Online Trade: The New Mantra

Online Trade: The New Mantra
Electronic Commerce or e-commerce is trading of products and services over the Internet. It's basically online shopping. A lot of commercial activity is doing the rounds thanks to e-commerce. This has given led the way to a whole lot of electronic exercises like electronic fund transfer, electronic data interchange, Internet marketing, and online transaction processing.
With Broadband initiatives floating around in the country, SMBs can easily use Interent for their business.
So how can SMBs make use of e-commerce in their business? How can this be profitable? Technology does have an upper hand in any business and an e-commerce store can do the trick for an emerging business outfit.
Kartik Shahani, regional director of McAfee India lists out the steps to be followed for starting with an e-commerce initiative.
* In addition to the basic IT infrastructure, to do online trading, first put up a website. If your business is at a nascent stage, you should necessarily create a light website, since a heavy one takes a lot of time.
* Post the set up of website, you'll have to register with payment gateways like ICICI, SBI, etc. Registration of the payment gateways will involve showing the bank the required documents, your business plans and future plans. This is to make the bank realize that yours is a legitimate business.
* Finally, for secure transactions get hacker-free certification like a certification from a validated authority to ensure secure end user payment.
Today all businesses, irrespective of their sizes, are exploring online trade.
Jet Airways revamped its website last year. "With the critical mass of consumers planning travel and purchasing tickets online, it became important for us to be involved in the online distribution and retail. We'd partnered with Akamai Technologies, which accelerated the online business process," said Belson Coutinho, head (e-commerce) of Jet Airways.
"The business drivers for this partnership were to provide a superior online end user experience, improve look-to-book and conversion ratios online, handle peak travel demand with no incremental website costs and ensure 100% uptime of online reservation systems," added Coutinho.
Often while leveraging the Internet, instability and unpredictability of the Internet's performance can have a negative impact on customer relations. Coutinho feels that if performance not up to the mark, customers will refuse to use the site and will instead choose the competitor's business. By the same token, a high-performing web site translates into customer satisfaction, which can be correlated to increased purchase conversion, customer loyalty, and increased market share. To ensure a strong ROI, a company's Web site must perform well.
Chandamama recently came up with an interactive site for children and has a collection of illustrated stories and comics. L. Subramanyan, CEO of Chandamama said they're currently working on creating a 'Chandamama.com shop', where parents can buy magazine subscriptions, books, Chandamama merchandise, toys, and games.
Some time back, Globus started an e-commerce initiative. "Being 23 in number and not available everywhere and anywhere all the time was a question mark for us. So, we thought of developing a user-friendly, Web 2.0 open front-end e-commerce website where our niche products will be displayed and made available for purchase," said Meheriar Patel, general manager and head (IT), Globus.
Online trade will be useful and progressive for the emerging business outfits as it helps companies be in touch with the outside work 24x 7x 365. Also, since the trade is online, the SMB outfits can make use of less manpower.
courtesy :www.enterpriser.in/