‘Building The Digital Commerce Ecosystem’ – Need Of The Hour
The first of the series of panel discussions was on Building the Digital Commerce Ecosystem, Amitabh Pandey, resident and Head eBusiness, Thomas Cook moderated the session. He started the discussion with the Theory of unbalanced growth he studied in the college, he said in 2002 there was no infrastructure and now when the infrastructure is there , there is no business. He then passed the discussion to Rishi Khiani, CEO, Times Internet Limited.
Rishi then pointed out that we have come a long way in terms of infrastructure and that most of the investment these days is going into the buzz words such as Location Based Services, P2P services and now Augmented reality, he said that one has to look at how big a population is these services catering to. Rishi said there is a need to create utilities, utilities that could add value and cater to 300 to 400 million.
Vivek Nayak of Avenues India then took over the session adding the payment gateways’ perspective to the discussion. He started out pointing that If more number Offline businesses come online and create enough value, customers will come.
Evaluating the available payment options , the problem with the credit cards is that Indians are not comfortable to owing money, while cash cards and phone payments are growing drastically. He also pointed out that credit cards were never meant for online use and that two factor authentication is almost useless.
Brijesh Agarwal, Chief Operating Officer, IndiaMart.com then took over the discussion. He said that Digital commerce is M2M transactions, where in Man-to-Man transactions have now become Man-to-Machine transactions. He said that the process flow is changing and a business needs to increasingly concentrate on the pre-selection stage of the flow and that experience is the main driver in digital commerce.
Brijesh then enlisted the factors limiting the adoption of Digital commerce in the country, Viz.,
- Quality Concerns
- Security Concerns
- Reliable Fulfillment
- Lack of awareness
- Insufficient online marketing
- No standard and credibility rates
- Not enough MIS to handhold the buyer
He said that there is a great need for innovative business models.
Cory York, Country Director – India, Novator continued the discussion comparing the logistics in India and North America, the snapshot of the shipping times is provided below
| India | North America |
| homeshop18 7-10 days | FTD.com Sameday |
| Futurebazaar 7 days | Walmart.com 1 day |
| Rediff.com 7 days | Sears.com 1 day |
| Shopperstop.com 4-5 days | Bestbuy.com 1 day |
| Target 1 day |
He said that India has lot of options and that Indians are very demanding. The problem is that if I can hire somebody to get a product for me the sameday why will I wait for 7 days for the product to get shipped.
He said that the prediction for India is that when 3G finally launches e-commerce will be a reality, for the question why Digital Commerce didn’t happen in India till now, he pointed out to the Field of Dreams Movie story, he said when you (businesses) build it they (consumers) will come. To the same question Rishi Khiani said that there are buyers but sellers are not offering enough value and that seller is filling any gap.
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I think e-commerce is still growing in India. People are still apprehensive to use their credit or debit cards for online transactions as they are subject to frauds
But I think cash cards like ItzCash are safe to use