Tez’imi yazarken osCommerce’in İngiltere temsilcisi Mark Evans ile röportaj yapmıştım, belki birilerinin ilgisi çekebilir yayınlıyorum bir kısmını. Fakat şuan sadece İngilizce dilinde, henüz Türkçeye çeviremedim yakında çevireceğim…
Mark Evans’ interview from my dissertation which has been done almost a year ago. Here my interview;
Could you please briefly introduce about yourself and your expertise on e-commerce?
I am Mark Evans a UK developer on osCommerce, which is one of the most popular open-source e-commerce solutions available. I have been working in e-commerce since the year 2000 in both open-source and commercial development.
Could you please explain about your e-commerce services?
I provide both free support via the osCommerce forums at http://forums.oscommerce.com and also commercial support/development on a fee basis. This includes anything from support of existing websites, development of new websites to migration from other e-commerce solutions to osCommerce.
You are providing and helping step by step to people related e-commerce services, in this sense what kind of services people are mostly demanding?
Some of the things people most often need help on are customisation of the e-commerce solution to fit their business process. There are so many different ways that people manage things like stock and order processing that sometimes they need something specific to how they work rather than the generic methods we are provided by default.
Could you please briefly explain what type of e-commerce websites are in vogue in these days? And what are their business models?
One of the things I have noticed recently is that there are a number of smaller niche sites cropping up which focus on a small range of products, but they go into great detail about what the product is and also include lots of detailed extra information and imagery. This is different to the old trend of having shops with 100,000’s of products to a shop having 10 – 100 products. Businesses also seem to be moving more into the direction of mobile and social networks, providing access to help via twitter and options to buy from your iPhone or Facebook pages.
Could you please shortly mention what is thought to recent trends on the e-commerce?
There are a number of recent trends in e-commerce, firstly there is the move towards m-commerce and purchasing using dedicated mobile sites and phone based applications. Secondly the move to being more social where companies market using social networks. And finally the move to gather more business metrics about what is really happening on the e-commerce site and how people are really using it to help better target customers of the specific demographic.
In connection with the previous question, What are factors affecting to this trend?
I think the things most driving these trends are customer demand, as smartphones such as iPhone and Android are becoming more popular and the explosion of Facebook into the social network scene customers are demanding that purchasing is being made even easier for them. They want to be able to buy what they want, the way they want and if an e-commerce store doesn’t provide that the customer will go somewhere that does.
According to some newspaper and journals, e-commerce is rapidly increasing during and after the global financial crisis of 2007-2010. In this context, Could you please explain how did you affected from the crisis?
One thing that I found after the financial crisis was that people were keener than ever to get an e-commerce site up and running. Businesses were starting to see the benefits on having a presence online and the costs to run an online store compared to a brick-and-mortar store were widely different. This ended up in having much more work than I could cope with so ended up turning down loads of projects purely because I was so busy.
In connection with the previous question, what are the reasons driving people to do business on e-commerce?
I think the primary reason is cost savings, not having to run a physical store which requires staff and utility costs, plus being open 24-hours a day to customers anywhere in the world is also a big attraction for them.
How long will continue growth of E-commerce?
I think e-commerce will continue to grow for a number of years yet but the amount of growth is likely to slow down. As more and more e-commerce stores come online it’s likely that the ones that don’t offer an incredibly good service will get drowned out and will vanish. At that point consumers won’t just compare websites on price but also service and support. And with the use of twitter, Facebook and other social networking tools consumers will be able to spread feedback on their experience at a particular store very rapidly.
