Digital Darwinism will Determine the Future of E-Commerce Business Models

The Indian e-commerce industry has been experiencing unprecedented growth over the last few years. Increasing rate of technology adoption and wide access to high speed networks using smart devices has resulted in a high volume of active consumer base. Indian players like Flipkart, Snapdeal and entry of global players like Amazon and Alibaba in the Indian market has created a competitive ecosystem. Indian consumers evolved to a situation where wide variety of product choices across multiple criteria based searching mechanism powered by agile order fulfillment system thus achieving better consumer experience. The clutter caused by continuous increase by the new entrants to the market placed compelled the e-tailers to come out with innovative customer engagement models. In the face of competition, the e-tailers always trudge to bring relevant traffic to the website therefore strategies of viral marketing and search engine marketing have become things of paramount importance. India has an active internet user base of over 354 billion with addition of almost 6 million each day but with a low market penetration compared to the overall population of the country which indicates the potential for this industry in near future. In 2009, India’s e-commerce market was USD 3.8 bn which rose to USD 12.6 billion in 2013. Conservative estimates by Goldman Sachs predict that Indian e-commerce market is going to cross USD 100 billion by 2020. Many significant factors have contributed this steady growth including high smart phone penetration, digital wallet adoption and last-mile logistical services backed discount pricing and smooth execution. Propagation of networks like Internet of Things (IoT) where billions of devices will be connected over internet which in turn will help in collection and collation of consumer behavioral statistics at a micro level. Since the consumers today have moved away from market push to strategic pull therefore marketers also have mapped their sales pitches tailored to suit individuality of consumers. Facebook’s social graph application effectively tracks an individual’s circle of acquaintances which helps the engine to cluster into different groups suitable for targeted marketing campaigns. IoT has brought in a structural change into the industry specifics where this disruptive innovation has gained acceptance among people and believed to have made life easier. Multiple electronic devices connected over internet gather real time data ranging from inventory status to shipment details, health diagnostics to financial transactions. Computing is going to be ubiquitous, with real time transactional data capture. Online market place brings together the buyer and seller in direct contact and the premise of brick and mortar setup with high entry barriers have been broken to give rise to new economy companies that had left many giants redundant. The startup ideas could not have blossomed if the entry barriers were very high. The domain of e-business has evolved from the traditional communication medium to the platform with visual merchandising offering a significant value proposition. If we could talk about companies like Ola, Uber or Blah Blah Cars and Ryde where hassle free taxi ride services could be bought online with single applications working across the globe. Online grocers are only growing in business volume with each passing day. Habits are changing. Erstwhile ordinary middle class are going online thus constituting a potential TG with high proliferation rate. Social enterprises through crowd funding or angel investment are in the offing. Projects like Billions in Change, Bharat learn are gaining momentum. Direct connect between the buyer and sellers have seen many interesting business models coming up in the digital space touching our daily lives. Here‘s the story of a young working mother who doesn’t have wake up at the break of dawn to cook tiffin for her school going child anymore. By the time the child is ready to leave for the school a packed tiffin box with measured calorific value reaches the doorstep every day. The reason is simple she had subscribed to a digital tiffin service. Unlike the famous Mumbai Dabbawallah’s system of delivering homemade food through their logistic service, the players in this field like iTiffin, Mumma’s Box and The Lunch Box have a certified dietician on their roles to ensure the quantity and quality of food offered to the young ones. Since most of the public schools do not offer food from their kitchen this model of tiffin service is gaining popularity among the young women working in metro cities. Like each coin has two sides, the E-Commerce business models also pose a survival threat to the new generation. Foodpanda’s (a food business aggregator) market maturity model has compelled the company to cut down its existing workforce by 300 people in the NCR alone. The story of a young technocrat mother is quite intriguing. She woke up one fine morning with a fear that the faster pace of technology adaptation in all businesses might leave her yet unborn child jobless in the coming days. The growing pace of technology adaptation is bringing closer the Judgment Day when a conflict between human labour and machine substitution becomes inevitable. Time has come to segregate between baseline activities and creative thinking therefore augmenting technology for redundant tasks as correctional measures to counter such conflict situations. The organizations and technologies are deeply entwined through their business models hence, going by Brian Solis’s (2015) theory of Digital Darwinism the future wrests with the companies that supports sustainable business models augmenting technology and those won’t, would perish eventually.