PDF If you’ve received your Christmas presents on time this year, odds are that Santa’s helper took the shape of a courier working for one of the many e-commerce companies springing up in India’s long-delayed dotcom boom. Ah yes, that phrase: ‘dotcom boom’! For more than a decade, these words have symbolized bad memories for the Indian business world. Memories of brave words, tall claims and the great NASDAQ crash.
As a digital marketing and web technology company headquartered in Bangalore, i-Vista witnessed the great e-commerce debacle of 2000 first-hand, while thankfully not being dragged into the general meltdown because of an organizational focus on the B2B segment. One of the biggest take-aways from that unfortunate time was the importance of understanding your market.
While many once-bitten twice-shy investors and entrepreneurs swore off the digital space at the time, western e-commerce majors like Amazon and e-Bay continued to thrive. The difference was that they were serving markets that were ready for the switch to online commerce.
It’s taken much of the last decade for India to become a healthy environment for e-commerce. Today, there’s an internet user base of 100 million and growing in the country. Standards of living are growing and there’s a new middle class with needs and demands to match their incomes. Broadband connections are becoming more widespread. With increased traffic and urban congestion and the superior range of products available online, people in India are increasingly turning to e-commerce to get their shopping done.
Travel-related purchases make up the bulk of market volumes as people purchase tickets and make hotel bookings online in larger and larger numbers, but electronics and apparel account for the largest number of individual sales. Around a 1000 e-commerce firms closed down during the 2000 burst; today, companies like Flipkart, 20North, Makemytrip and Letsbuy are scoring significant successes catering to the same market, after a decade of growth and change.
So this is a good time to be venturing into the e-commerce space. But it’s important to learn the lessons from the past and apply them. Understanding whether a market is ready for a particular offering boils down to market intelligence. You have to study the territory and understand the patterns of demand and supply and find the opportunities where the current system breaks down or just isn’t good enough. Technology is a big driver of course, as is user interface design and online security, but the bottomline is that you have to deliver something of value to a market that can’t otherwise gain easy access to it. And that’s a rule that applies to any form of commerce, electronic or not.
For expert insights and inputs on crafting your own e-commerce success story, you need to be driven by superior technology and market-ready marketing insights. Elements that i-Vista’s Digital Marketing and Technology specialize in!