Electronic
commerce or e-commerce is an evolved-through-technology specimen of commerce, and is a widely welcomed and embraced way of doing
commerce. And as competition is growing, a need to differentiate from
competitors is growing too. In e-commerce data is a key strategic business
asset. E-commerce website owners cannot see the buyers or visitors, so, their
best actions (best CRM moves) have to be driven by the visitors’ foot-prints
click-prints. Each click on website gives birth to data. Ability to manage this
data as a strategic asset, and use it as a strategic differentiator is a key
contributor to the success of an e-commerce operation. At the cost of stating
the obvious, let’s compare a customer’s e-commerce shopping with commerce
shopping.
E-commerce: Website visitor logs in to the
e-commerce website
Commerce: Potential customer walks in to the
retail store (representative commerce platform)
E-commerce: Or, Website visitor visits the site,
but logs out within seconds, maybe just after seeing the home page
Commerce: Potential customer enters the retail
store but comes out within minutes
E-commerce: Within the e-commerce website, he/she
visits one of its page (or browse from one page to another)
Commerce: Potential customer visits section(s)
of the retail store
E-commerce: Within a page, Website visitor
moving to another page as a result of clicking on to the product-icon
Commerce: Potential customer seeing or checking
some product(s) in the retail store
E-commerce: Website visitor, after spending some
time on web-page explaining the product, doesn’t select it for e-cart
Commerce: Potential customer checks some
product, say XYZ, but does not put it in the cart/basket
E-commerce: Website visitor selects the product
and adds it into the e-cart
Commerce: Potential customer selects the
product and put it into the cart/basket
E-commerce: Website visitor checks out of the
e-cart, and continue for making the payment
Commerce: Potential customer selects his bundle
of product(s) and move towards the payment counter
E-commerce: Website visitor selecting the payment
option and begin filling his/her details for making the payment
Commerce: Potential customer communicates
his/her mode of payment at the payment counter, and…..
E-commerce: Website visitor finally completes the
details and makes the payment - converts into buyer.
Commerce: Potential customer makes payment –
converts into buyer or customer
E-commerce: Or, Website visitor begin filling
payment related details, but logs out without finishing the payment
Commerce: Potential customer finally, at the
nth minute decide not to buy anything, leaving back the selected cart
In e-commerce, scope of conversion of
action/behavior of a customer (Website visitor) into data is a lot more than in
commerce. E-commerce’s edge lies in capturing “what happened in between?” and “what happened
even when customer did not finally buy anything?” Or, to put it in
some detail - in e-commerce, entire journey of a Website visitor from logging
in to the website to his/her final purchase gets recorded in form of data –
Yes, this aspect of covering the web pages customer visited, the products
he/she checked before finalizing his/her cart covers “what happened in
between?” part which is not usually captured when a customer is doing similar
things physically inside the retail store (example of commerce). Similarly, in
e-commerce, entire journey of a Website visitor from opening the website to
his/her final decision of not to buy anything gets recorded. Or, we get data on
a customer’s doing window-shopping e-window-shopping.
“With great power comes great
responsibility” – a famous dialogue from a famous movie Spiderman. A lot of
information getting captured in data puts high responsibility on analytics. In e-commerce
analytics sits in the heart of decision-making.