Contents
1 Introduction 7- 2 Bharti Airtel 7
- 3 E-Commerce Practices of Bharti Airtel 8
- 4 Evaluation Criteria 11
- a. Content quality: 11
- b. Performance 12
- c. Customer support or Contact information 12
- d. Customer privacy or security 13
- 5 Branding 13
- 6 Segmentation 15
- 7 Transactional facilities 16
- 8 Integration of Online and Offline Operations. 16
- 9 Recommendations 17
- 10 Conclusion 18
Description
Any business that has a huge customer base and that deals with customers on a day to day basis requires E-commerce and E-business applications. To have an official web site for a business has become mandatory since 1990s. Customers browse the web site of a company to ascertain its credentials. Other business entities that deal with large number of customers use the web site with e-commerce applications to cater to customers’ needs such as answering their queries through online customer support, allowing them to purchase products and services online, allowing customers to update their personal and contact information etc.. So the efficient use of E-business or E-commerce is vital to the success of a retail business that has huge customer base. In turn the success of E-commerce depends upon customers’ participation. If more and more customers are able to use E-commerce applications of the company in an efficient way, the company can cut down costs of managing retail brick and mortar outlets. Success of a company that is involved in large scale retail industry directly depends upon the success and efficiency of its online business. There are many pitfalls linked to E-commerce though such as security threats, data integrity issues, performance of the hardware and software applications, the speed with which web pages open etc. The report does an evaluation of Bharti Airtel, one of Asia’s leading telecom service provider, with respect to its E-commerce applications in areas such as branding, customer segmentation, transactional facilities and degree of integration of online and offline operations. The report then makes recommendations to improve performance and efficiency of their E-commerce applications.
