Ecommerce Website - Acronym Soup Explained
by Frank Foster
If the experts are correct (and sometimes they are), your business may be missing the greatest opportunity in history to increase margins and expand markets. Using the traditional rules of trade—goods and services are exchanged using well-established channels and long-established rules of business.
However, the incredible explosion of the Internet NTM (Not To Mention), the extraordinary trade architecture now available through the Internet, has changed the traditional rules of doing business. In addition, we now have to learn FUA (Frequently Used Acronyms) FTASB (Faster Than A Speeding Bullet) just to solve our FAQ’s (Frequently Asked Questions) about B2B (Business To Business e-commerce).
Forrester Research says that “The Internet enables customer self-service to handle 33% more capacity with the same staff level. By absorbing 20% of call center contacts plus attracting one-third of new support customers, corporations realize a 43% decrease in cost per contact.”
How can small- to middle-sized businesses establish and maintain a business website without the staff or internal infrastructure to support such an endeavor?
To build a winning e-commerce business, you need a solution that enables you to:
* Build long-term customer relationships by providing personalized service and content.
* Retain customers with personalized online service.
* Create new market opportunities to merchandise your products.
Your business website should attract and retain customers with compelling, personalized e-commerce experiences, manage relationships with online distributors, measure and analyze the success of online initiatives, and expand their market reach through a network of affiliates. Indeed, there is SAR (Some Assembly Required).
To produce such sites and run businesses across this online business channel, enterprises will have to address a complex set of development, site production, merchandising and customer care activities. For instance, they must quickly develop sophisticated Web applications, develop Web workflow procedures, and establish processes for editorial content and version control. In addition, one-to-one marketing schemes must be designed so that the website is most effectively targeting customers based on their interests and preferences.
Enterprises must balance these activities so that they can maximize their online revenue opportunity and their L2B (Looker To Booker) conversion rate, while keeping internal labor and systems costs under control as the online business expands over time.
To be successful, a business must choose a service provider who can deploy the right technologies for their Internet initiatives, as well as the infrastructure to support it.
While the way we do business is changing, the essential components of successfully choosing a business partner has not. Can the service partner you choose provide value and service at a reasonable cost? IMHO (In My Humble Opinion) this is still SOP (uh…Same Old Procedure).
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