E Commerce Promotional Techniques

To win in e-commerce you must promote. Your visitors won't hear about you unless you tell them about you. But don't dive in. Try out several promotional methods before you decide on the best combination for your products or services. There are no rules; the best combination will differ greatly from site to site. So test as many promotion methods as you can. Here are seven of the best for small to medium sites…

PR

PR is about getting magazines, newspapers, and e-zines to tell their readers about your site. This is hard. The editors demand interesting stories. To get ink, you need a twist. If you think you might make a good read, work hard on the PR. Ink is gold.

Referrals

If you have a great site, your visitors want to tell their friends about it. Make it easy for them and provide incentives to do so. Make it easy for them to send email to invite their friends to your site. Include the name and email of the referrer in that email. These will be some of the best leads you generate. Print Ads

Your potential customer reads magazines. Go there. Run small ads in publications carefully targeted at your customer. Keep the message minimal - just tell us what you sell and list your URL. Start with the cheapest classified ads in the best publications you can afford.

Banner Ads

Create a nice banner, buy lots of impressions, then watch the orders roll in. Simple, right? Not always. Find out if banners work for you. Create high quality banners. Run the banners on several well-targeted sites and buy enough impressions to determine if they perform.

Affiliate Programs

You should get other sites to send their visitors to your site. But how? Give them something. Provide a reciprocal link or give them a cut of the revenues generated from their referrals. Do not affiliate with mediocre sites.

Contests

Hold a drawing. You need a compelling prize, a recurring drawing, a database, and most importantly, a well-crafted email campaign as an adjunct to the contest. Manufacturers of unique and interesting items have the best chance of winning with a contest promotion.

Search Engines

All web businesses must implement an effective search engine strategy. Follow the basics - submit to search engines, insert meta tags, and use well-crafted titles, but don't obsess. Very few businesses thrive from search engine traffic alone. It is only one of the seven promotional methods you should try.

Internet business is tough. If you already have a great site and a compelling value proposition, you stand a chance. But if you are really serious, you must attend to promotion. Don't waste money. Test to see what works first. Then go for it - spend big money on promotion. Winners do.

Contributed By:
Rik Das
(Globsyn Business School)

NASSCOM CEO Summit: 'Beyond Horizon'

The National Association of Software and Services Company (NASSCOM), has organized its 1st. national event, “CEO Summit : Beyond Horizon” in Kolkata on 11th and 12th November 2008. NASSCOM is a global trade body comprising of member companies that includes software development, software services, software products, IT-enabled/BPO services and e-commerce. It has over 1200 members that includes 250 global companies.

The event has focused on the key issues of the industry today.

During the Inaugural Address, Mr. Som Mittal, President , Nasscom pointed out

• the effective use of tech resources by IT-BPO industry
• emphasized that its time to make investments with domain expertise
• that small industries need support for growth and prosperity to become big corporates

Mr. Raj Jain, Chairman and Managing Director , R S Software said that

• he truly believes Kolkata to deserve the brand for IT in India
• he recollected the memories of early days of today’s IT hub in Kolkata
• he admitted that the barren place on 14th Nov. 1991 has emerged a lot
• SME s being the core of Entrepreneur’s dream
• he suggested “SME Mantra”, viz., stay focused and stay flexible.

The phases of evolution of Satyam Computer Service Limited as described by Mr. Ramlinga Raju, Chairman, Satyam Computer Service Limited, has encouraged the participants to set new visions for life. Mr. Raju emphasized on the fact

• that knowledge allows growth
• that resources to be available globally
• to mitigate the risk by spreading access to customers beyond U.S
• focussed on leadership and innovations in offering newer services for customer benefits.

Kolkata has the capability of handling the many fold growth of Nasscom , said Shri Siddharth, Principle Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Govt. of West Bengal. He has the dream

• to connect the villages with broadband
• to make the villagers computer literate
• the children to handle computer like any other acquired reflex like cycling or swimming.

Dr. Debesh Das, Minister-in-Charge, Information Technology Deptt. has

• encouraged the SME s by revealing their contribution in quantity and quality towards the growth of the economy.
• described the present recession as a passing phase and addressed all to get ready for the next boom.
• ensured that Govt. will pay the subsidy for the rigorous training needed by IT companies.
• discloses that Govt. has taken up projects to support business to be started within 24 hours.

