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.