Armour Iso

Armour Iso

Snags In E-Commerce

The novelty of shopping on the Internet has worn off, and today's customers are sophisticated and discerning. Because the competition is always just a mouse-click away selling on the Internet is not as easy. Making money online may be harder than earning from business offline. To survive and for long-term success in e-business, we should be aware of the most common mistakes and pitfalls that can ruin your best-laid plans. To effectively sell online, the e-commerce website should persuasively present the products, be appealing, simple to use and should easily guide visitors through the sales process. If not a few simple mistakes could be costing major sales.

Grammatical Errors Grammatical errors and spelling mistakes only add to the displeasure of online customers. They may even change the intended meaning of the content.

Site Usability The site must

- Make the purpose clear. This entails clearly explaining what  the site is all about.

-Help users find what they need. This involves making everything obvious, ensuring that every    vital link and tool is accessible on every page.

-Reveal content. Customers should be able to see the best offerings immediately.

-Use visual design to enhance, not define, interaction design.

Shopping Customers buy online because it is supposedly faster, at times cheaper, and more convenient than driving to the store. They come to the site primarily to look for products that fit their needs quickly and easily. The main factors that negatively affect the growth of online shopping include credit card fears; failure to trust online vendors; fear of misdirected merchandise or receiving the wrong items; or having to return merchandise. These are common consumer fears that affect all e-commerce sites.

Marketing Plan There are millions of web sites on the Web, and there is a need to create a reason and way for customers to come and visit the site. A package of strategies will bring potential customers to the site. Some of the strategies include search engine optimization, pay-per-click search engines, affiliate and pay-per-performance programs, banner advertising, offline advertising, press releases and other promotional strategies.

Customer Service Unhappy customers can share their "bad experiences" with the business to a lot more potential customers through emails, chat rooms, instant messages and discussion forums. Studies have shown that dissatisfied online customers tell twice as many people about their experience than do satisfied customers. Poor service may cover site malfunctions, complaints and service disappointments. It could include not answering emails promptly, totally ignoring customer complaints and suggestions, unsecured and confusing order forms, convoluted return policy, delayed shipment of goods. Some of the ways you could improve on your customer service include:

- Answer emails promptly

- Promptly confirm orders

- Encourage customers to contact

- encourage interaction with customers.

Product Fit There is one basic tenet that not all products can be sold online. Before opening online store, we must make sure that our products are suitable for the Internet. We must investigate where in the traditional world are our products being sold and compare their prices with ours if we add shipping and handling costs. If our price still comes out lower, then we have a strong advantage.

Site Design. “First impressions count” and this saying apply to e-commerce more than anything else. When a user arrives at our site, they will begin to make immediate decisions about every aspect of our business. The first barometer customers use to judge our online business is our web site's design. All the elements of our web site's design - navigational structure, product presentation, copy and testimonials, proof of security - converge to give our visitors an overall impression of our business. The look and feel of our site allows our visitors to form their own judgment of trustworthiness.

A well-designed interface, with a professional looking, marketing-oriented and easy-to-use page layout is essential. We must make sure that every graphics; text and technology used works to our advantage, rather than losing sales opportunities. A cluttered web page makes it difficult for visitors to see what we have to offer. The content of our online store must also be updated regularly, to give the impression that someone is actively minding the store.

Slow Loading As technology improves people seem to be getting less and less patient and nothing is more frustrating to users than waiting for web pages to load. Internet users are quick to reach for the back button on their browsers and we have to design a fast loading site to keep their attention. Graphics are a common cause of speed issues we need to optimise them for the web as part of our e-commerce design process.At a minimum, we must compare the load time of our web pages to the load time of our competitors’ sites. If our site takes longer to load, adjustments must be made.

Login This is one of many e-tailors’ favourite usability mistakes. Requiring registration is a clear barrier to sales, especially when we have yet to establish a relationship with the customer. First-time shoppers aren't sure that they'll return and the feeling that some sort of commitment is required may turn them away from making even the first purchase.

Product Descriptions Improving our product descriptions is one of the easiest, yet most neglected ways to improve our online sales. If our product catalogue is large enough to justify, hire a copy-writer. Also, our description is to be unique.

Clicking In many cases users must click five, six, or even eight clicks deep into the web site to find what they are looking for. We must build web sites in which the entire contents of the web site are only one click away from the web page.

Co-ordination A flexible organizational structure, by involving the senior management right at the beginning and explaining the project strategies in details to the employees will improve co-ordination.

Marketing Just because we have a product and a Web site does not necessarily mean anyone will find it. We need to market our site both online and off. Focus on our company's competitive advantage, and do our best to convince the customer that we are offering a great deal.

Time If we do not keep our site current, we will lose out to competitors that do. We should stay on top of the industry and post new items often. If customers visit our site over the course of several weeks or months and nothing has changed, they may assume the site is no longer maintained, and they may look elsewhere. A successful e-commerce site is one that stays current and appears vibrant.