While addressing the session on Leveraging Global Delivery Management Mr. Ambarish Dasgupta, Executive Director, PWC, said that

• services sector has adopted Global Delivery Model model far later in compared to manufacturing.

Mr. Robert Latimore, partner, PWC, depicted the transition from outsourcing to global delivery model. He believes in providing

• maximum efficient service delivery with right skill, in right place and at right time
• his views are supported by the drivers of global delivery model
• drivers comprises of the managing cost, improved services, increase agility and access to high skilled labours.

According to Mr. Sanjiv Puri, Managing Director, ITC Infotech Ltd.,

• the new forces that drives business are de regularization, digitization and globalization
• the ongoing trends shows 80% of the world’s GDP will be sold across intrnationl boarders
• to create shared strategic vision with high degree of collaboration
• R & D and analytics as the unexplored areas of innovations in I.T.

Mr. Sunil Bhaskaran, Chief, Global Wires Business – TATA STEEL

• discussed the application of wires in power industry as well as in merchant products.

During the session, The Emerging Entrepreneur, Mr. Avi Basu, CEO, Connectiva Systems, emphasized on

• the burning zeal to do something on your own
• discussed the requirement of a strong team which eventually being the DNA of Connectiva, as the investors enquire about that primarily
• his vision is to prove products not as luxury but as a commodity.

Mr. Sanjay Chakrabarty, Partner, Columbia Capital has shaken the conscious of the audience by saying

• all business plans are wrong as you cannot predict the future
• has discussed some major issues like predictability vs. flexilbility which says that whether the cost flexible enough or not relative to the revenue streams
• coverd the issues regarding scalability and differentiation and approached execution along with vision
• suggested that to be a successful entrepreneur it is required to be alert at all the times and should have a resilient mindset.

Mr. George Zacharias, CEO, 7 Strata, who have been a very successful professional earlier and now an entrepreneur has shared his valuable experiences and said that

• passionate people are required
• the key figure for growth is to identify a strategy and to execute it with right people.

As delivered by Mr. Sashi Reddy, Founder & Chairman, Applabs,

• it is very important to get the first customer.
• an entrepreneur must be optimistic and learn to think small initially to get the first customer.

The third session on the 1st. day on Looking at tomorrow : Digital Divide and Digital Union the paradigm of the changing society was explored.

According to Mr. Satish Jha , President & CEO, One Laptop Per Child,

• it is very important to get acquainted with the technology right from childhood
• shown a model of a laptop which is shockproof and is meant to be used by the children.

The 2nd day started with the session chaired by Mr. Bikram Dasgupta, Chairman and CEO, Globsyn Group of Companies based on Competency vs. Experience: Is It an HR Issue. Mr. Bikram Dasgupta has

• entitled this period as the google- facebook era
• approached the speakers to share their views regarding the fact that whether niche skill set deserve much higher salry than the experienced employees or not.

Based on the above topic Mr. Kiran Karnik, Immediate Past president, NASSCOM, expressed his thoughts by saying that

• experience is truly required as they have seen the downturns and are aware of the ways to overcome the crisis.
• may be a competent person who is not experienced enough can get puzzled in such a situation.
• also narrated the importance of having diversified experience.

Mr. R Sankar, Executive Director, Pricewaterhouse Coopers,

• defined experience as a competency that is required sometimes.
• said that seniority is not the necessary tool to measure competency whereas experience can be considered as one.
• the way of behavior should be rational towards the experienced person showing him respect.
• encouraged the youngsters to get diversified in terms of their skill sets and to gain the experience based on that diversification.

The vision of Cognizant is to define competency as a combination of skill, knowledge and behavior as per Mr. Bhaskar Das, Vice President- Human Resources. He said

• experience enables the ability to see a pattern from an emerging trend as per his vision
• that wisdom really blooms
• agreed upon the point of necessity of diversified experience as per the version of the previous speakers.

Dr. Gautam Sengupta, Chief Operating Officer, Kitchen Appliances India Ltd. approached to the audience to

• remove the attitudinal clots.
• Defined the problem as common for both the experienced as well as the inexperienced persons.
• suggested to set inspiring goals inside the organization to resolve conflicts and to ensure competency.
• The organization as a whole should become a learning organization by adapting changes and removing the segregation between the new entrants and the old legacy.
• showed a new way in exploring the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP market) in our country itself.

