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Marketing and sales strategies for electronic commerce

Tata Consultancy Services' Srinivas Kulkarni delivered the second session on 'Electronic Commerce Track II'. He spoke about marketing and sales strategies for electronic commerce.

Kulkarni stressed on the tremendous opportunities made possible by the Web. It is today possible to identify and track users, look at supply-chain integration and enable the notion of extended enterprises, he gushed.

The connectivity between manufacturers and suppliers will streamline inventory and production places. The manufacturers can now analyse who their customers are and what their interests and preferences are, he said.

E-commerce allows for handling effectively the entire commerce cycle: The customer engagement phase, the promotion and advertising phase and the sales and payment collection phase. Customer management and product promotion can be enhanced too.

For the transaction business to consumer like retailing, banking, auctions, brokerage and legal advice, the services are well defined and 'commoditisied' when done via e-commerce, he said. Order management, processing, procurement of supplies is also going to be easier this way.

The key to deploying technology is the way to model the problem or the business process, observed Kulkarni. Inter-enterprise transactions are made possible by enabling a commerce layer on existing business solutions, using standard protocols for transfer.

E-commerce will also make 'site' analysis possible and the kind of usage, preference for certain products etc, can be tracked.

A Dutch company made innovative use of e-commerce to auction the highly perishable consignment of flowers. Trade.net of Singapore managed to reduce berthing time of ships from 14 days to 7 to 8 hours by transferring manifest information of in-coming container ships to all concerned like buyer, bank, ports and government. Again, e-commerce tools achieved this.

E-commerce has seen tremendous response from some of the big names in industry, pointed out Kulkarni. Microsoft and General Electric make purchases of $1 billion each through the Internet.

Technology for e-commerce application is merely a tool but planning and marketing strategy needs to be put in place for deriving the best out of e-commerce, Kulkarni warned.

The totally new opportunities and changes in market dynamics will also mean that a) there will be completely new markets and b) existing markets will get redefined and of some existing markets will disappear altogether.

Sales strategies and applications on the Intranet can be evaluated for measures of success, said Kulkarni, through parameters such as number of visits, sales actually effected etc. The slack or effectiveness in advertising expenditure can likewise be identified.

The major challenge to Web marketing, according to Kulkarni, is to increase value further while simultaneously reducing costs.

Predictive marketing on the base of data analysis will greatly define corporate strategy, he was confident.

Distribution and supply-chain management can be more effectively managed through integration of ERP to ERP in two companies. For instance, inventory requirements at the manufacturer's shop can trigger processes at the supplier's end.

The commerce layers can be loaded on both the buyer's system and the seller's system. But the effectiveness of this would call for sharing of data and trust between business partners.

Advertising will see a new dimension through e-commerce. It will be totally dynamic, offering particular advertising messages to particular persons, based on what he or she has already bought.

All kinds of promotion, bonus schemes, 'buy now for an incentive' etc can be worked out for special sales and pushing of slow-moving products.

Selling strategies can be implemented through e-commerce too. Intelligent cross selling, taking into account the relationship between several products is another possibility.

Personalisation and membership is possible through the analysis of the customer's likes and dislikes and previous experience with the customer.

For actual transactions, application architecture can take care of incorporating all relevant product information, self-information, pricing, taxation, invoicing and shipping, he said.

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