Barriers to E-tailing in India

E-retailing also commonly known as E-tailing is basically shopping using Internet as a medium. There are multiple similarities and differences between Retail store shopping and E-tail shopping. Both have the process of billing their customers and have to maintain relationships with their suppliers. The most common difference is the time frame; the customer can avail the retailer’s services only between specified working hours, but E-tailing services are available 24/7.

The barriers to E-tailing in India are:-

1. Payment options: Indian customers are generally not comfortable making online payments thou in the recent past there is a change in this behavior. Online retailers like Flipkart and others have adapted their services to suit the Indian customers. Flipkart offers services like cash-on- delivery and card-on-delivery to build trust among its customers, who still rely on touch and feel before making purchases.Thou this method increases the handling cost of these retailers but it also increases the sales volume
2. Handling returns: The problem of returning a product is very much prominent in Indian e-tailing businesses. The customers can return defective or unwanted merchandise which he receives. E-commerce retailers, with their emphasis on convenience and customization, must match this standard of service. At present there is a huge scope of improvement in this aspect.
3. Discount rates: The E-retailer has less operating cost compared to conventional retailers. Online retailers do not have to invest huge amounts on real estates and advertising. A trickle-down effect takes place here, the amount saved by these online retailers are passed on to the customers. With the increase in the number of competitors in this space the customers seeks for more and more discounts making it difficult for the retailers to keep up with the price war.
4. Communication barrier: There are 30 significant languages spoken across different states in India, thou the official language is Hindi and English majority of the Indian population is not comprehensive with English. The online retailers use English as their mode of communication. Thus making it difficult to tap the rural masses.
5. Other online websites: With the outburst of multiple online retailers, there are more and more websites offering comparison between different E-retailers. These websites compare products on various dimensions and offer the customers the best price across all available E-retailers.  Makemytrip.com is a perfect example; a customer seeking air-tickets between two destinations can compare offers made by various airlines. The duration of the flight and prices are the common factors that determine the purchase decision in this case

Search Engine Rankings--Mystery Unfolded

People tend to visit websites that are at the top of their search-query result as they perceive those to be more relevant to their query. Some websites rank better than others because of a web marketing technique called "Search Engine Optimization" or SEO.

SEO is a technique which helps you get traffic from search engines and ranks your site higher than the millions of other sites in response to a search query.

People do not scroll through the query results and they are used to clicking on the first result that they see. On a survey done by tech-crunch it was revealed that the result at number one position can get as many 35% of all the clicks.

There are many ways to go about to ensure that your website is ranked high.  Some of the methods are as follows:

1.  Make the headline short and crisp! you only get 65 characters to write your "Headline" and anything beyond that  will consequently cut off the headline. Hence keep it short, simple yet relevant :) The relevant aspect can be ensured by using most of the "keywords" that you want your website to be associated with

2. Meta description is another critical element which needs to be optimized. Answering the 5 Ws (Who, What, Why, When, Where, How) can be used to formulate the meta description. Each meta description should differ from that of the other pages description and the character limit of 160 should be borne in mind!

3. Leveraging Google+ is another way to go about to increase your website traffic. The combination of an individual's picture and name through Google+ in the query search result will give a more authentic picture to the searcher and it will lead to more click-throughs than those links which do not have the mentioned elements!! 

4. Go Social...social connections on a page influence the rankings of the link. Share buttons should be accessible on the page through a widget. Sponsored tweets or Facebook sponsored stories also play a big role in creating more clicks.

5. Most importantly you should ensure that your content is relevant, informative and great!

High ranking techniques are not limited to the above but these will certainly act as a head-start to go about the same!

Optimize on !