Benefits Of Ecommerce

Benefits Of Ecommerce

E Commerce is one of the most important facets of the Internet to have emerged in the recent times. Ecommerce or electronic commerce involves carrying out business over the Internet with the assistance of computers, which are linked to each other forming a network. To be specific ecommerce would be buying and selling of goods and services and transfer of funds through digital communications.

The benefits of Ecommerce:

• Ecommerce allows people to carry out businesses without the barriers of time or distance. One can log on to the Internet at any point of time, be it day or night and purchase or sell anything one desires at a single click of the mouse.
• The direct cost-of-sale for an order taken from a web site is lower than through traditional means (retail, paper based), as there is no human interaction during the on-line electronic purchase order process. Also, electronic selling virtually eliminates processing errors, as well as being faster and more convenient for the visitor.
• Ecommerce is ideal for niche products. Customers for such products are usually few. But in the vast market place i.e. the Internet, even niche products could generate viable volumes.
• Another important benefit of Ecommerce is that it is the cheapest means of doing business.
• The day-to-day pressures of the marketplace have played their part in reducing the opportunities for companies to invest in improving their competitive position. A mature market, increased competitions have all reduced the amount of money available to invest. If the selling price cannot be increased and the manufactured cost cannot be decreased then the difference can be in the way the business is carried out. Ecommerce has provided the solution by decimating the costs, which are incurred.
• From the buyer’s perspective also ecommerce offers a lot of tangible advantages.

1.     Reduction in buyer’s sorting out time.

2.     Better buyer descisions

3.     Less time is spent in resolving invoice and order discrepancies.

4.     Increased opportunities for buying alternative products.

• The strategic benefit of making a business ‘ecommerce enabled’, is that it helps reduce the delivery time, labour cost and the cost incurred in the following areas:

1.     Document preparation

2.     Error detection and correction

3.     Reconciliation

4.     Mail preparation

5.     Telephone calling

6.     Data entry

7.     Overtime

8.     Supervision expenses

• Operational benefits of e commerce include reducing both the time and personnel required to complete business processes, and reducing strain on other resources. It’s because of all these advantages that one can harness the power of ecommerce and convert a business to ebusiness by using powerful turnkey ecommerce solution made available by ebusiness solution providers.

My Opinion about E-COMMERCE

The lessons in the tutorial emphasize strategy-setting activities such as writing the firm's mission statement, determining a value proposition, defining the business model, identifying target markets, and conducting a competitor analysis. The lessons cover only lightly topics such as e-marketing, operations, and financial statements, which would be the focus in other courses such as marketing, logistics, and accounting.

Increasing memory skills will help you memorize faster and remember more. You will be able to remember names, facts, dates, history, story lines, outlines, speeches, and more. Just follow these easy steps and you won't increase your memorization time, you will cut it in half. Your short term memory will improve and your long term memory will surprise you. Start your memory enhance now!

·  1 - Most people try to simply read as much as they can to simply memorize a piece of writing or a number and that simply isn't enough. One also needs to practice recalling this information from your short term memory. With that said, we'll start by reading the piece aloud to ourselves or anyone else.

·  2 - There are a few other ways we can actively try to bring the text into our memory. Activities such as rewriting the material, creating an audio file to listen too or having someone read it to you are great ways to ingest the material.

·  3 - After bringing in the material, it's time to try to regurgitate it out. Unless you're particularly skilled at memorizing things this won't occur perfectly the first time. Now we need to actively try to come up with what we're trying to remember. On a blank sheet of paper, write down everything you recall. If it's a speech, speak out everything that's remembered.

·  4 - Another technique to activating your memory is an outline. In a way, an outline is a verbal puzzle for your memorization skills. It can be a guide to what you have to remember by giving yourself a clue and letting your brain extrapolate what that clue meant.

·  5 - One more advance technique to try is to write out the beginning letter of each word that needs to be memorized. Next read the single letter passage and get as far as you can. Go back to read the original passage again and then go back to your wordless version.

