Читать книгу Marketing Strategy In The Digital Age: Applying Kotler's Strategies To Digital Marketing - Milton Kotler - Страница 17

As an extension and supplement to the brand’s website (official website of a company), e-commerce is an important function furthering the digital revolution of enterprises. It provides clients with a very convenient way of knowing, comparing and purchasing goods and obtaining services. In the past, perhaps many enterprises regarded e-commerce as just a supporting channel, but with the booms in recent years and new business giant Ali Group riding the e-commerce wave, enterprises can hardly ignore a fact: e-commerce has subverted the traditional business model, representing an upgraded version of the traditional model.

Nowadays, clients expect that all channels of the enterprises are consistent, strongly connected, easy to be interconverted and competitive in user experience. Against such a background, enterprises must ensure that their e-commerce platform not just offers online trading services but also needs to integrate e-commerce, social media and mobile ends into a unified experience. Or further, they integrate online and offline channels, which provides an all-round buying experience for clients.

E-commerce websites with a good visual presentation can help users sort out the best product, compare different price solutions of products in short terms and provide a safe and efficient means of payment. Users can easily comment on their shopping experience and this can also help enterprises build brand trust. Generally, e-commerce consumers may just be a group of younger people more familiar with digital technologies, but the fact is that number of e-commerce users is expanding in every age group.

A new trend in e-commerce is mobile e-commerce, which benefits from the rapid popularity of smartphones and tablet computers in recent years. In 2015, more than half of the mobile phone users went shopping on mobile ends for at least once; GMV of mobile e-commerce for the first time exceeded that of the PC port, indicating that e-commerce on mobile ends would become one of the main trading channels. By the end of 2015, the number of mobile shopping users in China reached 364 million, up by 23.8%. By 2018, this number is likely to be close to 500 million. For businesses, this change means that e-commerce users use different screens and often move from one screen to another. Even many users use mobile means to make comparisons in physical trading. Forward-looking companies have begun to actively use mobile e-commerce to better the physical trading experience. The mobile payment based on near-field communication technology (NFC) is the one being promoted. Leading players of mobile payment in China, WeChat and Alipay, have invested tremendous resources in cultivating the user habit of mobile payment and now they also have to face the competition with Apple Pay, a global leader in mobile payment products.

Mobile e-commerce helps physical stores to collect more trading data to better optimize user experience, provide a more personalized shopping advice, which reduces the gap between the online and the offline trading experience. E-commerce blurs the boundary between the physical and the virtual worlds and encourages online and offline integration, leading to a highly integrated, omni-channel shopping experience.