After the bad days of the dot-com burst, the interest and more so implementation of e-commerce is now growing. During the last 3 years, the number of B2B implementations using Web services increased, but it is only in the last 6 months that many innovative B2C implementations have started to happen.
This week Mr Anto Peter of Softview invited me to present for an hour on their website design workshop, which happened today. My topic was on “E-Commerce” where I covered various Internet/E-Commerce Myths and Realities, and payment mechanisms with respect to India.
It is interesting to note one of India’s successful eCommerce sites. It is none other than Indian Railways’ ticket booking service at IRCTC which sells over One Hundred Thousand Tickets every day, totalling a turnover of Rs.102 crores per year.
When it comes to using online there is a marked difference between the west and India. In India, the Credit Card penetration is very low, Debit Cards are growing slowly in popularity only now. Many online shopping sites in the country have adopted successfully COD (Cash On Delivery) as a payment mechanism. Though we expect COD to have high failure rates (people declining the purchase), the experience so far has been good with many of the merchants, with failure rates in the order of 1% and less.
E-Commerce reality and myth in 2004 – Darwinism on the web and Internet Myths
E-Commerce reality and myth in 2004 – Globalization and Indian Buying Patterns
The presentation can be downloaded from here: e-Commerce Reality and myth (Zip format)