By Trideeb Das
You are on the way to your cafeteria, while getting money from the ATM, you recharged your mobile phone, paid a few basic amenity bills ( the options that you currently get in ATMs) and also looked into the menus available for day to day items and ordered a full list of house hold goods. Time is not very far away to get these options. While retail shopping markets getting crowded, supply chain and carrying the same items that you buy every weekend over and over again become a challenge for the heavy scheduled human beings, there could not be a better option that your ATM starts delivering your house hold items. Well, virtual retail stores are not just in imaginations. Last year, a major South Korean retailer Homeplus owned by British giant Tesco opened a virtual store in a busy Seoul subway station, for increasingly sophisticated smart phone users to order groceries and more.
Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, is the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. With more and more websites and a full world of retail in internet that gets referred as e-commerce, multiple new technologies and inventions adding to the user experience in digital world, digital commerce is the new name of electronic commerce.
Online shopping was invented by Rediffusion Computers employee Michael Aldrich in Great Britain in 1979. Since May- 1984, at Gateshead in England resident Jane Snowball, the first online shopper who purchased items from Tesco; e-commerce has evolved multiple folds. Currently B2C product sales totaled $142.5 billion and expected to be $279 billion in 2015.
Digital commerce, the new face of electronic commerce is going to be touching everyone’s life in the times to come. While ecommerce world and websites from the nascent state has become full blown business in last decade, everyone is waiting to see the technology boom that is going to start common people after the recession period. According to a study, global e-payments and m-payments going to be almost double to $ 1.6 trillion by 2013. The number of global e-payments (online payments for e-commerce activities) is expected to grow from 17.9 to 30.3 billion transactions between 2010 and 2013, while m-payments are expected to grow from 4.6 to 15.3 billion transactions in the same period comes as the proof to revolutionize digital ecommerce.
With technology trends, analytics and big data would play one end predicting consumer behavior and branding through social networking sites, payment processing going to provide next level of technology evaluation to support seamless processing of holistic shopping process.
It would be interesting where you would be buying your groceries next year…
Nice post by Author, I agree with him some extent - ofcourse e-commerce makes our life easier, But for business entity , it is very difficult to attract customer through e-commerce in Indian Ecosystem. We do have few examples like flipkart or snapdeal which has almost win the trust of its customers, but still 90% organization has not gain confidence level.I request Author to provide statistics of Indian users who uses e-commerce in daily basis. I personally know few people who had started a venture in selling vegitable online, They could not do well, reason - i found people still love to go offline to buy vegetables and groceries. I hope our ecosystem may change going forward and we may come online for all activities. I have another example of apply2many.com - an e-commerce platform to apply colleges admission form online, It could not go well - again same reason - people love to go college and buy application form in person rather than buying it online.
ReplyDeleteMy intention to only show the other face of e-commerce which is hardly acceptable in indian context neither to go against with Author's belief.
Thanks
Karunjay Anand
Th article is not in the context of India. BTW, Tesco opened the first virtual store in UK at Gatwick airport very recently.
DeleteIn Indian context, e-Commerce players are struggling and there will be consolidation. But that does not undermined the e-Commerce potential in India. India at present have 100 million internet users and only 7% does commerce transactions. While 100 million users represent just 10% of total Indian population of more than billion.