E-Commerce
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Because the Internet is always open, even on holidays, your business is always open. Your customers will appreciate the extra access to product updates, shipping details, billing information and more. And since the Internet knows no boundaries, your customers can shop from home, work, or anywhere they can make a connection.
Plus, by connecting your e-commerce and shipping systems, you'll be able to ship products faster and for less money.
Increase Sales
Add the Internet to your sales and marketing mix and you've got a brand new channel to reach new customers. With a Web site, you automatically become a global provider of goods and can gain an edge over even the largest competitors.
Interactive selling gives you an advantage because you no longer are limited by shelf-space or inventory concerns. Instead, you can offer all your products or build them to suit your customers' exact specifications. And you won't have to sink money in or fill your stock rooms with excess merchandise that may never sell.
Decrease Costs of Doing Business
E-commerce helps you cut out or streamline processes that eat away profits. For instance, the exchange of information can add to the cost of a sale -- from advertising to availability updates to follow-up calls. But your Web site can be an efficient, cost-effective communication vehicle. Customers can find timely, accurate information in one place when they need it.
By using e-commerce, everything from purchase orders to funds transfer can be handled faster and more efficiently. Even payment processing and bookkeeping are easier. You can convert funds to digital transactions and virtually eliminate bounced checks and inefficient cash transactions. And once you connect online sales and payment systems to back-end accounting programs, you won't have to re-key data or duplicate efforts.
Building today's agile organization in "Internet time" requires the services of highly skilled professionals, who are well-educated in the latest technologies to develop and deliver effective e-commerce solutions.
Thinking Strategically About E-Commerce
Excerpt of a recent article from Boston Consulting Group
The first generation of electronic commerce has been a land grab. Strategy has ranked right below tactics, and tactics below experimentation. That phase is coming to an end. We are entering the second generation of e-commerce. The key players, branded goods suppliers, physical retailers, electronic retailers, pure navigators, must now shift their attention from claiming territory to defending or capturing it. In other words, they must focus on strategies to achieve competitive advantage.
The battlefield where competitive advantage will be won or lost is navigation, how customers search, compare, and decide what to buy. In the physical world, consumers have such a hard time finding and comparing goods that they seldom actually do it. They rely instead on product suppliers and retailers, who build advantage by creating navigational tools, branding, advertising, relationship building, to short-circuit a laborious and costly process.
On the Internet, however, people can exchange massive amounts of information directly, fast, and free. Product suppliers can sell directly to consumers. Electronic retailers can focus on navigation but outsource fulfillment. Pure navigators like Yahoo! or Quicken can organize information and help people make sense of it without being party to any physical transaction.
Product suppliers and bricks-and-mortar retailers have every reason to see the Internet as an arena for marketing and promotion, a new channel for doing old things. But if they persist in that view, they will handicap themselves in their struggle with new competitors who see navigation as a business in its own right. In most consumer businesses, far more profitability derives from influencing navigation than from any other activity. Companies have three basic ways to capture that profitability: reach, affiliation, and richness.
Source: Boston Consulting Group
Authors: Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster
Click here to read the complete article