·  6 - Remember that memorization is not only the taking in of information but also the regurgitation of that information. From here you must repeat the previous steps, read in the information and then read out the information, until you have whatever it is better memorized

My video

My Personal Interest

SUNGAI DALAM LAUT

UNIQUE BIKES I'VE EVER SEEN

Photo or graphic design relate to E-COMMERCE

INTERNET ICONS

SOCIAL NETWORKING ICONS

PPT 254 E-COMMERCE CONCEPT

Chapter 4

Consumer Behavior, 

Customer Service, and 

Advertising

 Ritchey Design Learns About Customers

¢  The Problem

—Small business designing and manufacturing mountain bike components

—1995 Web site was a status symbol rather than a business tool

—The site did not:

¢  Offer enough customer information

¢  Enable the company to gain insight into their customers’ needs and wants

Exhibit 4.1 EC Consumer Behavior Model

Consumer Behavior Online (cont.)

¢  Consumer types—individual consumers who commands most of the media’s attention

¢  Organizational buyers

—Governments and public organizations

—Private corporations

—Resellers

¢  Consumer behavior viewed in terms of:

—Why is the consumer shopping?

—How does the consumer benefit from shopping online?

Variables in the Purchasing Environment

¢  Social variables—people are influenced by:

  Family members, friends, co-workers, “what’s in fashion this year”

¢  Cultural/community variables—where the consumer lives

¢  Other environmental variables:

  Available  information, government regulations, legal constraints, situational factors

Personal Characteristics Personal Differences

¢  Age and gender

¢  Marital status

¢  Educational level

¢  Ethnicity

¢  Occupation

¢  Household income

¢  Personality

¢  Lifestyle characteristics

Consumer Purchasing Decision Making

¢  Roles people play in decision-making

—Initiator—suggests/thinks of buying a particular product or service

—Influencer—advice/views carry weight in making a final buying decision

—Decider—makes a buying decision or any part of it

—Buyer—makes the actual purchase

—User—consumes or uses a product or service

General Purchasing Decision-Making Model 

¢  5 major phases of a general model

1.Need identification

2.Information search

3.Evaluation of alternatives

4.Purchase and deliver

5.After-purchase evaluation

Web Advertising

¢  Advertising is an attempt to disseminate information in order to affect a buyer-seller transaction

¢  Interactive marketing—marketing that allows a consumer to interact with an online seller

—Two-way communication and e-mail capabilities

—Vendors also can target specific groups and individuals

—Enables truly one-to-one advertising

Internet Advertising Terminology

¢  Ad views—number of times users call up a page that has a banner on it during a specific time period; known as impressions or page views.

¢  Button—a small banner that is linked to a Web site

¢  Page—HTML document

¢  Click—a count made each time a visitor clicks on an advertising banner to access the advertiser ‘s Web site (ad clicks and click throughs)   

¢  CPM (cost per thousand impressions)—fee an advertiser pays for each 1,000 times a page with a banner ad is viewed

¢  Hit—request for data from a Web page or file

¢  Visit—a series of requests during one navigation of a Web a site; a pause of request for a certain length of time ends a visit

Why Internet Advertisement?

¢  3/4 of PC users gave up some television time

¢  Well educated, high-income Internet users are  a desired target for advertisers

¢  Internet is by far the fastest growing communication medium

¢  Advertisers are interested in a medium with such potential reach, both locally and globally

¢  Cost

—Online ads are cheaper than those in other media

—Ads can be updated at any time with minimal cost

¢  Richness of format

—Use of text, audio, graphics, and animation

—Games, entertainment, and promotions are easily combined in online ads

¢  Personalization

—Can be interactive

—Can target specific interest groups and/or individuals

Exhibit 4.11 Adoption Curves for Various Media

Advertising Networks

¢  Advertising networks (ad server networks)—specialized firms that offer customized Web advertising, such as brokering ads and helping target ads to selected groups of consumers

¢  One-to-one targeted ads and marketing can be:

