E-commerce Success

10 key factors to E-commerce Success:

1. Providing value to customers.

2. Providing service and performance, that is similar to what is found in a physical outlet.

3. Providing an attractive website. For instance, the innovative usage of colors, graphics, animation, photographs, fonts, and white-space percentage may aid in the success.

4. Providing an incentive for customers to buy and to return. Eg. Discounts

5. Providing personal attention. Personalized websites, purchase suggestions, and personalized special offers. Eg. Amazon

6. Providing reliablity and security.

7. Providing a sense of community. Such as having chat rooms, discussions boards.

8. Engineering an electronic value chain that focuses on a "limited" number of core competencies, such that it appears to be either a specialist or generialist.

9. Constructing a commercially sound business model.

10. Setting up an organization of sufficient alertness and agility to respond quickly to any changes in the economic, social, and physical environment.

http://ecommerce.insightin.com/overview/success_factors.html

All these are the few factors that I felt that are important for e-commerce's success.

In my opinion, e-commerce is indifferent from any physical outlet. This is because just like any other outlets found on the streets, they are facing competitions, or even more than what physical outlets face as the competitor may just be one click apart. Hence, consumers have numerous choices to choose from by merely moving their cursors.

Furthermore, I feel that having chat rooms is a rather important way of getting hold of your customers. This is because there was once my colleague was viewing a few florist websites, and than she came by a website that provides chat room which meant that if you have any queries, you can in fact just open a chat box and ask the 'salesperson', who will than give you an immediate replies. As such, with your customer's queries immediately solved, he or she may than just decide to place orders from your shop, which was what my colleague did. Since you have provided sufficient and efficient service to your potential customers in comparison to your competitors who do not have such a service, it proves to increase your chance of getting hold of the deal.

In addition, with the provision of personalized attention such as giving purchase suggestions, personlized special offers which is what Amazon did, is part of its success factors. This is because by providing other available options according to your customer's liking, it increase the chance of he or she purchasing the other books. Moreover, people like feel that they are have previleges that others do not, thus by providing personlized special offers it might than get your customers to be loyal to you, and make purchases from you the next time.

Finally, being constantly aware of the changes in the environment is as equally important so as to keep up with the trend, and also be able to provide updated products and services that your customers need.

Blog vs Vlog

BLOG

By now, everyone should be well aware of what a blog is.

Basically a blog is "...a journal that is available on the web...Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog. Postings on a blog are almost always arranged in cronological order with the most recent additions featured most prominantly."

- Enzer.

Today, blogs can also be used to earn revenues. Xiaxue, is the local popular blogger who managed to earn her revenues through blogging and posting advertorials on her site.

Despite all the craze about blogging, I do not understand the point of having a journal on the web and allowing it to be available to everyone and anyone on the internet to have access to it. This is because isn't journal suppose to be a personal thing. However, why is it now that one is allowing everyone even those whom one does not know personally to read about one's daily life.

VLOG

Almost everyone should be well aware of what blogging is, but how many people actually know about vlogging. Vlogging is in fact the short form for video blogging. As the name suggests, the medium is video, and it is a form of Internet television.

Video blogs actually take advantage of the web syndication to allow the distribution of video over the internet via the usage of RSS or Atom syndicaition formats, for automatic aggregation and playback on mobile devices and personal computers.

The surge in vlogging began in 2005, and the most popular video sharing site is, YouTube.

In fact, even radio stations and television stations are now using vlogging as a way of increasing the interaction between them and the listeners and viewers.

In my opinion, vlogging is an interesting way of expressing yourself. This is because through the use of videos the viewers are able to clearly understand your current thoughts and feelings as they are able to hear you and see your facial expressions, unlike plain blogging. Hence, in a way, you are able to bring the viewers into your world more easily as compared to blogging. Furthermore, I feel that it would be more interesting to visit sites that contain more emotions.

Although through blogging, you are able to type out your current thoughts and feelings, but due to the fact that different reader interpret the same posting differently, it might be difficult for them to give you an accurated feedback or comment.

The Evolution of Internet

The development of Internet first begin about 40 years ago.
The history of Internet can be segmented into 3 phases starting with:

1st- Innovation Phase (1961-1974)
The basis of Internet were actually pondered upon and realised in actual hardware and software. The original purpose of the Internet was to link large mainframe computers on different college campuses. Furthermore, this form of communication was only possible through the telephone system or postal mail.

2nd- Institutionalization Phase (1975-1994)
Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation (NSF) gave funsing and legitimization for the fledging invention of Internet. Great amount of funding was provided for the development of Internet into a strong military communication system that could withstand nuclear war. Thus,ARPANET was actualized.
In 1986, the NSF assumed responsibilty for the establishment of a civilian Internet called NSFNET, and hence began a 10 year long $200 million expansion program.

3rd- Commercialization Phase (1995-Present)
The government agencies encouraged private corporations to take over and expand the Internet backbone and local service to ordinary citizens.

Seeing the Internet era that we are in today, it is rather obvious on how successful we are as human beings to be able to utilize and improve things that are present to our own advantage, and also to make it more accessible to people all over the globe.