Online communities act as virtual focus groups, providing marketing data that might otherwise cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Contrary to popular belief, there is such a thing as a profitable venture on the web. Success online comes from two factors – value to the customer and value to the company. Most of us understand the value to the organization and are able to relate to it readily. But very few of us understand that the key to achieving this is to understand the value to the customer. And what does this mean? It means understanding your customers within the time frame and context to achieve business objectives.
Many of the existing business models on the web are a mere extension to their online counterparts, but the web can also redefine traditional business models. What the web does is that it helps us do things that we normally did in slightly different ways. And if this generates added value to the business, then isn’t it a case for consideration? New business strategies that take advantage of the net as a many-to-many interactive medium that emphasizes communication and community are what we are going to study here.
We help build community web sites that connect buyers and sellers on the web and services to provide value through rich content, collaborative tools like chat forums and bulletin boards.
A portal that plays by the rules and studies the markets effectively can become a major e-commerce facilitator in that vertical industry that it chooses to focus on. A variety of business models can be combined to form other kinds of transformed portals – for instance becoming a virtual order desk like instill.com, or NetBuy, a B2B infomediary that matches buyers and sellers, the value proposition being that of immediate order fulfillment.
Being a success on the web doesn’t mean that a business model once adopted cannot be changed. A successful portal is the right mix of business models, a dash of an online brokerage model (e-Bay) mixed with a trust enabler model (Paypal) and maybe even an online mall, whichever model is the most strategic and grants the maximum ROI.
At India Web Developers, we build and develop web portals. Please contact us with your requirements.