Finally Mr. Bikram Dasgupta, Chairman and CEO, Globsyn group of Companies addressed the audiences by

• thanking NASSCOM for such a wonderful effort
• added that this knot of NASSCOM which has brought everybody under one roof
• we should look forward to work together and explore the pool of talents available in our country.

The mega event came to an end with everybody participating there in the summit having new views towards life and with a refreshed mind thinking differently, positioning differently and encompassing differently.

Contributed By:
Rik Das
(Globsyn Business School)

Impact of E commerce on Business Analyst’s Role

Everyone wants to win and to be a successful business man. It requires changing the way we visualize the game. Enterprise Solution gives Business focused analytics and flexibility.

The Business Analyst with a strong sense of business technology and a primary facilitator for e commerce communication can transform the business which will radically alter the very nature of the firm and how it creates value.

E Commerce has a huge impact on the role of Business Analyst.

Business Analyst works under the following six situations :-

Organizational chart and Organizational Process: The Business analyst need to prepare the hierarchy inside the organization to identify the different individual as well as the different ongoing process inside the organization that is going to get impacted by the new software. In the process of developing the automation it may be found that a position in the Organizational hierarchy is not required any more as the things are getting automated.

Domain Modeling: Under this situation the anatomy of the organizational setup is not needed to be scanned by the Business Analyst. It means that the Business Analyst is unaware of the scenario that who will provide the input to the system and who will receive the output for that. The type of output will be different as well for different users. So it maintains confidentiality as no one can access the whole system.

One business many systems: This scenario is totally different from the previous ones. In this situation the company which requires automation is solely unaware of the required infrastructure needed for the system. So the Business analyst need to mention all the specifications regarding hardware and software. Finally the customer has the free hand to decide that whether it is feasible for him to implement the system or not.

Generic Business Model: It is a retail kind of environment where the software is developed without having any specific customer in hand. A survey is made beforehand by Business Analyst based on common features in all business segments and the software is developed to meet these needs which is of common interest to all.

New Business: A Business Organization may diversify. ITC group is ruling the tobacco industry and thought of exploring the hospitality sector now. So the Business Analyst should find out the IT infrastructure required for this new venture.

Revamp: The business Analyst is responsible to change the scenario of existing business process.

The Business Analyst is to work with warehouse, finance, marketing department etc. to determine, document and define e Commerce online and operational requirements.

So the Organizational chart and Organizational Process is essential to have these ideas. If the Business Analyst is going to develop the site without having these knowledge about the organization then the E Commerce site development will not be possible. So the Business analyst will not be able to estimate the requirements of the site under the Domain Modeling scenario.

One Business Many Scenario is more required for B2B aspects. The business partners may ask the firm to go for automation through E Commerce to sustain a healthy partnership relation.

Ramco systems established in 1989 by P R Venketrama Raja provide user ID and password to create the E commerce site for any company.

This is an example of Generic Business Model , where the Business Analyst found out the common requirements of organizations and the companies are adopting it because initially they r not applying the entire module which incurs less cost. Gradually with the growth of business the full system can be implemented if required at additional cost. So it provides the flexibility of choice indeed.

If the Business Analyst find out a new venture in the business which is purely online then E Commerce is the only way out for it under the New Business environment.

The existing scenario of the business can be changed to a great extent under the revamp model with E Commerce. The Business Analyst plays a major role to find out diverse ways of implementation of the automation.

Impact of E Commerce on Business Analyst’s role has enabled the industry to innovate and stay ahead of competition. No industry is immune from this trend. This is a welcome change for the growth of the new business era and opening new ways where business process is benchmarked to ensure that they follow the best practices to achieve improved targets.

Contributed By:
Rik Das
(Globsyn Business School)

E Commerce, A review on Project Characteristics

“Business drives Technology
Technology enables Business”

Electronic Commerce, more widely known as E Commerce is digitally enabled commercial transaction. With the growth of Internet this new form of trade has grown by leaps n bounds. A wide variety of commerce is conducted in this way, spurring and drawing on innovations in electronic fund transfer, Internet marketing, EDI, inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.

