol tag <ol>.
And also there are many links which are shared by Flipkart, that I think are made by using
the anchor tag <a>. Use of Form & Button tag is done for the purpose of placing order.
Conclusion:
Flipkart may not always have the lowest prices, BUT they are a first class place to shop. They have an excellent customer service. Prices of products are really attractive.
There is Notify Me option for out of stock products but I never got notified cuz products were/from long time-over six months out of stock. Nice website for online shopping in India. Gives you cod (cash on delivery) payment option.
Easily assessable, Simple Structure, Good network of supply, Attractive Offers & Discounts are the key features for Flipkart being do successful in the Indian market besides a good marketing strategy.
