Opening an online shop is much easier than opening a regular shop; at least it can be measured from cost factor. However, inviting buyer to come and be a customer of a store is much more complex than just opening it. Let me invite you to examine from various point of views.
For a buyer, money is something sensitive. A buyer would never want to give their money in exchange for an item if they do not want the item or if there is something that makes it hard to get the goods after they made the payment.
Just imagine, if you want to buy a music CD, the options are to purchase it at nearest CD store or at on online shop. What do you think will be the consideration?
- Availability of goods. This will be the first thing to be checked.
- Price will be the second thing to consider. In this phase, buyer will compare prices. It’s like a game that psychologically speaking, the amount of satisfaction gained is doubled if the buyer can get the goods at a cheaper price.
- How to get the goods which includes the payment mechanism, easy process and so forth.
- The time to get it.
The four points above will usually be the points of consideration for potential buyer in deciding to buy an item. These four points are going to be the foundation of buyer’s trust to a store, despite of the store is online or not. That’s right… Trust is the main foundation of the success of a store in building reputation.
Since 2011, we have been flooded with online companies focusing themselves on e-commerce. The June 2011 issue of The Marketeers magazine happened to make a new term social shopper, from the sprouting of online store provider websites, as the nickname for customers of shops run using rising social media platforms such as Facebook. Even Multiply which used to be known for being a blogging platform has pivoted into online store provider by combining internal networking function among users with an online store facility that called social commerce.
I don’t deny and also experiencing how e-commerce atmosphere is rising and irreversible. Even though it can be said that Plasa.com failed to meet market expectations (this could be an interesting case study), we can look at Kaskus, a forum that eventually grew very large and widely known for its phenomenal circulation of money, and this has happened because the use of the forum as a venue of transaction is facilitated by the team behind Kaskus. The same thing led Multiply to shift itself from being a blogging platform into online shop provider. Other players in the space include TokoBagus, BliBli.com, DinoMarket, Rakuten dan and many more.
The question is whether the e-commerce companies have been able to gain popularity? Well, frankly, I’m not too sure. Why? Because in my observation, many e-commerce companies are still having problems establishing trust for their services in the community. Several e-commerce services that have strong financial backup are busy doing promotion like crazy, but the foundation that must be built is public trust. Too great of an exposure without a firm foundation will speed up the backfire against their brand service. But it seems that they do not care (or do not understand).
As someone who also once had an e-commerce business (on eBay in 2004-2005), I have always been of the view that buyer is number one, but if the platform that we use is not able to make our store as a store in which the buyer comes first, we know where this will end. 🙂
And just like the statement on the title which is intended for e-commerce service providers, we don’t need flashy features yet, we need platform that makes us trust the seller.
Abang Edwin is a practitioner of online community management since 1998 long before the term of social media / social networks appear in the internet world. He began his journey by experimentation with several online communities which eventually successful at that, to this day he still gives consultations about knowing character and foster online communities for brands / agencies and individuals.
He was at Yahoo! for over 4 years as a community manager. Currently he is Country Manager – Indonesia for Thoughtbuzz.net, a social media monitoring company.
