Four Pillars of E-commerce.” 1.Domain Your Domain can be your website (online store, a market place), a physical location(physical store, a warehouse), or even a person (personal brand). This is a place where your products or services reside. Overtime, when we move to a more advanced technology like Voice or any future platform running on blockchain, the same categorization applies. During my early days as a programmer, I used to design a site using word editors. When Adobe Dreamweaver came along I was flabbergasted. It was a gift from heaven. It made our coding lives enjoyable. Today, building websites have never been easier, faster. With the advent of drag and drop Wordpress page builders coupled with functional plugins, you can now create impressive landing pages, customize a blog site, and design your online store by just dragging and dropping blocks. You can manage every feature of your web design from single location. 2.Marketing This is where major efforts must be spent. This pillar includes your email/ social media/ influencer/ messenger marketing, SEO, voice technologies, sales/marketing funnels, etc. Building funnels is key to increasing your AOV ergo improves your P&L. Creating value through a well crafted sales funnel gives you credibility and increases trust. Focus on offers that will help your buyers save time, money, and increase their bottom line. This is key in designing your overall sales strategy. Make sure that your customers leave your site feeling that they got a great deal from you. This will make your service remarkable. 3.Payment According to a survey conducted by The Nerve, a data insights company, in Feb 2019, Cash(51.3%) is still the primary mode of payment for Filipino online shoppers. The first COD service was introduced nationwide by Lazada in 2012. This pillar includes Cash/mobile/credit/debit card payments, digital wallets, bank transfers, crypto payments, etc. 4.Logistics Among all the pillars, Logistics is still the weakest. The Philippines lags behind other ASEAN countries in areas of infrastructure and logistics competence. Trust is the umbrella of the four pillars. For all the pillars to work together, you need to implement Trust building strategies. On the other hand, the bottom part of the illustration represents the Foundation of the framework. Providing a cohesive Customer Experience across all pillars must be exercised.
