NetComm Suisse at HTW



NetComm Suisse Association has created its own observatory in 2013 and collects now quantitative as well as qualitative research about online commerce. If not stated otherwise, the information for this blog entry was obtained from Carlo Terreni (2018), General Director and Board Member of the NetComm Suisse Association.

eCommerce meets Tourism 

The observatory NetComm Suisse analyzed the Swiss e-Tourism data over 9 years and did an international comparison of e-Travelers behavior ultimately, they came up with some interesting results. Since 2008 online shoppers of holidays increased significant 60%, however, since 2014 a flat trend is observable. The shows that 34% of online shoppers used the web in 2017 to purchase their holidays which equals 1’600’000 people. What the study shows as well is that holidays are among the top 5 things that the Swiss population buys online. Comparing other European countries with regards of online purchases, Switzerland is among the top 5 countries right behind Spain, Italy and the UK. The study also reveals the average spending of a Swiss online shopper of holidays which is 1’087 Swiss Francs per year. Besides holidays, an even more significant part of online shopping in tourism is transportation. 43% people shop online and spend an average of 824 Swiss Francs yearly for airline, bus, train tickets and whatnot which results in a total of 1.7 billion Swiss Francs of transportation in Switzerland. 

Consumer Behavior for Online Purchases of Holidays 

What differentiates Switzerland compared to the rest of the world in terms of preferred payment method is that almost one third of the purchases require an invoice, just right behind the credit card and Paypal. Generally, Paypal is the preferred payment method in the EU, hence, setting up an online shop for the Swiss market, entrepreneurs need to take into consideration how Swiss people like to pay as this can make or break their business. Another interesting result of their study, is that the use of a smartphone outperformed the use of a tablet. Consequently, the smartphone is the 2nd most used device to connect to the internet right behind the PC. Thus, entrepreneurs also have to think about this and develop their website that it is mobile user friendly. Lastly, the study looked at how one can convince online shoppers of holidays to buy online. The most effective method is direct marketing – newsletter subscribers are likely to go to the online store and buy what is reported in the message. Also social media presents an attractive platform for entrepreneurs as 26% of online shoppers of holiday are highly active social media users. 

Success factors at the beginning of an e-commerce project 

Getting into e-commerce is a major step forward even for a smaller entrepreneur as well as for a bigger company. Well established, there is a huge chance for a growing business and an increase in profits. But (doing) e-commerce is not only putting up some products or services online and then hoping for the best. As in every project, there is a good bit of strategy and a bunch of critical success factors. Therefore, understanding which of these factors, can and should affect a business is crucial in making the project a success. 

 1. E-Commerce projects are aimed at the general public
It seems rather obvious in a B2C context, but even more, this fact should not be underestimated. Providing the multi-browser compatibility is the first hurdle to step into e-commerce. Regardless of the browser, this consists mainly of providing an identical rendition. Software can solve almost every problem, but it need to be consistent and even more important, well tested. This is for example a very important point when it comes to site response times. Sales periods, marketing campaigns or holiday seasons and other special occasions can lead to heavy traffic on the production platform. For this reason, it is absolutely key to focus on response times from the very first start of the e-commerce project via study the product catalogue and the estimation of orders. To organise performance measurement campaigns is as necessary as to establish the capability of repeating the performance tests easily during the project to validate each major delivery. (SQLI, 2012) 

 2. E-Commerce projects are international 
Trade is also about crossing borders and why deprive yourself of the sales awaiting you beyond borders? Of course, in reality it is not that simple. An international e-commerce project can quickly give a sharp rise to complexity when it is faced with aspects such as multi-currency, multi-language, multi-tax or multi-payment methods. This complexity can easily lead to a multi-problem and therefore it is important to address these challenges at the start of a project. (SQLI, 2012)

 3. E-Commerce projects are governed by a legal framework
Which information needs to be included in terms and conditions? Which ones in the legal notes? How does distance selling legislation needs to be regulated? What are the methods and requirements when it comes do data collection and data protection? Which changes have arisen and will arise from several governmental directives? These are only some of the important questions which have to be answered before the e-commerce website can go online. (SQLI, 2012)

 4. E-Commerce projects are strategic
In the eyes of the management of a company, e-commerce is associated with great expectations, exciting figures and almost magical terms such as new sales channel, 2-digit growth, new consumer relationships or major changes in consumer practices and consumer behaviour. Therefore, become and be player in the field of e-commerce is of strategic importance and needs to be steered and monitored by a management committee. The importance can be measured in the number of the involved people which attend the project launch meeting. People such as the sales director, the CFO, the head of logistics, the head of legal affairs or the chief marketing officer will attend such a meeting. This high involvement shows the importance for a clear definition of the roles and responsibilities. Questions such as who is assigned the main responsibility for the project, who is responsible with regard to technical aspects as well as functional should lead and clarify this process. These questions need to be answered and cleared. Without, the decisions made will not be effective and the progress of the project will be in danger. (SQLI, 2012)

 5. E-Commerce projects are about logistics
The logistic element clips wings to a lot of companies, when they begin with their activities in e-commerce. No wonder, because nowadays customers are used to a quick delivery of their orders. They do not accept long waiting times and expect the delivery of their orders within two or three working days or even faster. This aspect gives high requirements when it comes to logistics. Just in time is a key. (Marzena, 2017) There are almost countless key success factors in the rapid growing e-commerce landscape. The mentioned ones are not the only methods or the Holy Grail. Becoming successful in e-commerce begins with smart and open thinking, taking responsibilities and strategic planning. As in every other business. Is that not boring?

