There are several key factors in using e-commerce which have critical importance in the success of any e-commerce venture. They include:
- Providing value to customers Vendors can achieve this by offering a product or product line that attracts potential customers at a competitive price.
- Providing service and performance This can be done by offering a fast, user-friendly purchasing experience.
- Providing an attractive site This can be done by the tasteful use of color, graphics, animation, photographs, fonts, and white space percentage.
- Providing an incentive to buy and to return: This can be done with sales promotions like coupons, special offers, and discounts. Cross-linked web sites and advertising affiliate programs can also be used.
- Providing personal attention This can be done by personalized web sites, purchase suggestions, and personalized special offers.
- Providing a sense of community This can be done with chat-rooms, message boards, soliciting customer input, and affinity programs.
- Providing reliability and security Parallel servers, fail-safe technology, information encryption, and firewalls can enhance this requirement.
- Providing a 360-degree view of the customer relationship, defined as ensuring that all employees, suppliers, and partners have a complete view, and the same view, of the customer.
- Owning the customers total experience This can be done by treating any contacts with a customer as part of a total experience, an experience that becomes synonymous with the brand.
- Streamlining business processes This can be done through re-engineering and information technologies.
- Letting customers help themselves Provision of a self-serve site, easy to use without assistance, can help in this respect.
- Helping customers do their job.
- Constructing a sound business model.
- Engineering an electronic value chain in which one focuses on a "limited" number of core competencies.
- Operating on or near the cutting edge of technology and staying there as technology changes.
- Creating an organization of sufficient alertness and agility to respond quickly to any changes in the environment.
