Commerce Server Blog

For past few years I am working on different ecommerce projects outside India. Many new entrepreneurs believe that ecommerce web sites will not work in India. Well there is some truth behind that with many live instances, where business spends millions of rupees and generated revenue in thousands. I believe, we can able to show miracles in ecommerce space in India. Entrepreneurs bought ideas from US/Europe and tried to rub the existing ideas on Indian customer and forgot simple business rule – “Know your customer”.

Indian customer is very difficult to understand the his trends are changing fast. If you would like to know how few entrepreneurs have done miracles, you have to read the book “IT happened in India” – where how some small companies became giant retailers in few years. One thought I got while reading that book is to incorporate bargain feature within ecommerce website. Yes this feature will attract most of the Indian customers. Middle class Indians will get satisfy when they buy items after bargaining and in live if you see all small retailers will follow this rule. Instead of you giving discount to the customer, let customer say how much he can pay for that product and let the system decide whether to give that product to for that price. For example, I came to the site to buy a optical mouse and the price is shown as 2000 rupees. Instead of you giving discount, you configure your pricing to allow bargain till 1400 rupees. If I bargain for 1000 rupees, the system should denied and can offer 1800 rupees and then if I bargain for 1200 then the system can offer for 1750 rupees and the bargain negotiation continues till a final price is achieved. Once the price is fine with the customer, he will add this product to the cart (with adjusted price) and goes through checkout process.

To make this feature work – start targeting bargain price based on user history and his sale history. If you take same optical mouse example where you can target 1400 Rs. for golden customer 1700 Rs for silver customer and 1900 Rs for new customer. If you observe, the concept is same as targeted marketing discounts but the difference is the (seamless) user experience. The customer feels that after bargaining, he is really gaining some profit out of the transaction.

Coming to technology side – I feel commerce server is not capable handling such complex pricing model. The only option we have is to build custom price bargaining feature and once the deal has happened – using marketing promotion codes we will make the price affect in commerce server subsystems.

We have to rely on Axapta or SAP for such pricing feature. Is it possible to incorporate these features as part of core commerce server.