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The A, B, C, D, E of Ecommerce (Eco Times, Aug 17, 99) |
E-nything
If you're looking for a hot subject
to talk about, here's the recipe. Take any word, add a dash of
"e" to it, and you have a winner - be it email, ebusiness,
ebooks, ecash, or ecommerce. The "e" in all the above
refer to the electronic way of doing things in today's wired world.
But while all these e-words are misused, the winner of the most-abused-e-word
goes to - ecommerce. While people with just a webpage claim to
be part of the ecommerce revolution, strictly speaking, electronic
commerce is the process of conducting business transactions electronically.
And in today's world, ecommerce refers to transactions enabled
by the Internet - be it business-to-business or business-to-consumer.
So the moment a company uses the Internet to buy and sell products
and services, they have jumped into the ecommerce arena.
The reason the Internet has suddenly
come into the spotlight, is because it offers people a mirror
reflection of the real world - with a lot of advantages and conveniences
thrown in. Almost everything that you can do in the real world,
you can do on the Internet. While the social implications are
visible from the popularity of email, chat, ICQ and personal webpages,
businesses have even more to benefit with the sudden availability
of an additional marketing and sales channel with a global reach
and a 24-hours-a-day-365-days-a-year virtual branch at their disposal
thanks to the Internet. Imagine the ability to reach customers
across the world, at their convenience, let them help themselves
to what they want, and even transact business with you even after
your business hours or on holidays - and all this at a negligible
cost.
E works!
Internet sales at Dell Computers exceeded
USD18 million per day in the first quarter of 1999, according
to the company's quarterly earnings report. Overall, Internet
sales accounted for 30 percent of the company's total revenue
in the first quarter of the year. Dell also reported that the
use of the Internet to develop and support other sectors of the
business had increased by close to 30 percent, specifically in
the areas of business procurement, customer support and relationship
management.
As of March 99, IBM's online sales
are generating revenue in the region of USD1 billion per month.
This compares to the total revenue of USD3.3 billion, generated
by the sale of IBM computers and software online in 1998. In addition,
IBM expects that selling over the Internet will reduce costs by
USD340 million this year. An online transaction is 70 to 90 percent
more cost effective than a transaction involving a human, according
to Richard Anderson, General Manager of Enterprise Web Management
at IBM.
Closer home, NASSCOM (National Association
of Software and Service Companies), the apex body of India's IT
industry, recently released findings of its survey to evaluate
the ecommerce scenario in India. The total volume of ecommerce
transactions in India were about Rs. 131 crore in the year 1998
- 99, out of which business-to-consumer ecommerce contributed
Rs. 12 crore, while business-to-business ecommerce contributed
the remaining Rs. 119 crore. While this may not seem much, ecommerce
volumes in 1999 - 2000 are estimated to cross Rs. 300 crore, a
sixth of which will be generated through business-to-consumer
ecommerce - and that is a lot of money for a country where ecommerce
is just a year old. One of the main factors that will drive ecommerce
volumes up so drastically will be the surge in Internet users,
projected at 5 million by the end of next year, up from today's
figure of 8 lakh.
Learning more
So where can you learn the ropes of
ecommerce? If you're westward bound, Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate
School of Management began offering the first electronic commerce
major in the US; Carnegie Mellon University and MIT's Sloan School
of Management also have similar programs. The cost? A whopping
Rs. 25 lakh for a course that lasts a year - and if you're interested,
admission forms will be available from mid September.
But if you don't have a family inheritance,
and would rather learn on Indian shores, open any daily and you'll
be bombarded by institutes offering to "teach you ecommerce".
Scrutinise these courses very carefully - most of them will teach
you the technical programming required for ecommerce - if that's
what you want, go right ahead. But while ecommerce requires the
infrastructure of technology, it won't go anywhere without management
- marketing, logistics and customer service. And if you're looking
for courses from that perspective, you'll not find a single course
in place. The best way is to surf the ecommerce wave with one
of the hundreds of companies chartering out into these waters,
and learn as you go along.
There is no teacher like real world
experience - even in the virtual world of ecommerce.
Lyndon Cerejo (email)
is an Internet Strategist, and can be reached online at www.strategist.net