Key Learnings in E-business

Dear Sir,

Please find below the key learnings from the E-business sessions:

E-commerce has evolved immensely over the years:

1995-2000: Dream Run with entire focus on innovation and advertisement (B2C scenario)

                 Eg: Napster - online music sharing

2001-2009: Witnessed industry slowdown due to 9/11 attacks. VCs exitted the market and Banks came up instead. 

                 Concept of Transaction Profit emerged. (B2B picked up)

2009 Onwards: Social Media got popular. The era of VCs and earning through advertisements emerged again. (B2C came up again)

As the market matured, following aspects came into play:

- Growing power of channels

- The way suppliers negotiate with channels

- The way new entrants penetrate the existing ecosystem of channels

- Fierce competitions along with some signs of consolidation

   Eg: Flipkart bought Letsbuy for $20mn in Feb'13 and Snapdeal bought Esportsbuy.com in April'13

The Key choices on the part of the senior management regarding an e-commerce business model are:

- Value Cluster (Value Proposition for business and TG)

- Market Space Offering (Online product, service, information and competition)

- Resource System (Aligning resources to deliver the value proposition - Asset + Partners)

- Financial Model (Revenue Model / Funding)

The EGG Model was also discussed wherein the Core depicts the Customer Decision Process which is inflexible and hard to change, the White which depicts the flexible activities which can be moulded and the Outer Shell which depicts the policies which shield the inside from the outside forces of Govt and society.

The B2C Business Models can be macro-classified into:

- Pureplay : No offline presence  Eg: Ebay and Flipkart

- Click and Mortar : Primary offline presence but also have a click model Eg shopperstop.com, futurebazaar.com

- Hybrid : has an extension counter which operates only online Eg: Makemytrip

Micro Classification would include: E-tailers, Community provider, Content provider, Portals, Transaction Broker, Market Operator and Service Provider.

Today the most popular acronym in the valley is MVP - Minimum Viable Product, while in the dot com era, it was GBF - Get Big Fast ( Eg Click business model of Webvan- a dot com grocery store vis-a-vis models of Peapod, Redmart etc)

Regards

--
Aditi Gupta

12DM-012

EBUS-A