GUANGZHOU, China, September 21, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- E-Commerce 1.0 was a selling-oriented era when pure sales prevailed, and marketers competed through their insight into consumer psychology and art of marketing persuasion.
The e-commerce 2.0 era, however, shifted from selling-oriented to consumer-centric. e-commerce enterprises have started to forge closer relationship with customers. While providing the needed product functions is a must, to meet the emotional needs of customers is just as important. Therefore, enterprises and products pursue unique market/brand orientation that could differentiate themselves and bring consistent value package to their consumers. A good understanding of products thus becomes a decisive competitive edge in this era.
The coming of the e-commerce 3.0 era, the third phase of e-commerce, features product reconstruction. Enterprises will see users not merely as product consumers, but as important players that have independent thinking and could contribute to the evolution and shaping of products. They provide fast support for e-commerce enterprises to perceive customers' needs, to understand product orientation, and to figure out where to go and how to respond. The supply chain thus could offer quick implementation.
Products express everything in selling. E-commerce enterprises have been fighting with their strengths in product integration for quite a long time. Therefore, the way you implement your products could inform the status quo of your supply chain. You have by and large three solutions to implement products - spot purchasing, production order and inventory products - each of which, like a coin, has two sides.
Spot Purchasing
Choosing Spot Purchasing means that you must go for brand supplies that are of high cost-effectiveness and uniform styles. However, the problem is that brands and their factories normally do not stock excessively, and the supply of the wholesale market has no strength in e-commerce. Hence, spot purchased products could only be used at the initial stage or as a supplement.
Production Order
When it comes to Production Order, the difficulty lies in how to make the factory fully understand your product needs and your style orientation so that they can work exactly the way you want. To cooperate with a factory, the main issue would be how to implement the product - it is where styles come from.
Let us take the current products at online stores for reference. Big platforms all sell their competitiveness with well-selected products whose operations, especially the supply chain, have enough confidence. For instance, SooBest stands out with their leading products - fashion men's clothing, style T-shirt, women dresses, and sexy intimates. We should make good use of those data that have been tested by others' practice. You would hardly be wrong to copy the products of a non-personalized store whose conversion rate is around 5%. But, you should never copy the product that builds its success on traffic; otherwise you will easily end up with zero profit. Normally, a well-received item at physical stores would see the same popularity online.
Inventory Products
Nowadays, what most brand entities sell online are inventory products. They put those products online for a few weeks and then do promotions so as to clear inventory and enhance user experiences.
You may excel as a master of one of the mentioned solutions, yet you could hardly break through in the current e-commerce environment. So, generally speaking, the supply chains of e-commerce companies are a combination of the three or two of the three methods.
The most important job of a product manager is to do planning, to purchase and to build an inventory model. But only a very few e-commerce enterprises know how to do product planning. Not that it requires a big sales scale to do product planning, and not that a plan to sell what items in the following one or two months could be called product planning. You should combine what your new product marketing needs are with supply chain planning. In addition, you need to communicate with your factory so that they could understand your marketing needs and your plans. Otherwise, your products will obtain limited reach and soon departure far from the market.
