Tag: Web

The e-Commerce conundrum

Prasad Ajinkya2 Comments

I walk into a brick and mortar store (say a book store), browse through some books, finally decide on my selections, head to the counter, make the payment and come out a happy customer. All that the vendor needs to do here is –

1. ensure that he is well stocked with books I like
2. have a search mechanism in place to find the right book for me
3. have someone manning the counter

The beauty here is that if the book were torn or something, I do get a chance to examine the goods before buying them. I decide to buy the goods only after I say its ok, who would I trust more than myself? Thus, I perceive the transaction as fair, and I pay the book store and head home.

Now consider a second scenario, I walk into a bookstore, and I inform the vendor that I am looking for, say a Jack Reacher novel. The vendor shows me his collection, but much to my chagrin the particular title I am looking for is not with him. The attendant assures me that they have run out of stock and will restock in 5 days. However, they would be more than happy to inform me once the book arrives. I hesitantly leave my no. with them and think that it’s good to have book stores who inform their customers about books they want.

Apply the same paradigm to an online shop. Rarely would I come to this shop for idle browsing, if I do have a title in mind, then I would be interested in skipping directly to it. If at this juncture, the store informs me that it is out of stock and will not accept my order, however they will be more than glad to inform me when the book is in stock – I won’t be that pleased. I will grumble and grudgingly close the browser.

If the decision making involvement is the same, if the outcome is the same, then why the difference in behaviors?

Futurebazaar

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In December 2006, we were working on an e-commerce portal aimed for the B2C segment. It was supposed to rival Amazon in terms of features, experience, technology … a very ambitious project. When doing market research for that project, we tried out many Indian e-commerce sites, actually shopped on some of them, and literally choose from the best of them the features we want to build. That was the first time I came across Futurebazaar. I bought a book, (Shantaram) from the site, the book was delivered in a week or so. I soon forgot about the site, little did I know that I was one of the first customers on the portal. Within a month or so, I got a mail from them saying so and also an invitation to their public media launch. Wow! My first media launch invitation!! Wheee!!

I look at the site now, almost 40 months later, and I can see how well they have evolved. No more the tacky-looking nested menus, distinct spaces which map onto their physical presences, interesting sales promotions (Lucky Wheel thingy), only products which they stock in their physical stores, support offered through their physical stores, etc. The way they have evolved their business from being a pure play online shop to a click and brick model is to be applauded.

Kudos to you Futurebazaar!!

Twitter Analytics

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Was listening through a podcast by Duct Tape Marketing on Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik. It started of as an interview promoting his new book on analytics powered through crowdsourcing. Towards the fag end of the interview, something that Avinash said really got my attention.

Most people treat Twitter as a shout channel. Please do not treat it as one.

Then he rattled off two important parameters for measuring one’s tweeting success. They made more sense because I agree with him on Twitter being an engagement space with your customers. His parameters are –

  1. No. of RTs/1000 followers
  2. No. of replies per day

The first one measures how many of your followers are listening to you and see value in your ideas. The second one measures how many of those listeners are engaging with you.

Simple.

Social Media

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Yesterday, I attended Startup Saturday … the theme was Social Media and how it can be leveraged by start-ups effectively.

Some of my key learning –

  • Online marketing does not replace offline marketing efforts, and vice versa. If you are planning a huge effort in one media, do not ignore the other
  • The best way to use these platforms is not as a broadcasting medium, but as a way of engaging with your customers
  • Don’t create propaganda, create evangelists … who can propagate your name
  • Social media marketing is not cheap, and it is certainly not a free alternative to traditional marketing
  • In case of B2B space, marketeers can target the end-customer through social media and get the attention of their intended customer organization

Will attach the respective presentations as and when the organization committee puts them online :)

Why use LinkedIn

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This is more of a recollection of my learnings than anything else, people can share their learnings and I promise to grow this space.

