Before you dive into this post I must clarify that I am doing an SEO and working in this field since last 7 years and in addition to that I am running a small e-commerce store since last 2 years.
Have you ever noticed that writing anything about e-commerce on rodinhoods, give you so many eyebrow raises? Still I am going to write about this.
The second stage when Indian ecommerce (bubble) start growing, there is a lot more awareness about it in market and consumers. e-com companies knows where the customer are and they started to attract them the easy but costly way. They have got heavy funds from VCs and Investors hence, bigger Indian e-commerce players leading the market have lots of money to spend on main stream of advertising, which includes TV, newspaper and other traditional Medias.
During this second stage of e-commerce bubble, Can you imagine what is happening to the average new e-commerce customer in India? Who is not a good searcher, paying a high price of internet and doesn’t know where to look for when he want to buy something from internet?
In order to consume whole Indian e-commerce market cake Indian e-commerce retailers, put customers in oven of e-commerce market, without knowing when he becomes fully baked cake? They have forgotten that e-commerce is a marathon and not sprint.
Now days, He – an e-commerce customer becomes a half-baked cake. Which will not be eaten by e-commerce Companies, and if they want to eat it, it tastes bad.
Why it is half-baked, and tastes so bad?
An e-commerce customer only knows 5 leading ecommerce sites which are being shown on TV ads frequently. Plus neither has he known how to get discounts on e-com sites, nor how to search for better products on internet? He even doesn’t know that how to get true reviews for product on Google to get worth of his money which he is going to spend on e-commerce sites.
While buying, half-baked customer went for the brands as he saw in TV or in other ads. He only knows that what he saw in ads, media sites and other related advertisement are the only e-com world. And believe me most of the searchers go ahead with wrong spells of e-commerce sites and ended up on parked domains or low quality doorways.
To avail more customers, e-com companies are trying to invest more in advertisement and they cost them on their profits.
For online business you need to get customers more organic ways to get the business grow naturally, to get the exact test of baked cake. I am sure you guys are telling me that I am not seeing the big picture here. But I am pretty sure that every industry needs a genuine customer that matures with time for a business to survive and grow.
In other geographic markets where e-commerce is now matured, they saw a gradually growth in internet, e-commerce, credit cards, supply chains and most importantly in their customers and their buying habits. But in India, people are lurking to get COD, discounts, credits for purchase and offers. Leave Google, they even become lazy to search on e-commerce portals itself. (reason for growth of pinterest kind of layouts of e-com sites). I believe that the products which are shown in TV ads are most saleable items on e-commerce portals.
There are 100s of t-shirt selling site in US, since more than 10 years, while threadless arrived 2 –3 years back to provide crowd sourced printed t-shirts, and they succeeded. In India we have t-shirt selling companies and threadless kind of company started simultaneously, as a result poor growth of the threadless kind of sites is unavoidable, which is more mature model of e-commerce. These trends are not representing only e-commerce and product sector, service industry are witnessing same trends too.
Concluding that, we have to prepare a genuine online customer who knows the value of online shopping and services, not in terms of only low prices and multiple choices. If we would not be able to do that now, e-commerce eco systems will throw us out.
