e&m-Business

Before starting this course, I had a normal working knowledge on e-commerce, especially due to the fact that I am co-founder and part of the management team of a company that offers e-commerce services on a b2b basis, and also builds and manages e-commerce platforms at own risk. This has given me profound insights on how the business works. But like with everything in life, you never stop learning. And in this particular case, I believe you should learn one new thing every day. It is such a fast paced and innovative environment, it is hard to keep your knowledge up to date. And also due to the fact that the web is not static but extremely dynamic and new ideas and concepts come out on a daily basis, it is very difficult to analyze what is useful, what is a trend and which innovation or business model will help shape the future of what we know as e-commerce today. So jumping on to every train can be a dangerous strategy. It can also be a dangerous strategy to be the innovator and come up with mindblowing ideas. Why is that? Well, if we look at some of the first search engines for example. Remember Altavista or Lycos? No? I don't blame you. What they did really was paving the way for Google. As an early mover they had to deal with all the difficulties and obstacles you encounter when bringing a new concept to the market. Once the technology and the concept was ripe, it got harvested by others such as Google or Yahoo. So we find similar situations in e-commerce. Especially if we limit the scope to b2c e-shops. Many trends disppeared as fast as they appeared in the beginning. Take the electronic malls as an example. A few years ago it seemed to be a trend and a promising concept to have multiple brand stores united on one platform. Really, all of those platforms more or less diappeared. Needless to say, that sometimes old trends which didn't work out can get a new boost through innovation. This is what I believe with regards to bulding successful strategies in e-commerce: Do not take every trend as a template for a succesful business model, most of them die within a year. No matter if there was a huge hype around it or no hype at all. Make the customer's life easier. Complicating the shopping process for the client because you want to show everything you can do with your programming skills and apply what you've learnt at your last photoshop course is a conversion killer. Keep it simple. Take Amazon as an example. Amazon obviously has a very sophisticated site, but they don't need to bloat things with tacky animations and background music. They are succesful because they offer almost anything you could want to shop for, they offer it at very competitive prices and they make sure you have it within a couple of days. Obviously, if you want to enter this market, don't try to compete with Amazon. Rather try to find your vertical spot where you can shine, and maybe one day Amazon will knock on your door and offer you an irrefusable amount of cash. Bingo!

One thing I haven't been able to work with a lot so far is m-commerce, or m-business. I will refer to it as m-business, because the scope goes far beyond simple business transactions. Through the technology we hold in our hands today, we can also manage our clients, business partners and our employees. When you receive a package via UPS or any other of the many parcel services, you will sign for the reception on a digital mobile device. In fact, UPS was one of the first companies to implement such a system and you could say that this was one of the first appearances of e-business. In this case, the digitalization of the delivery process was an advantage for the company as well as for the cusomters. It made it easy to track the delivery, control the employees performance and therefore increase efficiency and customer value. UPS' "Parcel Men" currently use the DIAD (Delivery Information and Acquisition Device) and the GSS (Global Scanning System). The DIAD helps tracking the delivery, supplies a regularly updated delivery list, captures the pick ups and the deliveries and secures communication with the distribution center. The GSS is responsible for capturing the parcels at the distribution centers. Obviously we (almost) all own smart-phones and we know the possibilities those devices give us. The example of UPS is to show you, that m-commerce is more than just mobile gadgeting. It can be a core element of a companys process structuring and therefore of its value chain.

Nevertheless, we cannot ignore that there are millions of mobile internet devices (MID) out there and we need to take that as an opportunity to, amongst others, enhance our customer relationship management and advertise more efficiently. In the U.S. the mobile advertising market is expected to turn over $3.1 billion in 2013. Here you find a great article about mobile advertising and CRM. For me there are two aspects which make m-business worth getting into. It gives you the ability to follow your customers wherever they go and therefore collect valuable data about their consumer behaviour. And it makes it possible for you to be in touch with your clients at all times, hence be closer to them and have a tighter realtionship. Again space is limited, for more on this topic check this out.

Cheers! P