Enterprises, the first thing you need is planning, thinking that e-commerce is good, rushed into, and holding the desire to make money in the short term, often will not be the opposite of what you want to enter e-commerce is different from entering a channel, which requires a longer familiarization process and more learning.
First of all, the consumer's re-knowledge, although the traditional enterprises in the past has been concerned about the consumer, but those are mostly some of the statements on the data and a small amount of market research, or second-hand information from the channel. E-commerce puts you directly in front of the consumer, which is true one-to-one marketing. Enterprises in the first real face of direct consumer purchases, often at a loss, consumers most of the time in the evening to buy, but the business is working during the day, customer service also has no power to deal with the first time the consumer's complaints, not to mention the bargaining, or, customer service is simply a chatting partner, know nothing about the product, but also slow to respond. These are the problems that exist in today's e-commerce, its deeper problem is that companies still can not understand the changes in the consumer market, still in the 1.0 era of the mentality of the 2.0 era of the market.
Production, ordering, packaging, logistics, after-sales service, which also need to make huge changes. E-commerce has changed the product law of 20/80, it may be 4/96, that is, 4% of the products occupy 96% of the sales. Especially in the Taobao platform, the characteristics of the search weight is to increase this change, which is unique to e-commerce "pop-up" phenomenon, that is, "tends to consume more" phenomenon: the more people buy the product, the more people will buy, consumption tends to a few pop-up product Concentration. And you can not put other products off the shelves, which will affect the selectivity of customers, although they will still tend to choose "pop-up", but they still want to see a wide range of products displayed at the same time. If this phenomenon is not dealt with, or in accordance with the traditional supply chain for the forecasting of production orders, it is easy to form a good selling products out of stock, the phenomenon of other products inventory backlog. This is the form of e-commerce on the enterprise supply chain put forward new requirements.
Order processing, picking up and delivery, but also be required to more quickly and accurately; traditional warehousing, but also need to make corresponding changes to become more adaptable to the needs of individual orders; packaging needs to be more adapted to the express transportation and the need for multiple turnover. These, seemingly small, the actual relationship between the success or failure of e-commerce in the overall situation. After-sales problem is also the same, before the after-sales often follow the channel construction and spread, but now it is very difficult to do, even if the country had a basic spread of enterprises, now also because of e-commerce geographical uncertainty and have to give up after-sales in some areas, but if the headquarters location can not do a good job of consulting and explaining the work of the reverse logistics (such as returns, replacements) is a very high amount of money to spend, this is the E-commerce operations are often encountered problems.
Secondly, in the handling of the channel, can not be careless. Foreign trade enterprises transformed to do the domestic market, no burden, but rather can throw away their hands to do a big job, but the traditional small and medium-sized enterprises are faced with the problem of channel conflict. Obviously no one is willing to immediately abolish the previous channel to start in the zero starting point of e-commerce to make a huge investment, but the cost of traditional channels and product selection model is completely different from the e-commerce channel, so far, very few brands can put the same product at the same price in the traditional and e-commerce channels, the same sales well. Whether traditional to e-commerce or e-commerce to brick-and-mortar stores are facing this problem. Therefore, the product line or do sub-brands, sub-brands, are the road to choose, there is no right or wrong, just to find a suitable way of operation of the enterprise.
There have been a number of enterprises to think or operation of the integration of online and offline business model, I have to say, as a practitioner I am well aware of the difficulty of this uncharted territory, which, there are too many problems need to be solved, there are too many interests need to be weighed. If the channel (whether it is a retailer or distributor or even a branch of the manufacturer) to enjoy the benefits of network orders share, which is certainly on the distribution, warehousing and transportation or after-sales service has a certain benefit, but the difficulty is that the sharing of benefits itself will make the unit price of the product rise, if the share of the benefits is too high, on the contrary, it will make the product lose competitiveness on the network; benefits are too thin, the offline channel may not be willing to do, they will be think that the network robbed their sales (in fact, there is indeed this possibility). Therefore, more often than not, the manufacturer's choice is to separate the operation, only let the channel share of after-sales service revenue.
The conflict between brick-and-mortar dealers and online distributors is unavoidable, with brick-and-mortar dealers splitting up business areas based on geography, while online distributors mostly face the national market. But let's think about the process of the rise of the modern retail channel (what we now call K/A), we have not also faced this problem? Modern retail channels have obvious cross-regional characteristics, which is the channel change can not be avoided, to solve the K / A channel can still be used in the field of e-commerce, which is a quantitative change to the qualitative change of the process, although there are still countless tangles in the middle of the process, but the trend is to make it so that no one can stop it.
Despite the fact that e-tailing now still only accounts for 3% of total retail sales of consumer goods, we should be sober enough to see that in many categories, it has been far more than this number, and the nature of the Internet is a 10-fold speed of development, and every year will be a huge change. Just a few years ago we were still debating how much impact online advertising actually has on traditional advertising, but now we are already discussing how to develop e-commerce and innovate our marketing model with the help of this. This is surely a once-in-a-century turning point, and the Internet will only accelerate and change the structure of human society and the shape of business. It's not too late for every business to enter the e-commerce space. This is a new field that has a legend every day, and will certainly be the future of Chinese enterprises.