Ecommerce Strategy FAQs PDF

W7_L1&L2 : ECommerce Strategy - Part 1 & 2 Frequently Asked Questions 1. What is the role of a content provider? Ans. The key focus of a content provider is in providing information about products and services and not specifically in gathering orders and fulfilling these orders for customers. A co...

W7_L1&L2 : ECommerce Strategy - Part 1 & 2 Frequently Asked Questions 1. What is the role of a content provider? Ans. The key focus of a content provider is in providing information about products and services and not specifically in gathering orders and fulfilling these orders for customers. A content provider is a person that customers would like to come to, to gather information, to compare different options available in the market, but specifically not for purchase of products because products might not be available here. So rather than actual selling of products, a content provider is more interested in making sure that there is a platform that can enable customers to gather as much information as possible about different digital products and services out there. 2. What is a full service provider? Ans. A full service provider is the one that tries to provide a full range of services in one domain wherein you're trying to focus on all the customer requirements and also trying to provide better experiences to customers for their entire shopping experience. Companies like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra etc, are examples of full service providers where the customer can come and buy a large variety and a large assortment of products from these platforms. 3. What are value net integrators? Ans. Value net integrators basically try to coordinate activities across the value net by gathering, synthesizing and sharing a lot of information across different people. These could be the kind of people who are involved in creating a seamless process behind the entire e-commerce platform rather than providing products and services and rather than directly getting involved in retailing activities. 4. What are virtual communities? Ans. Many times customers who are involved in the purchase or consumption of specific commodities or specific products would like to have a community-like environment where they can come and interact with one another. So, there are e-commerce platforms that are also providing a virtual community kind of an atmosphere where people can come interact with one another and the platform only facilitates such interaction or facilitates such community building. 5. What are the two basic things that you have to identify as an e-commerce player? Ans. As an e-commerce player or as somebody who is trying to establish an e-commerce business, the first thing that you have to identify is what kind of business model you want to have. And depending on the business model that you choose, all the other things are going to fall in place. The second thing after you have identified the business model is where you have to identify and define the kind of products and services that will be part of the offering that you make. 6. What are the different things that the shopping cart softwares enable you to do? Ans. Similar to the content management systems in the case of web design, in an e-commerce platform also, most of these softwares enable you to do a content management system. So rather than choosing each of these product pages and designing each of these product pages, you can probably have the software help you in identifying how the template should be, how the theme should be, what kind of optimization techniques should be adopted, etc, and have a seamless, interaction between different pages, make sure navigation doesn't get hampered every now and then, etc. 7. How does the credit card payment technique work? Ans. You have different credit card agencies which are connected to banks and you have a certain credit that the bank is providing to you and the card and the details of the card are now used for your purchase processes. It is generally secured by a third party who is the credit management agency. Say for example, if it is American Express, if it's MasterCard, if it's Visa, etc, they are the ones who would manage the payment gateways. 8. What is distribution and what are the ways in which it works? Ans. Distribution basically is the activity that happens after the customer has made the purchase decision on the website or on the e-commerce platform. How is that you get the product delivered to your house? Or how is that the customer gets a product delivered to a specific location that the customer wants? That is what distribution basically covers. This is a very complex logistical operation. Many times companies have very specialized teams that take care of the entire distribution activity, but in a very simple manner. There are three ways in which distribution works in an e-commerce space. One of them is called online distribution. The second one is offline distribution. And the third is a hybrid distribution model. In an online distribution model, the platform basically connects the seller with the buyer and the seller becomes responsible for delivering the products to the customer. Think about the case where you go to eBay and you decide to purchase a certain product. Now it is the seller's responsibility to make sure that the product is shipped to the customer. The seller can decide about the logistical partner, the kind of speed of delivery, etc, that the seller wants to choose. And depending on that, the customer's orders are fulfilled directly by the seller. The second mode of distribution is something that is a little bit more comprehensive, a little bit more controlled by the e-commerce platform, which is called offline distribution. Here similar to the case that you would find in Amazon's “Fulfilled by Amazon” services, there is a certain control that the e-commerce platform has wherein they keep stock of different products and every time the customer makes an order for a product, it is shipped from the e-commerce platforms’ own physical warehouses, or the e-commerce platform is now going to procure all of these products, do a thorough quality investigation, make sure that it is a product that adheres to different specifications as promised to the customer and then deliver this product to the customer. There are different advantages because of offline distribution and because of the control that the e-commerce platform has in distribution, many times they are able to promise quicker delivery times, they are able to ensure that the product doesn't get hampered in the process of distribution or in the process of logistics. Many times they also have trained people who visit the customer premises and they provide an experience to the customer, and it is not just some courier boy who's coming home. The third model is where you have hybrid distribution mechanisms where e-commerce platforms either choose to have an offline model or an online model depending on the kind of complexities and depending on the kind of products, the price of the products and the importance of these products. 9. What is affiliate marketing? Ans. Affiliate marketing is a form of partnership in which a company pays an affiliate, which might be another company or an individual who basically is provided a pre-specified amount for an action taken by the customer for whom he is responsible. Consider for example, if you go to certain websites, you would have seen that there are people who will give you links to a product on Amazon. They'll be giving you a link to a product on Flipkart. They'll give you a link to a product on eBay or any of these e-commerce platforms. Now when you click on this link and you go to the landing page or you go to the product page on the e-commerce platform, the e-commerce platform has a mechanism by which it is able to identify the source from where you have come to this e-commerce platform. And in case you are going to complete this purchase or in case you're going to complete the transaction, then the e-commerce platform knows that the person who provided the link in the first place is somewhere responsible for this customer to have come to the e-commerce platform and for the customer to have made this purchase. Because of this, now this person who provided the link is given certain benefits or certain commission. And this entire activity is called as affiliate marketing. W7_L1&L2 : ECommerce Strategy - Part 1 & 2 Frequently Asked Questions 1. Retailing: An activity where you make the product or service available for the end consumer's consumption or for the consumption of a family unit, etc. 2. Intermediaries: The middlemen that are engaged in the distribution channel of a product before it reaches to the consumer. 3. SKU Level: SKU or Stock Keeping Unit level basically means the smallest or the individual units that customers can buy from you. 4. Meta-tags: tags placed in the head section of your code that help define the contents of a web page. For example, a description meta-tag is used by Internet search engines to display a description of your page in their search results. 5. Call to action button: You can have a button where the customer can click on a mobile device and immediately dial you on the phone. You might have a registration form, you might have addresses that are provided, anything that makes the customer to now act and thereby move a little further to making that product purchase. 6. Remarketing: The activity wherein the ads are displayed about products that you have looked for, on an e- commerce platform. 7. Affiliates: Third parties that give incentives or give customers a lot of information about which products to buy from which e-commerce platforms.