jeudi 11 avril 2013

Summary of the experience


It is already the last class! It has been a lot of fun writing those blog entries everyday and I might even continue with the blog after the class is over.
            Firstly, having to write a blog entry every week made me more aware of tech news in general. Every week, I would try to find the latest trend in e-business and would read all the recent tech articles to find the topic I wanted to discuss and that is by itself a great takeaway from this course.
            Secondly, I tried blogging a few times before but always posted a couple articles and never opened the blog again. This time, having it as a class requirement and writing more and more articles made me realize the true value and potential for blogs. Also, having the ability to check the number of sites views, the encouraging comments (even though the blog’s name was so specific that I didn’t really expect anyone to see it besides the professor) made me aware of the impact a blog designed to be read by everyone could have.
            Obviously, I also learned a lot about the topics I discussed every week. My blog was centred around e-business’s influence on shopping with a few exceptions dedicated to cloud computing.
The main takeaways that I will remember after this class is that e-business is targeting three very important trends in consumer behaviour:
·      The search for cheaper products and services: because pure-click businesses do not have high labour costs or rental costs, they offer better deals to consumers. Other business models such as group buying or penny auctions contribute to this trend.
·      The search for discovery: more and more people are looking for new products to try or see what products their friends are using and e-business tends to facilitate that for consumers through social media integration and new business models such as subscription boxes.
·      The search for convenience: people with busy lives need technology to make the most difficult tasks easier and less time-consuming. As a result, we’ve seen the growth of mobile payments, the increase in popularity of shopping walls or the introduction of the Google glass. Cloud-based software and applications are also part of this trend by making data available anywhere and anytime.

To conclude, I believe this class was very useful and taught me what the most important trends in the industry were.

jeudi 4 avril 2013

Online pure-play enter the offline market?


The growth of e-business has allowed the development of a number of business models including a large number of online pure-play models.
However in the past year, we’ve noticed a number of originally “online only” players starting to enter the offline market. We’ll try to understand the origins of this trend and give some examples of how online pure-play businesses can use offline channels.
While online shops have caused a lot of brick-and-mortar businesses to close shop, they still lack a few characteristics that customer’s value such as:
  •        Tactility
  •        Instant delivery
  •        Social interaction

By investing in the offline market, online sellers are looking for innovative ways to bridge the gap and make up for these flaws. Some of the most innovative ways to do so include:
•         E-bay opened a temporary pop-up shop in London during the holiday season where it featured images with QR codes and recommendations driven by social networks.
•         Similarly, Etsy opened a pop-up shop in New York with laptops to show their entire shop catalogs and mobile devices serving as POS terminals via Square and PayPal.
•         Another big trend is the shopping walls developed by Tesco for instance with their giant poster in Korean subways where people could take out their mobiles, scan the products they need and have them delivered to their houses, saving a significant amount of time. Now, its virtual stores are also found in bus shelters and have produced 130% increase in online sales and 76% new registrations for Tesco online.
This innovation was further developed using a similar technology and the XBOX kinect to allow customers to literally reach out and grab the products they want from their TV
Using pop-up shops and other offline channels allow online sellers to:
•         Make efficient use of retail space, with lower inventory
•         Measure engagement and conversion rates
•         Attract new customers
•         Support real-time social electronic shopping