—Expensive

—Very rewarding

—Very effective

Advertisement Methods

¢  Banner--on a Web page, a graphic advertising display linked to the  advertiser’s Web page

—Keyword banners

—Random banners

¢  Benefits of banner ads

—Customized to the target audience or one-to-one ads

—Utilize “force advertising” marketing strategy

—Direct link to advertiser

—Multi media capabilities

¢  Limitations of banner ads

—High cost

—Click ratio—the ratio between the number of clicks on a banner ad and the number of times it is seen by viewers; measures the success of a banner in attracting visitors to click on the ad

—Declining click ratio—viewers have become immune to banners

¢  Banner swapping—an agreement between two companies to each display the other’s banner ad on its Web site

—Direct link between one site to the other site

—Ad space bartering

¢  Banner exchanges—markets in which companies can trade or exchange placement of banner ads on each other’s Web sites (bcentral.com)

—Credit ratio of approximately 2:1

—Still the largest Internet advertising medium 

¢  Pop-under ad—an ad that appears underneath the current browser window, so when the user closes the active window, they see the ad

¢  Interstitials– an initial Web page or a portion of it that is used to capture the user’s attention for a short time while other content is loading

¢  E-mail

—Several million users may be reached directly

—Problems: junk mail, spamming

¢  Standardized ads—on February 26, 2001, the Internet Advertising Bureau, an industry trade group, adopted five standard ad sizes for the Internet:

—Larger and more noticeable than banner ads

—Look like the ads in a newspaper or magazine

—Users read these ads four times more frequently than banners

—Appear on Web sites in columns or boxes

¢  Skyscraper ad—full column-deep

—Sometimes as many as four on one Web page

—Interactive—click on a link inside the ad for more information about a product or service

¢  Classified ad—a newspaper-like ad

—Special sites like classifieds2000.com

—Online newspapers, exchanges, portals ,

—Regular-size classified ads is free

—Larger  size or with some noticeable features is done for a fee

¢  URL (Universal Resource Locators)

—Advantages:

¢  Minimal cost is associated with it

¢  Submit your URL to a search engine and be listed

¢  Keyword search is used

—Disadvantages:

¢  Search engines index their listings differently

¢  Meta tags can be complicated

—Optimizing Web content improves discovery by a search engine

¢  Keywordcount.com

¢  Searchenginewatch.com

—Paid search-engine inclusion

¢  Several search engines charge fees for including URLs near the top of the search results

¢  A debatable issue is the ethics of this strategy

¢  Advertising in chat rooms

—Virtual meeting ground

—Free addition to a business site

—Allows advertisers to cycle through messages and target the chatter again and again

—Advertising can become more thematic

—More effective than banners

—Used for one-to-one connections

¢  Advertorial—an advertisement “disguised” to look like an editorial or general information

Special Advertising Topics

¢  Pricing of advertising

—Justifying the cost of Internet advertisement is difficult for two reasons:

1.The difficulty in measuring the effectiveness of online advertising and

2.Disagreements on pricing methods

¢  Pricing based on ad views

¢  Pricing based on click-through

¢  Payment based on interactivity

  The interactivity model bases ad pricing on how the visitor interacts with the target ad

¢  Payment based on actual purchase

  Pay for ads only if an actual purchase has been made (affiliate programs)

¢  Permission advertising (permission marketing)—advertising (marketing) strategy in which customers agree to accept advertising and marketing materials

¢  Measuring, auditing, and analyzing web traffic

—Site audit validates the number of ad views and hits claimed by the site

—Rating—looks at multiple criteria including content, attractiveness, ease of navigation, and privacy  protection

—Sites with higher ratings command higher prices for advertising placed on their sites

—Companies use software to assess if placing ads really increases traffic to their sites

¢  Localization—the process of converting media products developed in one country to a form culturally and linguistically acceptable in countries outside the original target market

¢  Using internet radio for localization

  Internet radio—a Web site that provides music, talk, and other entertainment, both live and stored, from a variety of radio stations