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PARTICULARITIES OF ECOMMERCE
Starting an online business needs
several of the major activities that are
required to start any other business.
The first thing that is needed is
planning. You need a product to sell.
You need capital to set up your business
and finally you need customers to buy
it. You have to make advertise your
products and make it known to the
people. An efficient customer service is
needed. Then, you need to manage the
purchases made by your customers.
However, 3 main features are unique to
online business and they provide the
customers will several advantages.
-
Convenience: People, who shop
online, can place their orders at
any time of the day or night. They
don’t have to go to any particular
place to make their orders, but
simply make some clicks on the web
and their order is registered with
the web store. Also, customers will
have to enter their account details
only the first time. From then
onwards the data will be extracted
from a database which will have the
account details of all the
customers.
-
Information: The user can get a lot
of information and can compare the
products of different companies
before making his choice. Thus, the
online customers are in a better
position to get the best deal.
-
A Lower Impact: The buyers don’t
communicate with any sales
representative’s, face to face which
will save the buyers from all the
emotional and rational convincing.
Most of the internet merchants
emphasize the fact.
The producers also experience numerous
advantages because of ecommerce. They
can improve their services, correct the
prices and adapt to changing business
conditions very quickly. Online
marketing also reduces cost of insurance
and storage. Supporting and designing
e-catalogues is very cheap compared to
printing and mailing the catalogues in
the traditional way. Moreover, the
suppliers can stay in touch with the
consumers to get reliable information
regarding the quantity required. Online
marketing can be availed by all firms no
matter how small they are.
Though ecommerce has so many advantages,
it has a large number of problems or
issues, some of the most important
being: finding new and innovative ways
to motivate people to buy, e-security,
informational congestion and many more.
To attract customers several big
companies like Priceline.com give
special offers. Consumers always go back
to those sites where they can get more
value for their money either through
lower prices or through other offers.
Another important issue is: Fraud.
Several internet users are afraid to
shop online because technically advanced
fraudsters will find ways to hack
ecommerce websites and steal valuable
information. Conversely, the e-merchants
are a worried lot because they believe
some users log on to their systems to
create an electronic diversion.
Researchers believe that by using the
internet small and medium sized firms
can compete against the larger ones,
provided they have a proper strategy. It
is predicted that the advantages of the
larger companies over the smaller ones
will reduce drastically in the future
due to reduction in advertising
expenses. |
