An example of an E-Commerce success and its causes

Online shopping brings a lot of convenience to the consumers. In Malaysia, more and more people start to purchase something online such as clothes, electronic products or even pets. eBay offers boundless opportunity to allow people pursue their interests and their passions in the areas of their hobbies and their collectibles.

eBay has built an online person-to-person trading community on the Internet, using the World Wide Web. Buyers and sellers are brought together in a manner where sellers are permitted to list items for sale, buyers to bid on items of interest and all eBay users to browse through listed items in a fully automated way. The items are arranged by topics, where each type of auction has its own category. It's convenient and easy to be found by people. This facilitates easy exploration for buyers and enables the sellers to immediately list an item for sale within minutes of registering.

eBay has done a regular basis to promote eBay, they have had isolated campaigns through radio and print, and they've also done some tradeoffs and some banner ads on other sites. But the really unique thing about eBay is that when compare theirs to traditional businesses or other e-commerce sites, they have done very little external promotion to build membership.

Another cause has helped to make eBay as successful as it has been, is that people really enjoy the experience of the shopping bazaar. They enjoy looking around for merchandise. The other component is they really enjoy the competition of the bidding process. Everybody likes to get a bargain, and shape or form, likes to haggle a little bit over the price. eBay's auction format allows users to do that.


Obviously, people are becoming more and more comfortable with shopping online and they're getting more and more accustomed to doing that. That's another factor why eBay is grateful.


References:
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~magnus/ief248a/eBay/history.html

An example of an E-commerce failure and its causes

As we know, there are not all E-Commerce business successful like Amazon.com, AOL, eBay and Dell just to name a few. However there are also those that did not quite get it right and sunk badly. One of an example of an E-Commerce failure is webvan.com.

About Webvan


Webvan was an online “credit and delivery’ grocery business that was founded by Louis Borders, the same man that established Borders book store .It delivered product to customers’ homes within a 30-minute window of their choosing.Webvan began its operation on 2 June, 1999, went bankrupt and closed down by 2001. In June 2008, CNET hailed Webvan as one of the greatest dotcom disasters in history.

Factors that cause Webvan failure

Types of product

Most of the product sell in Webvan are F&B product like food.Shopper may also price sensitive on the product where Webvan had to include extra labor cost and shipping cost on the product. So discount of the grocery product, the expire dates and the price of the product are the factor that effect consumer decision whether buy online or buy through retail shop.

Logistic

It is not easy to convenience all customer at the same time. Scheduling the time to delivery is not easy job for a logistic department of Webvan. If the company want to schedule all the delivery process well where the company able to send to product in time and able to save company cost it take days to complete. So it is a challenge for logistic department to do well. If the company unable to send the product to their customer on time, this will effect the consumer loyalty to the company.

Delivery on the time that the customer needed it

The advantage of Webvan is that they will deliver to your home after you place the order. But the problem is that Webvan unable to completely send to you when you need it now and the delivery cost might be more expensive then the product. Product like fresh vegetable and fruit may no fulfill the consumer need where the customers unable get the goods on time where they need it.

This is on of our group example of a failure E-Commerce business. If you felt you have any opinion or suggestion. Don’t hesitate to post comment.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webvan
http://www.webvan.com/