Checkout Procedures Once our customers decide what they want to purchase, it should be easy to go to the shopping cart and pay without having to answer questions or jump hurdles. We should try to make completing the transaction as easy and painless as possible

Testing All the links on your site, including product descriptions, photos, the shopping cart, feedback, and others, should be routinely tested to make sure they work.

E-COMMERCE PROBLEMS

Problems with conducting business in an online store typically occur in one of three areas: our server, the connections to our server and our expectations for success. Web hosting industry observer TopHosts.com provides the following list of suggestions to avoid the most common pitfalls in hosting an e-commerce site.

.Server/Hosting Problems Most problems with online storefronts occur with our Internet Service Provider or hosting service. These are mainly server-related and should be kept in mind when choosing a host for our site. One of the most common problems is server overload. If other companies have their sites stored on the same server as ours, during high traffic hours, the server may be inundated with queries, ultimately affecting the speed and quality of service of our site.

There should be no more than 10 sites per server. A way around the server overload issue is to ask our host to "co-locate" our server. This means that we actually own the server, but it is physically located at the host's operations centre. The server is exclusive to our site, but we don't have to worry about servicing it – our host is responsible for the server's maintenance.

Connection Problems The second area where problems can occur is with phone connections. As an online business owner, we must make sure the phone lines that carry data have no interference. Interference that is otherwise indistinguishable or benign for voice communications can be detrimental to data transmissions for our Web site. Interference problems that occur when we are dealing with sensitive credit card information could potentially cause us to lose both transactions and consumer confidence. We should verify that the phone lines have no static and are not affected by microwave activity in the area, which can be generated from hospitals or industrial complexes. The testing is free and will benefit our ability to conduct online transactions.

Expectation Problems The third area where problems can occur is closer to home our expectations for online success. Before we implement our Web site, we should create a business plan -- and we should not expect to generate a million visitors or a million dollars in revenue during your first few years. Our strategy for online sales should include having enough financing to "weather any storm."  We must overestimate expenses and underestimate revenues for the first few years. We should create a position and building a customer base we should implement a long-term strategy when executing our online storefront. We need to build confidence in our business and have the patience for e-commerce to evolve. Our goal should be to build traffic for our site -- not just casual, passive visits, but loyal, repeat traffic which will ultimately generate consistent revenue.

MAJOR THREATS TO PRESENT DAY E-COMMERCE

Money Thefts e-Commerce services are about transactions, and transactions are very largely driven by money. This attracts hackers, crackers and everyone with the knowledge of exploiting loopholes in a system. Once a kink in the armour is discovered, they feed the system with numerous bits of dubious information to extract confidential data. This is particularly dangerous as the data extracted may be that of credit card numbers, security passwords, transaction details etc.Also, Payment gateways are vulnerable to interception by unethical users. Cleverly crafted strategies can sift a part or the entire amount being transferred from the user to the online vendor.

Identity thefts Hackers often gain access to sensitive information like user accounts, user details, addresses, confidential personal information etc. It is a significant threat in view of the privileges one can avail with a false identity.

For instance, one can effortlessly login to an online shopping mart under a stolen identity and make purchases worth thousands of dollars. He can then have the order delivered to an address other than the one listed on the records. One can easily see how those orders could be received by the impostor without arousing suspicion. While the fraudsters gains, the original account holder continues to pay the price until the offender is nabbed.

Threats to the system Viruses, worms, Trojans are very deceptive methods of stealing information. Unless a sound virus-protection strategy is used by the e-Commerce Solutions firm, these malicious agents can compromise the credibility of all e-Commerce web solution services. Often planted by individuals for reasons known best to them alone, viruses breed within the systems and multiply at astonishing speeds. Unchecked, they can potentially cripple the entire system.

Malicious threats hackers attempting to penetrate a system to read or alter sensitive data, burglars stealing a server or laptop that has unprotected sensitive data on its disk, imposters posing as legitimate users and even creating a website similar to yours and attacks your systems or sends sensitive information to unauthorised people.

IDENTIFYING E-COMMERCE THREATS

Threats to e-commerce systems can be either malicious or accidental. The procedures and controls put in place to protect our site should help minimise both.

Authentication Most notable are the advances in identification and elimination of non-genuine users. Ecommerce service designers now use multi-level identification protocols like security questions, encrypted passwords, biometrics and others to confirm the identity of their customers. These steps have found wide favour all around due to their effectiveness in weeding out unwelcome access.

Intrusion Check the issue of tackling viruses and their like has also seen rapid development with anti-virus vendors releasing strong anti-viruses. These are developed by expert programmers who are a notch above the hackers and crackers themselves.

