Appendix

Key success factors in e-commerce

Several factors have a role in the success of any e-commerce venture incorporated by a Websites. They include:

1.  Providing value to customers. Vendors achieve this by offering a product or product-line that attracts potential customers at a competitive price, as in non-electronic commerce.

2.  Providing service and performance. Offering a responsive, user-friendly purchasing experience, just like a flesh-and-blood retailer, may go some way to achieving these goals.

3.  Providing an attractive website. The tasteful use of colour, graphics, animation, photographs, fonts, and white-space percentage aids success in this respect.

4.  Providing an incentive for customers to buy and to return. Sales promotions to this end involve coupons, special offers, and discounts. Cross-linked websites and advertising affiliate programs are also booming.

5.  Providing personal attention. Personalized web sites, purchase suggestions, and personalized special offers go some of the way to substituting for the face-to-face human interaction found at a traditional point of sale.

6.  Providing a sense of community. Chat rooms, discussion boards, soliciting customer input, loyalty schemes and affinity programs help in this respect.

7.  Providing reliability and security. Parallel servers, hardware redundancy, fail-safe technology, information encryption, and firewalls enhance this requirement.

8.  Providing a 360-degree view of the customer relationship, defined as ensuring that all employees, suppliers, and partners have a complete view, and the same view, of the customer. However, customers may not appreciate the big brother experience.

9.  Owning the customer's total experience. E-tailers foster this by treating any contacts with a customer as part of a total experience, an experience that becomes synonymous with the brand.

10.  Letting customers help themselves. Provision of a self-serve site, easy to use without assistance, help in this respect.

11.  Helping customers do their job of consuming. E-tailers and online shopping directories provide such help through ample comparative information and good search facilities. Provision of component information and safety-and-health comments assist e-tailers to define the customers' job.

12.  Constructing a commercially sound business model. If this key success factor had appeared in textbooks in 2000, many of the dot.coms might not have gone bust.

13.  Engineering an electronic value chain in which one focuses on a "limited" number of core competencies -- the opposite of a one-stop shop. (Electronic stores can appear either specialist or generalist if properly programmed.)

14.  Operating on or near the cutting edge of technology and staying there as technology changes (but remembering that the fundamentals of commerce remain indifferent to technology).