Technology is not a panacea! E Commerce Project Characteristics requires a lot of innovative thinking to make it a success.

The steps involved clearly reveals the fact.

1. Requirement Analysis :- Analyze the requirement of the site by conducting feasibility study. Feasibility study can be done in three different ways,
   

   
   

   a) Technical : Whether I have the technical expertise to develop the site or the organization in need of the e commerce website can provide the technical infrastructure or not.
   

   
   

   b) Economic : The fund needed to develop the site as well as to maintain it can be provided by the organization or not.
   

   
   

   c) Usability : Whether it is feasible to build a site for the proposed functional area or whether the users will be able to use it or not. Eg., An E commerce site in a remote area where most of the population is not computer literate.
   


2. Problem Identification :- We need to perform the “as-is” system study. The process that is going to get automated with the help of E Commerce must be done presently manually or with the help of some other existing older automation. We need to identify the problems with the existing system.
   


3. Requirement Study :- Requirements can be of two different types.
   

   
   

   a) Functional : What are the features required in the e commerce site so that it will become more user friendly. This can be done by collecting inputs from various departments.
   

   
   

   b) Non functional : This includes many things including performance, capacity , reusability , security , scalability, availability etc. Eg, If the availability of the ecommerce site is 24x7x365 then we need to design it in such a way so that necessary upgrades can be performed without shutting the execution of the site. It is applicable for both hardware and software.
   

   
   

   Another example is regarding the scalability issue. If today the hits to the ecommerce site is in hundreds it is not that the value will remain constant. It can go upto thousands and lakhs and crores. So we need to design it in such a way that it can accommodate any number of hits at any point of time. Like, if the number of hits are much higher then main topics will be displayed i.e. a lightweight version of the page will be displayed. This will make the access faster in congested traffic.
   


4. Design : - when we are designing a system we need to identify which portions of the project can be conducted in house, which portions can be conducted by subcontract and which portion to be outsourced.
   


5. Implementation :- It includes coding for the site along with benchmarking as well as maintenance. Site is compared with those of competitors in terms of response speed, quality of layout, and design in the process of benchmarking.
   


6. Testing :-
   

   
   

   a) Unit testing: testing the site’s program modules one at a time.
   

   
   

   b) System testing: involves testing the site as a whole , in a way the typical user will in using the site.
   

   
   

   c) Acceptance testing : Verifies that the business objectives of the system as originally conceived are in fact working.
   

Contemporary electronic commerce involves everything from ordering "digital" content for immediate online consumption, to ordering conventional goods and services, to "meta" services to facilitate other types of electronic commerce.

E Commerce has opened a new horizon and means of trading which is really a trendsetter of this cyber age.

Contrubuted By:
Rik Das
(Globsyn Business School)

Boosting the Business with Information Technology

“The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way.” - Dale Carnegie

Information Technology has shown this different way and inspired the business growth and has become explicitly interwoven with strategic business to innovate new lanes of success stories. A robust IT infrastructure can make positive and quantifiable differences in business performances. Higher IT capability is directly proportional to higher revenue growth. Productive employees are key determinant of achieving superior productivity. IT fuels up the efficiency and productivity of the employees as well as the managers which leads to 23 percent higher revenue per employee than its peers. A positive role that Information Technology plays in enterprise growth is to enable enterprises to connect to new markets and respond to changes in the market faster. Buyer- set pricing and Auction-set prices with the help of online auctions and online seller bidding respectively lead to Cost Leadership by providing Lowest price guarantee by online price adjustment. Priceline.com, EBay.com are facilitating this process quite effectively. Increase in market share is influenced by online customer design , Customer online shipment tracking and E-Commerce.

Innovative Strategic Information Systems like online discount stock trading, package and flight management and online full service customer systems provided by Federal Express or Amazon.com has rewarded them with Market Leadership. The global satellite network Merchandise ordering system in Wall – Mart has increased the global market for the organization. Alliances like Airborne Express/ Rentrak Corp. has increased their market share by online inventory management/ shipment tracking.

Effective implementation of Information Technology has led to remarkable decline in the cost of synchronization that initiates concentrated business structure. Flexibility of Information Technology will enable to respond to the competitive forces by being able to respond to any specific information or communication requirement thus providing effective management of interdependence.