Firewalls are another common way of implementing security measures. These programs restrict access to and from the system to pre-checked users/access points.

Educating Users e-Commerce is run primarily by users. Thus, e-Commerce service providers have also turned to educating users about safe practices that make the entire operation trouble free. Recent issues like phishing have been tackled to a good extent by informing genuine users of the perils of publishing their confidential information to unauthorized information seekers.

E-COMMERCE MAINTENANCE

E-Commerce companies rely heavily on IT infrastructure to conduct its business smoothly on the internet. Downtime of infrastructure implies downtime of the business transactions. Hence it would not be improper to state that uptime of IT infrastructure is directly proportional to the productivity and profitability of an e-Commerce company.

Maintenance of the IT infrastructure normally happens under annual maintenance contract (AMC) with the original equipment manufacturers after the end of the warranty period for the best-in-class industries. AMC covers the service portion of the maintenance as well as the spare parts to be supplied within the contracted period. A person entrusted for coordinating with the OEMs for maintenance of the machine needs to conversant with the hardware operations so that OEMs can respond to service calls in a faster and efficient way.

Offloading maintenance There are two options left for an e-Commerce company by which it can maintain and manage the IT infrastructure. It can either maintain the infrastructure using own resources or use the services of specialist in this domain. Current industry best practices indicate the preference of the latter. The model could work well if this is not just a contract but a business alliance with the service provider.

Such a synergy developed between the two matured organizations, where one is user and other is a service provider, works to the benefit of both when the user is an e-Commerce company and the service provider is an expert in the field of Facility Management Services.

Successful implementation of the relationship soon develops specialist skill of managing IT infrastructure within the e-Commerce company but now the user remain more focused on the e-Commerce based activities.

Changing face of service provider Specialized service providers normally develop kiosks to register the user calls. A kiosk is tailor-made software which is made available from the server to each employee of the user organisation in respect workstations. In case the employee is stuck up with any IT related problem, he immediately reports the status to the information kiosk. The service provider immediately attends to the problem and tries to close the problem at the shortest possible time. As the time of call log and close is monitored, service level of the service provider gets noted at a micro level.

A service level agreement (SLA) is normally worked out between the user and service provider. This reduces downtime in working to a great extent as the violations are reported to the administrative head of the user organisation. There are penalty clauses which protects either side from the impact of failures.

Survey revealed higher portion of calls are related to problems in peripherals like desktop personal computer and laptop. The service provider personnel are specially trained on all the technicalities of a peripheral and knows to conduct trouble-shoot procedures. With this specialized knowledge, the service provider is able to solve 70 to 80 per cent of the problems very quickly after it is identified. For major problems, the personnel interact with the original equipment manufacturers (OEM) directly and give a technical perspective to the problem.

When a desktop is not functioning and troubleshooting procedures reveal that problems are originating due to the defects in the mother board, OEMs do not have to go through the entire cycle of fault finding and replaces the motherboard immediately. This reduces the machine downtime.

Specialized support An e-Commerce company needs the support of its various servers to put up applications over the internet. Steady performance of web server, database server, application server and proxy server are essential to ensure web applications appear on the net in a 24 X 7 mode. Similar importance is attached to remote mail management through mail server. With the advent of paperless office concept, email has also become a vital part of such organisations.

It is also important to ensure the internet service providers (ISP) provide connectivity to the internet without any downtime. Monitoring failure of ISPs also becomes an important activity of the service provider. With bandwidth constraint, there is an increasing need to support the bandwidth maximization tools.

E-Commerce companies normally boost departmental and inter-department performance by installing standard Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. High-end ERP packages such as SAP are difficult to maintain in-house due to unavailability of resource of such specialized skill in-house. The service provider is expected to maintain the ERP package efficiently.

Ensuring network security is an important area for the service provider. Security audits including vulnerability and penetration tests ensure that the system is protected from unauthorized intruders. ISO 27001 certification for information security is normally obtained by the user with the help of service provider.

With server compactness, support to newer options like blade servers, server virtualization, precision cooling in data centres are becoming necessity for e-Commerce companies. Service providers are exploring cost effective solution to maintain these facilities also.

Ensuring continuity With the growth of IT related services; skilled in-house IT maintenance staffs have become prone to attrition. Thus e-Commerce companies who believe in the concept of in-house IT maintenance staff falters to deliver when a key person from the IT maintenance decides to switch companies lured by better deals. But IT service providers generally have a pool of talent and therefore are not bothered by minor attritions. Hence users have a continuity of service.

With all pros and cons considered, it is clear that core competence is currently ruling the world. Maintenance too has emerged as an area of importance and is managed by experts for whom it is the core business. Thus shopping online is not a rarity; it has become the norm due to increased confidence, immediacy and the convenience factor. With this mind, and our competitor’s being just a mouse-click away, having the very best site has become a must.

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