Several factors have a role in the success of any e-commerce venture. They may include:
- Providing value to customers. Vendors can achieve this by offering a product or product-line that attracts potential customers at a competitive price, as in non-electronic commerce.
- Providing service and performance. Offering a responsive, user-friendly purchasing experience, just like a flesh-and-blood retailer, may go some way to achieving these goals.
- Providing an attractive website. The tasteful use of colour, graphics, animation, photographs, fonts, and white-space percentage may aid success in this respect.
- Providing an incentive for customers to buy and to return. Sales promotions to this end can involve coupons, special offers, and discounts. Cross-linked websites and advertising affiliate programs can also help.
- Providing personal attention. Personalized web sites, purchase suggestions, and personalized special offers may go some of the way to substituting for the face-to-face human interaction found at a traditional point of sale.
- Providing a sense of community. Chat rooms, discussion boards, soliciting customer input, loyalty schemes and affinity programs can help in this respect.
- Providing reliability and security. Parallel servers, hardware redundancy, fail-safe technology, information encryption, and firewalls can enhance this requirement.
- Providing a 360-degree view of the customer relationship, defined as ensuring that all employees, suppliers, and partners have a complete view, and the same view, of the customer. However, customers may not appreciate the big brother experience.
- Owning the customer's total experience. E-tailers foster this by treating any contacts with a customer as part of a total experience, an experience that becomes synonymous with the brand.
- Streamlining business processes, possibly through re-engineering and information technologies.
- Letting customers help themselves. Provision of a self-serve site, easy to use without assistance, can help in this respect.
- Helping customers do their job of consuming. E-tailers can provide such help through ample comparative information and good search facilities. Provision of component information and safety-and-health comments may assist e-tailers to define the customers' job.
- Constructing a commercially sound business model. If this key success factor had appeared in textbooks in 2000, many of the dot.coms might not have gone bust.
- Engineering an electronic value chain in which one focuses on a "limited" number of core competencies -- the opposite of a one-stop shop. (Electronic stores can appear either specialist or generalist if properly programmed.)
- Operating on or near the cutting edge of technology and staying there as technology changes (but remembering that the fundamentals of commerce remain indifferent to technology).
- Setting up an organization of sufficient alertness and agility to respond quickly to any changes in the economic, social and physical environment.
Related Topics
Regulations - Government Agencies and Law Enforcement
Institutions
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) - Overview and Standards
E-commerce problems
Ecommerce Product suitability - What Sells Best Online?
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