The Top 10 E-Commerce trends for the year 2000
What's the spanking fresh, squeaky clean first year of the new millennium got in store for E-Commerce? I put on the robe and played the venerable oracle gazing into the crystal ball. Here are the top ten trends from me.
Kiruba Shankar
Tuesday, February 01, 2000
# 1 - Alliances and Acquisitions will be the name of the game. I firmly believe that Brick and Mortar companies will quickly try and get their E-Commerce efforts together and graduate on to becoming Click and Mortar companies. After the Y2K scare is over, companies will start to pump in more capital investments into E-Commerce activities.
# 2 - As the international big boys like AOL and Yahoo! enter the Indian market with possible big stakes in Indian biggies, Satyamonline.com and Rediff.com ( not necessarily in that order!), small time portal players will find the going tough and there's certain be a big shakeout.
# 3 - The Silicon Valley attitude will fast catch up with the Indian Entrepreneurs as more Venture Capitalists start partronising Indian startups. More and more Indian Companies will start listing on Nasdaq and NYSE. In order to get as many eyeballs as possible before going for their IPO, companies will splurge exorbitant sums of money on advertising. After the full page adverts and huge billboards, it's the TV ads that're next in line for the dot.com companies.
# 4 - Companies in the online shopping business will begin to recognize that value-added activity begins after the customer hits 'submit order' and customer service will become the point of differentiation. There is a huge job market potential for customer care professionals as companies start to strengthen their back end processes.
# 5 - B2B (Business-to-Business) will boom as companies realize the convenience, the cost savings, and decrease in time to procure products directly from the manufacturer and thus avoid the middleman.
# 6 - E-Commerce applications will increasingly be adopted in wireless devices like cell phones and handheld computers. Pretty soon, an average Indian will be able to read emails, surf the Net and buy goods directly from his mobile phone. This will result in steep rise in mass usage of the Net and cell phones.
# 7 - Banks like Citibank and Standard Chartered will vie with each other in bringing out Internet-only credit cards. These virtual cards will not exist in the physical form and will only be a set of numbers and PIN numbers and can be used for purchases on the Internet.
# 8 - ASP's Capabilities Expand: ASP's (Application Service Providers) will continue to increase the quantity and quality of their customers and the robustness of their service offerings. The ASP model, as it becomes more pervasive, will lead to a dramatic change in how the software industry produces and distributes software.
# 9 - Dynamic Pricing reaches most industries: Dynamic pricing will extend into numerous industries via the name-your-own-price model (such as Priceline.com) and the Auction (such as Ebay.com) model.
# 10 - Privacy concerns will increase in the India as the public becomes more aware of how their Web site activity can be tracked, profiled, and merged with data collected from multiple off-line sources to reveal very "personal" information about themselves.
(Kiruba Shankar is a Web Technologist at Satyam Infoway Ltd and an enthusiastic evangelist of E-Commerce in India. He heads the Chennai Macromedia User Group and is an active member of the E-Commerce Special Task Force.
The views expressed here are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Cyber India Online Ltd ) |