Contributed By:
Rik Das
Lecturer, IS
(Globsyn Business School)

THE GOOGLE PHONE COUNTDOWN

"Communication works for those who work at it" - - John Powell

The world is waiting to visualize whether Google is going to be an immediate game changer with their new and versatile introduction, the Google Phone. They are really working hard on this new edition of mobile communication and has been lobbying the U.S. government for changes in wireless policy.

Taiwanese manufacturer HTC is going to make the phone which is named Dream. It is available exclusively in the T- Mobile network in UK. Google’s new operating system Android is going to run in the handset. Android is a Linux based operating system for mobile devices which allows developers to write managed codes in java like language that uses Google developed java libraries.

The phone will be equipped with Global Positioning Technology and will be capable of running Google’s range of Web applications such as its email service Gmail, productivity suite Google Docs and mapping service Google Maps and last but not the least, Google Chrome, the revolutionary web browser by Google.

Google is already one of the leaders in advertising and search engine. Its success story may be going to get replicated with the G phone. HTC has built a solid reputation for the quality and inventiveness of its handsets., and it is eventually the maker of the Google phone.

Expectations and excitement is creeping up with each clock tick as the launching time for this new endeavor of Google , the G Phone is approaching. The G phone may rewrite the rules and is expected to be the one to change the face of the wireless industry.

Contributed by :
Rik Das
Lecturer - IS
(Globsyn Business School)

Google Chrome, a Google initiative

“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller , you’re part of the road.”
- Stewart Brand

Our minds are obsessed with the three W’s . The World Wide Web, the defacto standard of the cyber age civilization. We don’t even think of life under the blue without the Internet.
The software application that enables us to display and interact with the text, graphics, videos images in the web page is known as the web browser.

The big players in browsers are Internet Explorer, Konqueror, Opera, Mozilla Firefox and so on.
The most recent addition to these names is Google CHROME.

Much ink and many electrons have been spilled over the fact that its advanced features has made it an icon in the crowd. It is an open source web browser. Stability, speed and security issues has been much improved compared to any other browser.

Is it yet another web browser? Not really the way we have thought about Web browsers before. Most web browsers send HTTP messages to far-off Web servers, which respond with HTML pages. But with Chrome things are quite different. When an address is typed that doesn’t exist , Chrome will send it to Google for help finding the right address. The standard homepage keeps link to most visited sites and recent bookmarks.

We can start right from the point we have left off before shutdown. Chrome can be customized as which page to be opened everytime a program is launched. Isn’t its handy for those who use numerous pages ??

The URL name can be typed on the whole, e.g. http://www.globsyn.com/ to visit the site directly or only “globsyn” can be typed to go for a search. This is indeed a versatile feature.

At the top right corner functions like print, save, cut, copy, paste etc , all can be found under a pull down menu at the top right or else just at the right click of the mouse. Its just all about to browsing a real enjoyment.

In incognito mode sites are kept off the browsing history list which allows the privacy while cruising the Web.

If one becomes bore with the same designated homepage then several shortcuts can be created on the desktop. With every start up click anyone and the browser opens it up for you. Its something really refreshing all through.
The users get continuous updates and about the phising and malware. These warnings restrict them to visit harmful sites. Other users can also get the facility through a public API called “Google Safe Browsing API”. Google Chrome wont let one bad site to crash the entire web browser.

“Sandbox” mechanism has been introduced in Google CHROME. This security mechanism safely runs programs and is often used to run untested codes or programs from unverified third party. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. This mechanism prevents malware from installing itself. The V8 JavaScript engine has features which has made it twice as fast than other popular browsers.

So the speed has become a striking factor of Google CHROME.

CHROME has implemented the multithreaded browser with a multiprocessing

architecture concept. The stability issues are taken care of very nicely. CHROME has taken the focus of World Wide Web with a lots of new features and facilities to make the Internet more user friendly and has touched the hearts of millions.

As of now, Chrome is a beta version with significant security problems yet to be addressed. By definition, it's not ready -- that's what beta means. Bugs and security holes will be fixed. But Chrome's basic business model will remain same.

Contributed by:
Rik Das, Lecturer, IS
(Globsyn Business School)