What is ecommerce?
Ecommerce (www.ritecart.co.uk)
can be described as a commerce conducted electronically. It is the whole
process of being able to make a sale of the product over the World Wide Web.
Electronic commerce that is conducted between businesses is
referred to as Business-to-business or B2B. B2B can be open to all interested
parties (e.g. commodity exchange) or limited to specific, pre-qualified
participants (private electronic market).
Electronic commerce (www.ritecart.co.uk)
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 the
business transactions.
How does one go about choosing an ecommerce product?
It is my observation that while selecting an ecommerce
product (www.ritecart.co.uk) most of
the customers seem to be asking themselves the following set of questions
·
How will it appear on the customer side?
·
Will it be an attractive website?
·
Will it display all of my products?
·
Can I use open source and do some developments
specific to my requirement?
These questions are valid and are important but these
questions should be asked only after the selection of product is done. It is very important for business, which are
for a long haul to really look for ROI (Return of Investment) from their
ecommerce product (www.ritecart.co.uk).
Before selection of any product, it is very useful to list
down why you need a product or software, in this case ecommerce software?
Some of the answers will be/can be
·
Increase presence in Online market and thereby
have more sales
·
Introduce a new channel of business- Have a new
online channel for selling goods
·
Establish Brand name, making future rollout of
products/commodities easier
·
Simplify management of all sales and inventories
·
Increase productivity by integrating both Online
and Offline model
·
Increase visibility of the entire business
operations by integrating both online and offline models together
·
Be competitive, Just because a neighbor doing
it!!!
I like the last one, because that way, one doesn’t have to really
think hard but to follow his neighbor!!
Anyways, once one has his reasons chalked out, he would have
also realized that this is a true line of business and needs much more
investigation, investment and business initiative to make it a real success.
Online business can be only successful as successful as the
tool is (the ecommerce product). To draw a comparison, one may want to travel
80 miles in an hr and may be really trying hard but that ain’t be possible with
a bullock cart or may be even with a horse wagon. One would atleast need a car
to make that happen.
Coming back to success, success of the ecommerce product (www.ritecart.co.uk) would lie on how the
product fares with all of the following aspects.
1. Ease
of configuration
2. Ability
to Scale
3. Useful
latest features
4. Available
marketing tools with the product
5. Ability
to analyze data (analytics, not only google analytics!!)
6. Reports
7. Integration
(with other modules, Like epos with near realtime online/offline synchronization
of data and other packaged application )
8. Customer
Service
9. Technical
Support
10. Technical
Implementation Aspects
11. Build
vs Buy
Please keep watching for my second
post on the same topic, where I will expand on each of above selection
criteria’s. If you happen to take your decision before my next post, consider
RiteCart ecommerce product (www.ritecart.co.uk)
software marketed by Palindrome Software Labs Pvt Ltd (www.palindromesoftware.com).