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What Do Indian E-Commerce Lack?
By siliconindia
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3 Comments
Bangalore: With e-commerce sites adding up daily to the list of the existing one, still the pace of the growth is slow in India as compared to the western countries.
There are several other factors responsible for it other than the infrastructure issues. The market in India is still unorganized and fragmented; most of the bigger online stores are just like a layer over the big e-commerce sites, where the buyers and sellers are directly interacting. Even these sites fail to understand the customer, and their need to buy. Even the products with high value proposition will fail if they fail to understand the consumers need.
Sometimes, an over-estimation of resource competence, staff, hardware, software and processes, fail to handle the new strategy. With a failure in developing new employee and management skills, they need to mitigate it with thorough resource planning and employee training.
Few e-commerce fails due to the technology trends that are always over estimated in short and long term. The user base is constantly expanding, and the e-commerce sites need to be more careful about how sophisticated an experience a business is offering to the customers.
When it comes to the global market, the websites expect the global consumers to use the website and transact with them but the technical design sometimes fails to accept the international address correctly. One of the other reason why it is difficult to build an e-commerce in India is due to the tax-structures are in favor of the offline business.
Shopping is still a social affair in India. Virtual shopping experience is something that all the consumers are not able digest. The overall experience is missing in the online shopping portals. The touch and feel experience that the Indians are used to is lacking. Logistics add up as a spice to these problems. It takes more than seven days to deliver the goods in India, where as in the western countries, it takes only a day or two.
Another shoe bitter is the payment option, where in consumers face a lot of problem in terms of making their payment online. Some sites have a confusing and problematic checkout procedure. A lengthy checkout process puzzles the potential buyer. If the entire process is complicated and demanding, then the site looses a high number of visitors as they cancel the buying process rather than completing it.
The e-commerce owners overlook the business decisions of building a proper payment method. It is one of the very last steps of the online shopping experience and the most frequent reason to lose a sale. The sites can choose from alternatives available, such as assortment of credit card processes including your local bank, off-line payments and even cash-on-delivery; or providing the customers an alternative to selection their best payment option.
With so much of fuss, it is essential for the e-commerce entrepreneurs to take initiatives to kick the growth of the sites in India. They can leverage the growing and ever penetrating internet in India. With the rural areas surpassing the urban, they can expand their market to these areas through providing products that suits their need.