Do the e-commerce success factors listed in Figure 9.11 guarantee success for an e-commerce business venture? Give one example of what else could go wrong and how you would confront such challenges.
On page 366 of our text, Management Information Systems, O’Brien and Marakas (2011) list eight factors of e-commerce success, they are: selection and value, performance and service, look and feel, advertising and incentives, personal attention, community relationships, security and reliability, and great customer service. While these factors are important to e-commerce success, they cannot guarantee it.
Lack of trust is a huge problem with smaller e-commerce sites. For example if your debating to between purchasing a new pair of shoes on Amazon or a lesser known site. If everything is the same; product, color, size, price, and shipping costs, most people are going to choose Amazon because it is a trusted e-commerce business with millions of users. To create trust a e-commerce retailer should use rely on third party review sites. E-commerce may want to provide influencers, bloggers and top reviewers with sample products to garner early reviews.
According to Nwachukwu (2002), the lack of strategic planning is the number one reason by e-commerce businesses fail, “A plausible conclusion that can be drawn from the many reasons why the e-commerce businesses failed is that many of them did not do much of any strategic planning; and for the few that did, the planning and decision making process was based mostly on intuition”. With a good strategic plan, an e-commerce business will either chose a product that does not have a good representation on the Internet or sell a niche product. For example, if I wanted to sell clothes or shoes on the internet I would focus on specialty sizes, I could sell shoes for women in sizes of twelve or larger (these are hard to find) or sell plus sized bathing suits.