E commerce, getting started

Starting an e commerce project in 2018 is much easier than a few years ago. Companies' doubts about the channel's potential have been demolished by successful case histories such as amazon.com and alibaba.com.

Ease ofpurchase, certainty in delivery, and especially the confidence in prepayment by credit card are one of the achievements that large e commerce has achieved, growing the entire channel.

Based on these examples, most distribution and manufacturing companies have already implemented at least one e commerce project to sell their products and services online. Unfortunately, not all e commerce projects have had such a fortunate fate as that of the most famous examples mentioned earlier. For some of them after the launch phase never reached a real development stage, and after months of no sales came the inevitable decision to close.

The fundamental question in this case always starts with a why: "Why do wewant to implement an e commerce project?" "Why didwe fail?" "Why did our competitors succeed while our ecommerce did not have similar luck?"

Most of the projects that did not pass the post-launch stage saw one of the following causes as determinants for generating the failure:

Lack of sufficient financial resources
Incorrect financial planning
Absence of an adequate traffic generation strategy
Wrong perception of competition and the competitive market
Attempt to grow the business too fast
Wrong choice of technology platform

All these reasons can be summarized by theabsence of a proper digital strategy.

A digital strategy is needed to drive the digital transformation of one's business and to implement a successful e commerce project.

First you start with theanalysis:

of the catalog of products or services you intend to market
of one's resources
of the competitive environment
of the planning of the goals you want to achieve.

At the end of the analysis phase, you have all the elements to outline the digital strategy plan you intend to follow.

You need to choose the business model that best fits your strategy. In particular, based on the product, the market and one's business structure, it is necessary to decide whether to implement a B2B business model (with sales to other companies or distributors) or a B2C model (with direct sales to end customers) or mixed models that combine all or part of the characteristics of one and the other. These sales models will be the subject of a forthcoming in-depth discussion.

The choice of business model is crucial and can have significant repercussions on the choice of technology platform to be used. Unfortunately, not all platforms, open source or otherwise, are flexible and customizable enough to allow for total adaptation to the business models that are to be implemented.

One of the points of digital strategy is definitely the planning of resources and the setting of objectives (KPIs) necessary to evaluate the results achieved and any deviations.

Unfortunately, competition in some market sectors necessarily requires significant financial investments especially in marketing and in acquiring the traffic necessary to create virtuous sales growth.

Regardless of the choices and strategies adopted, it is essential to have a tool for the analysis of KPIs (key performance indicators) to verify any deviations between budget expectations and the results achieved.

It is for this reason that beyond the ease of Rewix to create multiple business models, Tableau embedded has been included that allows you to create dashboards and indicators to provide at any time and with always updated data the complete performance of your e commerce.