  1. Targeted resume submissions – Find the organization you want to apply to, go find folks in your network who work for  that organization. Use their referrals to get your resume the place you want it to be.
  2. Business Visibility – Professionals talking about their organizations can act as evangelists on LinkedIn. With the integration of Twitter, the value of LinkedIn as a Social Media Platform has increased a thousandfold.
  3. Peer learning – People who work in the same industry can collaborate to discuss and resolve each other’s problems. Whereas this seems to be a generic utility of a community, I have seen this happen pretty well through the Q&A forum of LinkedIn. Since people who contribute to these are serious minded professionals vis-a-vis the casual replies of Orkut. All this for free unlike Experts-exchange, where the user has to fork out good money to get to the solution.
  4. Showcasing – This is the most obvious one, do I need to get into this :-)

Your comments are more than welcome on this one, since it will only add to this post.

Gartner Hype Cycle 2009

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I first came across the Hype Cycle in 2008, immediately, I posted about it here. Back then, the Web 2.0 and SOA was considered to be a market failure. Everyone who was anyone in the web development arena was claiming to create “Web 2-point-oh” applications, without knowing what that term meant. I know about an entrepreneur who pitched the idea of a Web 2.0-based e-commerce portal to a VC. In return, the VC asked one simple question – “Do you know what Web 2.0 means?”

Hype cycles are just that, they indicate the evolution of the system and its mainstream adoption with the amount of hype it is creating among the society. They also are an indication to future market leaders – companies which are poised to take off due to the right adoption of technology.

Gartner Hype Cycle 2009
Gartner Hype Cycle 2009

So, what do you think you should invest into now? Do you think you will buy “the Kindle””? How about that power saving infrastructure? What to do with KM?

Kudos to Gartner for coming up with this framework.

Web 4.0: The Enabling Web

Prasad Ajinkya5 Comments

Forgive me, this post is going to be a long one.

In the brief span of its existence, the web has evolved at such an alarming rate, that it outstrips evolution of any living organism. Even as Indian web users and web development companies are creating (and using) Web 2.0 platforms, the more developed nations are already talking about Web 3.0, the semantic web.

Picture2

Not so surprisingly, I have found to my chagrin that 80% or more of the Indian populace associate Web 2.0 with client side technologies instead of a collaborative technology. People associate it with all the wrong ideas … I do not blame them. Awareness has always been the bane of comprehension. Having said that, I decided that it would do some good if we can somehow capture the evolution of the internet in these already popular phrases, and somehow manage to extrapolate what the next stage could be – so that we are prepared when it comes ;-)

Or even better, a host of Indian companies could bring in the era of Web 4.0: The Enabling Web. So what are these evolutionary milestones?

Web 1.0: The Information Superhighway

This is the internet of yore. Those were the days when people would make separate HTML pages and upload it on the net. Content was written within these pages and uploaded. It was authoritative in nature, since most of these sites were a one way communication stream. People came to different sites with the sole aim of gathering information – hence the name, the Information Superhighway.

Web 2.0: A Collaborative Medium

This is the internet that we see around us these days. The web is more social now, its a place to meet interesting people – to collaboratively create content. Content is not written within pages, content is created by the users themselves. The more the users, the more the content. What the developers create is a platform which enables this co-creation between the users. A great example of this is Wikipedia or IMDB.

 

 

 

Web 3.0: A sense making layer

The new era of internet is coming, this can somehow make sense out of the user’s inputs and act accordingly. So when I say “Show me a blue lotus”, the internet should show me the image of a blue car instead of a blue flower. How does it do this? It already has my preferences for cars over flowers somewhere. This is where collaborative filtering mechanisms and business intelligence algorithms are used to correctly profile the user. The internet is capable of understanding what the user is speaking. It differentiates a Gandhi from a Hitler. Some examples of this would be WolframAlpha or Amazon.

Web 4.0: The Enabling Web

So what happens when the web begins the “understand” the user. The sole question is – “What’s the point?”. If it can understand the user, it can also understand the purpose with which the user is driven to visit a particular web application. And, if that can be done, then it won’t be too difficult to understand and provide what other resources would help the user reach his outcome. The web suddenly becomes a more intertwined place with each web application talking to others, so as to provide the best experience to its user. Not only experience, but to ensure that the user is enabled with the right set of resources to get his job done. The purpose of the user is kept at the center. That’s my vision for web 4.0 akin to a more evolved Ubiquity extension of Firefox.