The other day I wanted to buy a wallet and I thought: Why not online?
And then voila. Wasn't I pleasantly surprised at what Google gave me? It was indeed very pleasing, amazing and excellent that I found not just one website but several companies offering merchandize on the web. Not just some ordinary website, but really integrated web based shopping cart application with integration into payment portals. Not just that they have a fabulous website with multiple views of the product and dimensions, weight and so on(everything except video), they also have a live chat option and what I found was that when I was buying the product a guy offered to chat with me. It was not intrusive, it was pleasant and they went a very long way towards earning the trust from a buyer and making a buyer really comfortable and at home. Typical Indian hospitality which is sometimes lacking in business. So I am going to talk about what all technologies went into making this online shopping experience meaningful, useful and worthwhile. And also making money using technology. I hate academia and the college project ideology and system administration mindset in LUG which are the evils preventing LUG members from achieving their full potential in life. So my job is actually to encourage more and more people towards entrepreneurship and to go ahead and build product companies after building the appropriate technical skills. In order to create something that will sell you need to be really serious. It is not a college project; it is not a joke. It is a real world issue. Any real world issue is hard to solve. That is why only few make money. Now if you take the sellers who showed up in google for my query for a wallet, there was zovi.com and there was bagskart.com. I bought a wallet each from both guys. And I think both these companies online presence was out of the world. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The real technical challenge or business challenge in building an online shopping site is integration with payment portal and listing the product with dimensions, photographs and customer reviews and sorting by price and so on. But technology alone cannot succeed. You need to be clued in with the real world. We have a bigger problem. That of trust. How to earn customer loyalty? How does a random buyer called Girish sitting in Nellai get faith that if I spend 399 rupees for a purse I will actually get the purse in my hand( of course I did just now)? To do that you need to use certain technologies. And a thinking should go into the design of the website that listing the product alone and integration with payment gateway is not quite enough. You should have neat website with lot of photographs, you should provide the user with a lot of information, claims of 30 day moneyback or replacement, guarantee that the shipping will not take a lot of time and so on. At every step you should get customer confidence. Okay this mail is too long. But you get the idea. Always apply technology to the real world. Then only you can be successful in life. I wish to quote this I read on FB. "Education earns you livelihood. But self learning makes you a fortune." Apply your knowledge what you studied in engineering and your career and help yourself. No one can help you. Only you can. God bless. -Girish -- Gayatri Hitech http://gayatri-hitech.com _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
