E Commerce – Changing Business Trends

Business Managers of today are living in challenging times. Business targets had never been stiffer, work pressure and managing the complexities of competition is keeping them on their toes all the time.

Today, success or failure of a business and the Organisation is dependent wholly upon the Organisation’s ability to be flexible and to respond to the external changing environment.

Only those who are able to adapt to the changes and those who are able to assimilate and learn from tomorrow’s technology are able to run the race. Digital technology has changed the rules of business game.

Today, individuals have the power of internet in their hands. If one wants to book an airline ticket, it is pretty easy to do so online and it takes only a few minutes to complete the entire transaction of looking at the options, selecting the best priced deal, making an online payment and printing the confirmed ticket. As compared to talking to a travel agent for an hour and several calls, online booking is definitely a better deal.

Take the case of courier industry. One can book a consignment to any location in the world and you can use the track and trace feature on the web to track the status of your parcel at any time. This feature makes a huge impact to a business which is sending some important and time bound cargo or document to another location. Look at how easy it has become to configure a computer that you want and order it online in an instant.

From the above examples it is very clear that the businesses that have adapted and embraced E Business and E Commerce have managed to be successful and ahead in the industry. Migrating to an E Business environment is not easy and simple.

It is not as simple as it looks that one can just buy an application and host it on the net and attract customers. Embracing e business calls for Organisations to change their business models, business strategies as well as integrate their business processes with technology.

Organisations were traditionally product oriented. With times and changing environment they grew to understand and appreciate the need to be Customer centric and Customer relationship management became a key focus area.

Being customer centric meant orienting the entire organisation and all its functions and divisions to be responsive to the internal and external customers.

With the advent of E Commerce the Organisations have got to understand the Customers and their needs, preferences and buying behaviour in new light and from the perspective of electronic and digital media.

Understanding the why, how and what of E Commerce and orienting the entire Organisation to be customer centric in the new environment calls for re-inventing the business model where technology becomes the driver and the key differentiator. The entire Organisation needs to elevate itself and graduate to new web enabling platforms where speed, information, visibility and co-ordination of multiple transactions, seamless working of applications connecting different business processes form the components of the business chain.

Speed is the essence of E Business. Organisations have no time to learn all about the new technology, analyse, understand and then make their decision to embrace and grow into the E Business.

Time and speed will either make or break the businesses today. Therefore the Managers and Management have got to work and migrate their businesses to the E Business platform at the speed of thought and it has got to be done now.