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Even if these sixteen key factors are used to devise an exemplary e-commerce strategy, there could still be problems. Sources of problems include:
E-Commerce sites in India, UK, USA, France, Germany, Australia, Europe, Middle East, US & Europe Failure to understand the customer, why they buy, and how they buy . Even a product with a sound value proposition can be a failure if customer habits, expectations, and motivations are not understood. This potential problem could be mitigated with proactive and focused marketing research.
E-Commerce sites in India, UK, USA, France, Germany, Australia, Europe, Middle East, US & Europe Failure to consider the competitive situation. You may be able to construct a viable book e-tailing business model, but do you really want to compete with Amazon.com? This problem can be mitigated with competitor, industry, and market research.
E-Commerce sites in India, UK, USA, France, Germany, Australia, Europe, Middle East, US & Europe Inability to predict environmental reaction. What will competitors do? Will they introduce fighting brands or fighting web sites? Will they supplement their service offering? Will they try to sabotage your site? Will there be price wars? What will the government do? This can be mitigated with a 360 degree continuous environmental scanning system.
E-Commerce sites in India, UK, USA, France, Germany, Australia, Europe, Middle East, US & Europe Over-estimation of resource competence. Can your staff, hardware, software, and processes handle the new strategy? Have you failed to develop new employee and management skills? This can be mitigated with thorough resource planning and employee training.
E-Commerce sites in India, UK, USA, France, Germany, Australia, Europe, Middle East, US & Europe Failure to coordinate. If reporting and control relationships do not suffice, one can move towards a flat, accountable, and flexible organizational structure.
E-Commerce sites in India, UK, USA, France, Germany, Australia, Europe, Middle East, US & Europe Failure to obtain senior management commitment . This often results in a failure to obtain sufficient company resources to accomplish the task. This can be mitigated by getting top management involved right from the start.
E-Commerce sites in India, UK, USA, France, Germany, Australia, Europe, Middle East, US & Europe Failure to obtain employee commitment. The strategy is not well explained to employees. Employees are not given the whole picture. This can be mitigated by training and by creating incentives for workers to embrace the strategy.
E-Commerce sites in India, UK, USA, France, Germany, Australia, Europe, Middle East, US & Europe Under-estimation of time requirements. Setting up an e-commerce venture could take considerable time and money, and failure to understand the timing and sequencing of tasks can lead to significant cost overruns. This can be mitigated with critical path, critical chain, or PERT analysis.
E-Commerce sites in India, UK, USA, France, Germany, Australia, Europe, Middle East, US & Europe Failure to follow the plan. Poor follow-through after the initial planning, and no tracking of progress against the plan. This can be mitigated with benchmarking, milestones, variance tracking, and penalties for negative variances and rewards for positive variances and remedial realignments.
Product suitability:
Certain products/services appear more suitable for online sales and others remain more suitable for offline sales. The most successful purely virtual companies deal with digital products, including information storage, retrieval, and modification, music, movies, education, communication, software, photography, and financial transactions. Examples of this type of company include: Schwab, Google , eBay , Paypal , Egghead, and Morpheus .
Virtual marketers can sell some non-digital products/services successfully. Such products have a high value-to-weight ratio, and/or are embarrassing purchases, and/or typically go to people in remote locations, and/or are typically purchased by shut-ins.
Products such as spare parts, both for consumer items like washing machines and industrial equipment like centrifugal pumps, also seem good candidates for selling online. Retailers often need to order spare parts specially, since they typically do not stock them at consumer outlets—this means that e-commerce solutions in this area do not compete with retail stores, only with other ordering systems. A key element for success in this niche consists of providing customers with exact, reliable information about which part number their particular version of a product needs, for example by providing parts lists keyed by serial number.
Purchases of pornography and of other sex-related products and services fulfill the requirements of both rituality (or if non-virtual, generally high-value) and potential embarrassment; unsurprisingly, provision of such services has become the most profitable segment of e-commerce.
Products unsuitable for e-commerce include products that have a low value-to-weight ratio, products that have a smell, taste, or touch component, products that need trial fittings, and products where colour integrity appears important