PPC vs. social media advertising

As there are changes in the e-commerce website situation, nowadays it is no longer advertising in a magazine or newspaper. Everything is online and with this also the advertising. But there are some different types how online advertisement can be done.

What is PPC?

One of the options is PPC which is the abbreviation of price-per-click, which is used in search engine marketing (SEM). In a campaign with PPC only the clicks are measured which means the business with a campaign only pays if somebody clicked on the campaign. Like in a lot of other things google is market leader in this case. Nearly 90% of the internet users in Switzerland are using google as their first search engine whereas only 10% are using Bing. With this fact in mind it is clear that most of the people see the google AdWords campaign instead of the Bing campaigns. In former times there were also other companies which offered PPC campaigns but they vanished nearly fully from the market. (SEO Suisse, n.d.)

 Nowadays PPC is the dominating part in online advertising for companies with smaller budgets as it is easy to control the costs and the return on investment (ROI). (SEO Suisse, n.d.) However, it is very important to have an appropriate landing page with a “buy now” button as it would not make any sense just to point to the company’s website with the AdWords campaign. (Ottaway, n.d.) In Google as well as in Bing the payed ads have to be marked with the button “Anzeige”
Payed ads in Google (Google search engine)

Payed ads in Bing (Bing search engine) 

Social Media Marketing

In comparison to PPC there is social media advertising. In this case the company does not have to pay for the clicks but for the space which is used for the ad in Facebook, Instagram, etc. So the business is not affected by the clicks as one has to pay anyways for the space. Even though this advertising possibility is most probably more expensive as the PPC but it is perfect for raising brand recognition. Another benefit of social media advertising is that on social media platforms it can be advertised much more via demographics. That means as all these platforms collect a lot of data from their users a company has the possibility to reach their exact target market. (Ottaway, n.d.)

 To sum up it always depends what a company wants to reach with the advertisement. If the most important thing is to reach more visibility the choice should fall on social media advertising. But if the company is an ecommerce company they should consider to do an AdWords campaign. 

 Melissa, Nico, Linda



References

 Marzena. (2017). What are the factors for e-commerce success? Retrieved March 16th, 2018, from http://startupfreak.net/what-are-the-factors-for-e-commerce-success/

 Ottaway, F. (n.d.). Pay-Per-Click vs Social Media Advertising. Retrieved March 15th, 2018, from https://www.upwork.com/hiring/for-clients/pay-per-click-vs-social-media-advertising/ 

 SEO Suisse. (n.d.). PPC - Was ist das? Retrieved March 15th, 2018, from https://seosuisse.ch/was-ist-ppc 

 SQLI. (2012). 7 key factors in e-commerce project success. Retrieved March 16th, 2018, from https://www.strategies-ecommerce.com/en/news/expert-statement/7-key-factors-in-e-commerce-project-success 

 Terreni, C. (2018). Merging Sectors Online to Generate Value - From eTourism to eFood.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SWISS E-Sales and E-CRM

Image
Introduction The lecture of Luca Graf, former Head of Online Sales SWISS, offered some insights into SWISS‘ E-Sales and into the E-CRM.  If not cited differently the content in this blog entry is based on the presentation of the lecturer or the accompanying slides (Graf, 2018).  SWISS serves 17 Mio guests per year and generates a revenue of 5 billion CHF per year (Handelszeitung, 2018). The airline can be considered as too big for the niche market and too small to dominate the mass market. Therefore, SWISS needs to find an appropriate strategy to increase their profit. The competition in the airline industry is extremely high and on the other hand customers have a very high transparency. Customers look for information on the internet and can find almost everything they want to know. Further, customers want to be entertained, like a high level of convenience and are price sensitive. New Strategy To establish the SWISS brand a strategy with five pillars was created. Th...
Read more

Conversion Rate Optimization – strategies for hotel sector

Image
Introduction “One accurate measurement is worth more than a thousand expert opinions”  Admiral Grace Hopper If it is not stated separately, the given content is taken out of the lecture from October 17, 2017 with Joe Dreixler. Conversion Rate Optimization, short CRO, is essential in nowadays business, especially in hotel business. But why is it a crucial component? There are many booking platforms, such as booking.com, through which customers can book their rooms. For each booking, a commission fee must be paid from the hotel to the booking platform. Thus, the hotel’s aim is it to convert these passive guests, the ones who book over a third seller, into active guests, and therefore forgo the additional fees. This is the desired action they seek: for people to book a room through their own website. Hence, this action is called conversion. CRO is the process of maximizing the number of people doing this desired action. Essential components To reach the mentione...
Read more

eTourism and New Media

Image
Augmented and Virtual Reality in Tourism Jasmin, Marianne & Sina  The 16th of October 2017 Dr. Elena Marchiori, professor at the USI (Università della Svizzera italiana) in Lugano was in Chur and held a presentation about the topic of “augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) reality in tourism”. Figure 1 : Augmented Reality vs Virtual reality (Kudan, 2017) Augmented reality and virtual reality will be explained in more detail in the following chapters but in order to have an idea of the two a short description will be given underneath. Augmented reality : is a computer based technology which is used in combination with an existing reality in order to enhance the user experience and make it possible to interact with it. (Augment.com, 2017) In this situation the user is still in the real world but can experience an augmentation of it. Virtual reality : is an artificial computer based technology which is able to immerse the user in a simulated a real life enviro...
Read more