E-commerce : Chapter 4 : E-customers

Since the medium of transaction and online revenue models are changed, customers are changed too. Companies are putting a microscope on each and every customer in a detailed form. Customers are available all around the world. Like in Pakistan, we can buy products from Alibaba.com. The difference lies in the behavior of online and offline behavior. Normally we seek and spread information through the process of Word of mouth but in social media and digital marketing, we call it a word of mouse. The most important part of the digital ecosystem is the trust and privacy element. People are hesitant to share their personal information with other customers and companies. Most of the credit card fraud is the best example of it.

 You can always analyze the general lifestyle of online consumers, where they have money and less time. Almost all the e-commerce stores are into web rings and alliances where they partner with one another if they lack some products or not available.

Humans are a social animal, we have the tendency to follow others. Normally when we make an offline purchase, we keep it to ourselves. But in digital media, we shout out by sharing and putting up a status. We follow trends and gossips all around the world and share it with others. This concept is taken from the Mexican waves where we follow what others are doing.

Motivation is critically important to understand because you need to understand customers buying behavior and issues regarding online buying. To overcome that we will be focusing on 6 C’s of marketing. Content is the king in the digital ecosystem. Majority of your target audience will come after your content. People spread and share good content. Customization, where you create and deliver highly personalized content and media strategies for your customers. As in digital media, people create communities and share and gossip about latest trends and products. The only perk a digital buying and offline buying is the convenience part, as you can buy anything at any time from any part of the world. You have multiple choices among different part of the world to buy your products. Lastly, cost reduction because the supply chain is narrowly downed, fewer players in the supply chain, less costing and finally cost reduction to customers.

Fogg's model talks about how to change customers online behavior and what can be done to make them more loyal. He talks on three parameters 1). Trigger (call to action) where you can easily access things which you want to. For example, a photo of yours is tagged by your friend, you will receive an email regarding it, you will try to open it. 2) Motivation (if you tag a smoker to a cancerous lung picture, he will not watch it, because there is no motivation for him because of his belief system. The content should be aligned what he really wants to read. 3) Ability is how easily you can navigate through the system if the photo is not opened in just one click, your ability of opening that picture will be very low.

Ultimately, your job is to create a system beyond loyalty. Your task is to give them the quality support system, so that if anything bad happens your support system can help your customer. Make sure what you promise, you deliver. A product presentation is very important because the first impression is almost last impression in digital marketing. Trust and privacy control system should be there. And lastly creating your USP by giving right products available all the time in your web portal.