E-business Revolution in India

E-Business has reached to the doorstep of every individual in India. Today E-Business has broken all the technological a geographical restrictions that are still getting better day by day. There are so many E-Business websites(Amazon,Flipkart) which have reached that peak of success the commercial world and some are still working to get there. The Indian retail sector is witnessing a dramatic change because of changing mindset of the urban customers. E-Business allows consumers to electronically exchange services and goods with no barriers of time or distance [1]. So many customers moved from traditional purchase to e-business because it is often cheaper and faster. Besides, e-business offers more convenience and flexible for customization option of products and services [2]. Amazon and flipkart both have had amazing neck and neck run in India since the time they were launched. There have been amazing sales records, crazy silver and bronze medal is miles apart. Now, from a business point of view, it can be arguably stated that the competition in the E-Business segment in India is saturated.

Keywords: E-Business, technologies, products, services.

Introduction

The E-Business has changed significantly over the past 20 years. Today we commonly use the E-Business to perform searches when we need to know transact business and connect with friends and colleagues. Most organizations depend on the E-Business in one form or another for their business to operate successfully. Many of our day-to-day lifestyle tasks such as shopping, travel and online banking have been completely automated and are delivered through the E-Business sites. In recent history, no other technology has changed our habits, touched our personal life and affected our economy as intensely as the E-Business sites.

Ecommerce Statistics 2021 The fastest growth in retail E-Business between 2019 and 2022 is expected in India. By 2030, around 95% of all purchases are expected to be via E-Business. China is the largest ecommerce market in the world. 80% of Internet users in the US have made at least one purchase online. There are between 12M to 24M E-Business websites in the world. Credit cards and Debit cards are the most preferred form of payment for online shoppers worldwide.

E-Business growth statistics show a steady rise in global retail E-Business sales by the year, with the total value rising from rdaddphp.34 trillion in 2014 to .84 trillion in 2019. This is expected to cross trillion by 2020 and reach .88 trillion in 2021.

E-Business Websites

E-Business Websites development has been growing at a fast rate for the wide ranges of objectives in different domains such as education, government, business, health, and entertainment. The quality of a website makes a website profitable, user friendly and accessible, and it also offers useful and reliable information, providing good design and visual appearance to meet the users’ needs and expectations [1]. This can be done by defining the measurable website criteria [2][3]. Therefore there is a need to design a specific structure for evaluating the E-Commerce websites.

E-BUSINESS WEBSITE EVALUATION

Evaluation of e-business websites has a major impact on sales growth and the generation of incomes from online marketing. It is part of the overall E-business analytics process, which includes all the activities for analysis of systematic data that are performed to improve the business results of companies that sell online [4]. Web site evaluation should be planned in detail and then used as fully as possible.

Тhe following main phases of the E-Business web site analysis process can be listed:

• Identification of the business objectives of the analysis;
• Selection of the criteria for the analysis;
• Collecting and integrating data;
• Evaluation according to the selected criteria;
• Forming reports and analyses of the obtained results;
• Development of a plan for making improvements.

E-Business and Network Security

The main focus of E-Business web security is the secure transmission, web server security and some concern with client-side security. If the transmission channel and web server are safe, the client can be greatly assured that the client's security expectations will be encountered. For an acceptable premise of secured online business, the web security is necessary. Where web security is concerned with preventing attacks on websites which are classified as attacks on information and accessibility [5].

How to Evaluate a Website

Since the former 1990s, various approaches in assessing websites have been proposed by the researchers of universities. The widely used techniques involve benchmarking, capacity analysis, case work, experiment, survey, and online evaluation [6]. Although many people evaluate websites (especially trading websites) depending completely on the websites appearance and behaviour. Then, we must proceed to evaluate for several quality measures in the scope of accuracy, integrity, security, support and impartiality. Websites evaluation criteria have been offered in several settings in later years.

As shown in the figure, the General Website Elements are further classified in terms of six components. Look & Feel focuses on the aesthetic appeal of a web page, its readability, and download time, as well as its compatibility with browser. Navigation ensures an intuitive flow throughout the website, where web pages are logically arranged, easy to use, and clearly defined. Navigation on a website may be assessed in terms of presence of a site map, performance of the search engine, internal links etc. Credentials emphasize the trustworthiness of a website’s owner, as well as the reliability of the information available on the website. Content establishes the accuracy and validity of textual and visual information. Its evaluation determines if the information available on the website is complete, appropriate, accurate and regularly updated. Customization (or Personalization) features on a website enable users to modify page elements to fit their preferences.

PESTEL Framework Analysis

We used the PESTEL framework, as displayed in Figure 2 to analyse the changes in macro environment that affects Amazon. The PEST framework was first introduced by Harvard Professor Francis Aguilar in 1967 as the tool to scan the business environment which is useful to spot business opportunities, detect direction of change within business environment and avoid unconscious assumptions when entering a new country, region, or market. In 1980’s, 2 more factors were added to ensure the framework more comprehensive.

Political

Political behavior refers to “intentional acts from a wide range that may include influence tactics, self-presentation, impression management, voice and helping behaviour to manage (create, Ecommerce, Political, Economic, Social Technological, Environmental Legal maintain, modify or abandon) the shared meanings of organizational situations so as to produce desired outcomes that would otherwise be unfeasible”. Therefore, politics is tied to what is actively going on within the company, and in the society outside the company.

