Technologies like integrated automation systems have begun to replace the elaborate and tedious manual procedures, bringing down the percentage of errors, involved during manual process, to almost null. Since the automation systems work round the clock without any need of human intervention, they are generally preferred, wherever possible. One of the recent innovations in the use of automation system in the e-commerce industry is the ability for a system to track an order and report the status to a caller based on the phone number from which it is called, without any human buffer. Innovations such as these reduce enormous amount of human resources and manual errors, subsequently allowing the resource to be used effectively where it is essentially required.

Technology: an Enabler for Merchants

The entry of online market into the retail industry has divided the market into 3 segments: Merchants who sell goods exclusively online; Merchants who sell goods both online and offline; and Merchants who sell goods offline. Another sub-segment of online merchants are those who sell goods either through their own portal and/or through a third party e-commerce website. For merchants to sell online, a robust inventory management system is required, in order to keep all the systems up-to-date; efficient management systems are backbone of any online store. These factors have compelled a merchant to focus on the technological infrastructures provided by an e-commerce company before considering associating with it. A merchant expects the technology provided to handle critical facets like fraud detection systems, supply chain management and several other aspects of the business. Also the merchant should be informed as soon as the order is placed so they can begin to dispatch the product at the earliest.

Another challenge faced by the merchants in the online space is the lack of understanding of customer needs. While in an offline store it is fairly easy to track the performance of the products by studying the customers’ behavior. However the process is not easy in the online world, simply because of its enormous structures and depth. Since a customer can login from anywhere in India, at anytime, it becomes very hard for the merchants to understand their customers. And hence it is of critical importance to deduce web-analytics, transactional analytics, and behavior analytics in order to understand the online customer, but analyzing these big data sets becomes impossible to track records without any specific tools for it. And providing with such tools, merchants can now assess their performance and decide the quantity of products to be stocked preventing any over-sale or under-sale.

An industry that has evolved and seen innovation with the online market entering the space is the courier service companies. Many have upgraded their platform, transforming it to a more reliable, efficient and fast means of service. A recent value added feature in their services is the ability to track reverse delivery along with the existing normal delivery tracking.

So basically the online industry though has revolutionized the market and also has forced other industries to evolve but the fact remains that this is just the beginning and still there is a long way to go. With the competition in the market being so fierce, there is a need for new innovations to be brought in frequently and constantly onto this platform. A majority of innovation obviously revolves around customers since the core of any business will always remain the same: Customer is the King!