Speaking at the ASSOCHAM Conference on e-commerce today, Harish Bijoor of Harish Bijoor Consults shared some interesting points on the e-commerce market and behavior. Some notes from his talk: - We're moving from the scratch card generation to the iGen, which is going to retail online. The sense they have - when you can be impatient, why be patient. this generation is going to buy things impulsively on the net. - The anonymity of e-retail: 90 percent of lingerie in India is being sold by men, which is unusual. So when you want to buy fancy lingerie, you'll go the net. Most of this is non intrusive, and the user remains anonymous. (ED: We beg to differ, since e-commerce ventures like Amazon tend to collect massive amounts of data about consumers - they know what you buy, what you browse, what you like, what your friends like, and as we found of recently, even how much of a book you read. It's anything but anonymous, though the customer might get the feeling of anonymity) - The only guy who makes the money on COD courier is the courier guy, and the thrill of a return, because he gets paid for return as well. - Online, the marketing moves from active selling to passive selling, whereas the consumer moves from passive buying to active buying. - e-Commerce reinvents pure competition, especially with customer-to-customer models. Everyone is a seller,a buyer, and is equidistant form each other. Even in B2C, if the customer has to…
