Expand Your E-Commerce Businesses

Posted by arlene

A. Competing in the New Marketplace

Your competition is not just another online store—nor is it just retail, nor just catalog. Today, it’s every store, and tomorrow it will increase even more. The more you know about your competition, the more you’ll know about how to acquire and retain customers.

Understanding your competition will help you position yourself in the marketplace. You’ll need to know their financial positions, their customer value propositions, and how target customers view them. Are their suppliers reliable? What solutions do they offer the customer? How big is an online competitor? The Internet hides the size of businesses, unlike a physical retail store. It is difficult to know whether a given company is a large enterprise or a home-based company.

Customers have a basic level of online shopping expectation, which sets the bar. The most successful and popular online stores today are raising that bar as they integrate emerging technologies and refine website design to accommodate shopper preferences. Every day, expectations grow higher and the bar continues to move. There is no room for complacency in today’s business environment. The competition is only a click away.

The online store must differentiate itself from all channels and all competitors. The most difficult task is to create a truly unique website. Retail stores that are the most memorable provide something that other retailers do not. Wal-Mart’s success is attributable, in part, to the company’s strategy to build stores in smaller towns and cities. Consumers found the stores to be accessible and convenient.

Nordstrom differentiates through its special service and store ambience. Online, Amazon.com doesn’t just list titles of books. It gives customers access to excerpts of books and even allows individual consumer comments and reviews. Online merchants each need a unique position in the marketplace.

B. Integrating into Global Markets

Many e-commerce businesses selling to international audiences have recognized the need for country-specific websites that are based on products, customs, languages, and cultural influences. In many cases, countries will have unique retail shopping experiences that are part of the makeup of the people in that country. These considerations need to be factored into website design and development. As a rule, one global e-commerce website does not fit all.

While some consumer online shopping trends are global, it is good practice not to rely on those trends but to heavily consider each country’s specific insights. For example, although mostly men purchase online worldwide, in the U.S. more women are shopping and purchasing online. This has changed over the past few years and demands a demographic refresher for many U.S. e-commerce websites designed in the years when men were the dominant online shoppers. While this trend is true for the U.S., other countries may not yet be ready for women- focused shopping websites. In new business channels, there will be early evolutionary behavioral changes until the model becomes more mature and becomes integrated into the culture.

A country’s economic environment and culture affect online shopping adoption cycles. Each culture and each industry fosters different adoption cycles. Technology’s early adopters, for instance, were predominantly male. In some countries, students lead Internet adoption. Determining the adoption cycle for each environment must precede Internet design.

Similarly, global issues such as currency conversion, taxation, and privacy laws need to be researched before launching a website. Internet-related laws and regulations, as well as commerce in general, tend to change rapidly.

Specific country trends in online shopping, products, and demographics of the target customers must be monitored to ensure the website design keeps up with changes in the country and in the marketplace.

C. Finding the Niche

Web merchants, bricks-and-mortar retailers, and catalogers are all vying for the same customer. In order to succeed, each will need to establish a channel value proposition. The customer is at the center of the decision.

What attribute will be the most important? Will it be price, convenience, experiential shopping, entertainment, service, or something else? Because each channel is superior in at least one of these, the customer will not believe that a single channel can provide everything. Providing a singular focus, however, doesn’t mean that the other issues don’t matter. Delivering as many as possible will be key.

Because customers shop in more than one channel, resellers will have to share sales. But they don’t want to lose customers from their channels due to mistakes they make. The game is theirs to win or lose.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Expand Your E-Commerce Businesses

• Building blocks of set up and develop your own e-commerce business
• Get your Web Site ready for Toasting/Hosting
• Communicating with Graphic Designers
• Offline Brand Reinforcement
• User-Centred Design: the Internet Raises the Stakes
• Website Builders, ready for Hosting and Marketing
• A Variety of Organizations and Contexts Part 2
• A New Kind of "Shelf"
• The Morphing Marketplace
• A Constantly Changing Backdrop