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.
1.1.1.4 Mobile payment
Mobile payment, even at its very early stage, has received widespread attention and popularity. According to mobile consumer survey data released by Adobe in 2015, 18% of the consumers are using mobile payment and the figure for young people is even higher, reaching 25%. A total of 83% of the respondents believe that the mobile payment experience is more convenient than credit card payment. It provides two competitive edges: convenience and safety. Consumers can obtain details regarding the payments by cell phones and their financial information does not get stored in a physical entity, but on a highly encrypted cloud server.
Mobile payment has multiple technologies to support its function, among which message authentication code, QR code and NFC are the three most common solutions. With NFC technology, credit card payment can be easily completed by placing the merchant’s credit card POS in close proximity to the consumers’ cell phones. Square and PayPal in other countries and Alipay and WeChat in China are the common NFC solution providers and we definitely cannot ignore the rapid popularity gained by Apple Pay. This approach of the virtual card payment is indeed similar to the digital version of the physical credit card. When a user sends out a payment order, the cell phone app recognizes this order immediately and provides a scannable barcode or completes the credit card transaction using the NFC.
1.1.1.5 Internet word-of-mouth reputation
Internet word-of-mouth reputation is the positive or negative information of an enterprise or a brand shared on the Internet. Word-of-mouth reputation of enterprises always exists, and in the digital era, it has become so extremely important that it cannot be neglected. Anonymity, one of the features of online communication, enables clients to freely express their opinions on enterprises without worrying about the negative impact of sharing in practical terms. The transmission efficiency of the Internet centralizes and integrates decentralized and fragmentary comments and enables them to be propagated at exponential rates. A mistake made by an enterprise in a regional market might be transmitted to every corner of the world within several hours. The rich information on the Internet enables word-of-mouth receivers to obtain more and richer information closer to the real experience. Internet word-of-mouth reputation helps users to profoundly understand the information of the company, reduces the uncertainty of trading and improves the possibility of trading. Enterprises need to pay close attention to images described online and proactively improve the marketing efficiency.
In the market of consumption services, dianping.com is a typical company based on such a business model. It attracts consumers to publish their service experience after the consumption, which can be referred to by consumers who have not experienced this as yet. Founded in 2003, with the monthly active users exceeding 200 million, dianping.com has collected information over 14 million businesses, covering over 2,500 cities nationwide and a few areas abroad. Thanks to the mass data of business reputation, it has now become a leading platform for providing business and trading opportunities for the locals, which has laid a solid basis for furthering its online-to-offline (O2O) business next. It has been widely agreed by consumption service companies to set up a feedback profile and obtain positive comments by hosting joint promotion activities on dianping.com before opening up a new shop.
1.1.1.6 SoLoMo
In traditional models, social marketing, local marketing and mobile marketing are basically independent. The social marketing department is only responsible for online social marketing. Teams from different regions complete regional marketing together and hold a large number of marketing activities. As for mobile marketing, it is more likely to be SMS marketing, developing the business by sending short texts. The popularity of smartphones and tablet computers changes the picture. These mobile devices give consumers many more new functions and choices, which enable them to get any product and service they need at anytime and at anyplace.
SoLoMo is a mixed concept that combines Social, Local and Mobile. An example of SoLoMo is a smartphone app such as dianping.com that can position users, provide the comments and ratings of nearby shops, and allow users to publish their feedback, upload photos and have social interactions.
SoLoMo is an increasingly growing marketing trend. According to the current location, consumers get the relevant content or promotion information and share them through the social website. A 2013 Adobe survey shows that 71% of cell phone users visit social websites by mobile ends. A total of 70% of the respondents search for information, map and comments on nearby shops using mobile devices, among which one-third of them opine that they are encouraged by promotions from the merchants. Also, a 2012 Nelson study report demonstrates that 78% of respondents discover the shops they are interested in by cell phones, 63% of people learn the price through cell phones and 22% of people read the comments of merchants. According to the statistics above, the application function of SoLoMo has been extremely critical for the geographical comments of consumers.
When potential consumers show up nearby, businesses need to make