Economic

Economic have a significant impact on how an organisation does business and also how profitable they are. Factors include – economic growth, interest rates, exchange rates, inflation, disposable income of consumers and businesses and so on. These factors can be further broken down into macro-economical and micro-economical factors. Macro-economical factors deal with the management of demand in any given economy.

Social

Social factors Also known as socio-cultural factors are the areas that involve the shared belief and attitudes of the population. These factors include – population growth, age distribution, health consciousness, and career attitudes and so on.

Technological

Technological Factors We all know how fast the technological landscape changes and how this impacts the way we market our products. Technological factors affect marketing and the management thereof in three distinct ways:

• New ways of producing goods and services
• New ways of distributing goods and services
• New ways of communicating with target markets

Environmental Factors

These factors have only really come to the forefront in the last fifteen years or so. They have become important due to the increasing scarcity of raw materials, pollution targets, doing business as an ethical and sustainable company, carbon footprint targets set by governments (this is a good example were one factor could be classes as political and environmental at the same time).

Legal Factors

Legal factors include - health and safety, equal opportunities, advertising standards, consumer rights and laws, product labelling and product safety. It is clear that companies need to know what is and what is not legal in order to trade successfully. If an organisation trades globally this becomes a very tricky area to get right as each country has its own set of rules and regulations.

Amazon

Amazon.com is an international e-commerce company founded in 1995. The name reflected the vision of Sir Jeff Bezos, to produce a big scale phenomenon like the Amazon River. With Amazon, Amazon.in announced its presence in the Indian e-commerce space[7]. It also aimed at providing a trustworthy platform for the Indian retailers of all sizes to make their presence felt. Starting with books, movies, in due weeks Amazon.in introduced additional categories including mobile phones and cameras. It provides an array of services such as safe and secure online ordering experience, convenient electronic payments, cash on delivery, easy returns, consumer service with 365 days support, and a globally recognized and comprehensive purchase protection provided by Amazon.in’s A-to-Z Guarantee. Amazon.in is also accessible on mobile devices allowing consumers to shop anywhere. It also provides features such as the Search inside!™ feature with the help of which users can browse inside books. Not only this, the store features a collection of over 15,000 titles in English and Hindi across DVD, Blu-ray, Blu-ray 3D, and Video CD formats (Source: www.Amazon.in)[8].

Primary Survey was held among 66 people consisting of majorly students and working professionals. 30.3% (of the total) is female and remaining 69.7% (of total) are male candidates.The age profile of 52.2% (of total) belongs to the range in between 26 to 35 years, and 40.3% (of total) in the range of 15-25 years. 95.5% (of total) are from Metro Cities (New Delhi - the Indian capital, Mumbai - a rich city, Kolkata and Chennai). It is seen that many people use computers at their workplaces and their homes on a daily basis. The same is true about the use of Internet. It is found that use of Internet is not restricted only for email, communications, virtual collaborations, entertainment, etc. but also features online shopping. 53.7% (of total) respondents prefer online shopping over offline. It is found that approximately 60% (of total) people shop online at least once a month while 30% (of total) shop online more than once a month. Observations reveal that people were found to shop online during special occasions for their near and dear especially on the occasions like birthday’s, wedding, Diwali, and Valentine’s Day.The above mentioned case study during the ‘Diwali festive season 2019’ signifies that a lot of marketing efforts were undertaken by the e-tailing giants to capture the lion’s share of the market in an effective and efficient way. Through repetitive widespread advertisements of Indian e-tailing portals via different means like television prime slots, print media, billboards, email catalogues and reviews posted in blogs, Facebook, tweets about products and services used, consumers were attracted towards these portals. Seasonal offers and the occasion of gifting during festivals definitely resulted in significant spikes in sales as mentioned by vikas gupta senior vp marketing flipkart. The above SWOT analysis of Flipkart and Amazon.in along with the findings of the primary survey leads us to the following positive influencers that impact the Indian consumer’s online purchasing decision and drive them towards actual searches online for shopping[8].

Conclusion

E-Business website development is really an essential requirement for the online promotion now days. The main aim of E-Business development solutions is to extend the online presence of the website by giving an smooth and easy platform to online users or customers via a secured shopping experience. E-Business commerce websites are designed and developed to increase or enhance the overall profitability of an online identity.

REFERENCE

1. J. Hartmann, A. D. Angeli and A. Sutcliffe,“Framing the User Experience: Information Biases on Website Quality Judgment”, Proceeding of the Twentysixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Florence, Italy, April 2008, pp 855- 864.
2. G. Gledec, 'Quality Model for the World Wide Web', in 8th International Conference on Telecommunications - ConTEL2005 Zagreb, Croatia, June 2005, pp 281-287.
3. Z. Zhou, H. Zhou, and H. Yang, 'Evaluating Websites using A Practical Quality Model', in 14th International Conference on Automation &Computing Society.
4. Philips, J. Ecommerce Analytics. Analyze and Improve the Impact of Your Digital Strategy, Pearson Education, New Jersey, 2016.
5. R. J. Boncella, “Web Security for E-Commerce”,Communications of AIS (Association of Information Systems), Volume 4, Article 11, 2000.
6. Wen-Chih Chiou, Chin-Chao Lin and Chyuan Perng, “A strategic website evaluation of online travel agencies”, Journal of Tourism Management, © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved, Vol. 32, pp 1463-1473, 2011
7. Amazon (2014), Retrieved from www.amazon.in (accessed on 2014, October 16).
8. Dabholkar, P.A. (1996). Consumer evaluations of new technology-based self-service options, International Journal of Research in Marketing, 13(1), 29-51.