E-TAILING

E-tailing

Introduction

Electronic retailing, also known as e-Tailing, deals with selling products and services online via the World Wide Web. E tailing is synonymous with business-to-consumer (B2C) transaction.

Top ten e-retailers 1.Amazon.com 2. Planetrx.com 3. Ticketmaster.com 4. Gateway.com 5. Barnesandnoble.com 6. Mothernature.com 7. Iprint.com 8. Hallmark.com 9. Buy.com 10. Bigstar.com

Indian e-tailers: Rediff.com, Jaldi.com, Fabmart.com, Tsnshop.com and Satyamonline.com.

(Source: PC Data Online)

Challenges

Attracting the customersRetaining the customerBuilding confidence in revealing credit card

informationFrequent visits

Retailing to e-tailing

.

SOURCE:www.websem.be/blog/?p=217

Advantages over living retail storesMuch wider choice at fingertips Price discrimination Customized product placements No real estate costsEasy and comfortablyBetter interaction with the

customersMass Media

Every God has an Evil to face off.

Disadvantages over living retail stores

1.Limited only to on line users.

2. Ease of use is a problem

3. Trust, security and privacy concerns prevail.

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Source:

Forrester

Retailing Vs e-tailingRetailing E-tailing retailing is location-drivena retailer has to spend

considerable time, effort and money

in setting up his shop stocking inventory

creating display patterns.a retailer has strong

loyalty, product is physically

available

an e-tailer can go global. The primary aim of every

e-tailer is to attract a prospective customer to his e-tail site.

retaining a customer who has shopped through his site

a loyalty on the Net is difficult to obtain

product is not physically available

About Amazon.comAmazon.com, Inc. is an

American-based multinational electronic commerce company. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, it is America's largest online retailer.

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc. in 1994 and launched it online in 1995.

Product lineAmazon has steadily branched into retail sales of

music CDs videotapes and DVDs softwareconsumer electronicskitchen items, tools, lawn and garden items, toys &

games, baby products, apparel sporting goods jewellery, watches health personal-care items, beauty products,

musical instruments, clothing industrial & scientific supplies

Facts and figuresAccording to a research agency, 82% of the online

buyers have been found to be satisfied with their purchases.

The feature started with 120,000 titles (or 33 million pages of text) on October 23, 2003. There are currently about 250,000 books in the program. Amazon has cooperated with around 130 publishers to allow users to perform these searches.

The domain amazon.com attracted at least 615 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com survey. This was twice the numbers of walmart.com.

Amazon's profit in the fourth quarter of 2001 was $5.1 million, compared with a loss of $545.1 million in the year-earlier period. For the full year, Amazon still showed a net loss of $567.3 million. But that was less than half the previous year's loss of $1.4 billion.

Amazon.com is currently spending 174 percent of its entire revenue on marketing

.........cntdAmazon reported over 1.3 million sellers sold

products through Amazon's World Wide Web sites in 2007

the largest bookseller on the Internet. Amazon.com is the most visited Internet site in the world, with 17 million customers hailing from more than 160 countries.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Lebhar-Friedman, Inc.

Technology in amazonIn the early years, the entire Amazon.com system

was written in "C", which is an open-source software program language most commonly used on UNIX systems.

Amazon also exploited the new CD-ROM version of Books In Print. R. R. Bowker is the nation's official registry for titles and assigns International Standard Book Number (ISBN) (Hamilton, 2004).

Amazon began with Oracle's relational database software and, learning as they went along, Amazon engineers layered their own code on top of it (Hamilton, 2004).

Amazon.com assigned a unique identifier to all items it sold and it was the Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) (Wikipedia, 2004).

One-Click ordering that streamlined the entire process, allowing customers to shop without entering their shipping and billing information each time they made purchase (Saunders, 2001, pp.153-167).

Another top-secret technology for Amazon.com was A9.com and it was focused on product search (like Google's Froogle).

Amazon Simple Storage Service, or S3, allows businesses to store their data on Amazon’s own computer servers. S3 now held 5 billion “objects,” or pieces of data, up from 800million

Amazon's technological efforts had helped it

reduce costs and boost sales so much that revenues are expected to surge 32% in 2003, to $5.2 billion. (Hof, 2003).

E-tailing in INDIA

Need for a critical massGrowth in e-commerce will come

not from well-designed websites or web-marketing but from deeper penetration of the Internet.

In the Indian FMCG business, margins are as low as 10 per cent. Hence, e-tailing in such areas might not catch on.

For things like grocery, there is a shop out there at every nook and corner.

Hurdles in Indian E-tailingInternet is unlikely gather a sizable slice of

market.Despite a higher Internet penetration, cities

like Mumbai or New Delhi might not be a haven for an e-tailer

Cheap labourMounting competitive pressuresShopping is still a touch--feel--hear experienceInadequate information Important hurdle to the growth of the e-tailing

industry is the efficient management of logistics

How to improve E-tailing?Offline promotionsEg: Jaldi.comIt is important to include clickable thumbnail

imagese-tailing in India can be a success if the e-

tailers change their business models and understand their customers more. 

Scope for e-tailingCost advantage of e-tailingCollaborative commerce ( e-commerce)Create economic valueAccording to the KSA annual consumer outlook,

the consumers are more comfortable buying certain items. An illustrative list with a percentage of the consumers are: books and music 47 per cent, home furnishing 29 per cent, sports apparel 25 per cent, casual clothes 21 per cent, shoes 14 per cent, groceries 9 per cent and tailored clothes 9 per cent.

CH.SIREESHAG.SWATHI KRISHNAM.LAKSHMIK.SRI VIDYAK.SIVA KUMAR