Technology Awareness Essay

Technology can be acknowledged as the backbone of E-commerce industry. This study showcase the level of awareness on the issues involved with the technologies utilised in case of developing nations. Through the proper emphasis on understanding the technological issues faced by developing nations to conduct business internationally specifically in case of E-commerce industry has been highlighted. As the chosen developing nation India is selected and Flipkart as the company that operates in the E-commerce industry has been considered considering its vast amount of operation. Through the study technological issues faced by Flipkart and capability of the organisation to operate internationally has been demonstrated.Through the analysis it has been found that as the medium of dealing with the technological issues Flipkart has to grow organically.

The study will discuss on the technological issues that are faced by Flipkart and how far this company has the capability to operate internationally and get recognized in and across the world. Flipkart is an Indian E-commerce company that faces several issues while operating their business. The current segment even highlights the selected technology that should be used by the company so that they can expand in the international market. Technology can be treated as backbone of E-commerce industry.

It is the technology that helps in searching as well as customizing and personalizing products for customers that are fast becoming an obligatory characteristics and as expected from any of the E-commerce venture who are willing to succeed in the upcoming future years (Vyas & Gupta, 2017). Brief Background of Flipkart in India Flipkart Private Limited is one of the Indian E-commerce company that operates in India. The company was founded by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal in the year 2007. The company primarily used to focus on book sales before expanding into other categories of product like fashion, consumer electronics and lifestyle products (flipkart.com).

The company faces stiff competition from Amazon and Snapdeal that operates in the same country and industry. Figure 1: Flipkart Company Source: (Flipkart.com, 2018) The company aims at providing one-step solution to the customers where they can select any clothing, accessories, and home appliances by sitting at home. The prices are kept affordable so that customers gets attracted and it lead to impulsive buying. The potential customer who show interest in purchasing online products feel it comfortable as it saves both time and energy. In this busy world, individuals faces difficulty in travelling to offline stores and complete their shopping.

With the emergence of E-commerce industry, customers have found it easy to shop anywhere and anytime with just one click. There are several payment options (cash or debot card or credit card) available to them so that they can select and get the products delivered at home (Verma&Dahiya, 2016). Current business and technology landscape Currently, it can be seen that Mergingof Flipkart and Walmart brought lot of changes in the dynamics related to complete retail sector that include both online and offline services. Flipkart is an Indian company and the investment will impact the company in both ways (strategic ways and tactical ways). Figure 2: Flipkart & Walmart merger Source: (Trak.in 2018) The discussions were made at management level where it was found that fund raising and Initial Public Offering will bring changes in the operational efficiency and attainment of future sustainability activities.

By doing this, the Founders will have no role to play but still, the company will enjoy high market share as it will be professionally managed. This will lead to bring various level of objectivity as well as governance at the same time (Vaishnavi&Kuechler, 2015). Flipkart had faced issues such as instability in top management. It becomes difficult for the manager to adjust to the culture of the company or in India to be precise (Tam et al., 2017). It is because of the reason why things in India are less structured and more chaotic as compared to other nations.

Flipkart is busy in competing with its competitors Amazon. It is therefore advisable to expand the market internationally to make base perfect. It can be seen that Flipkart is not well-equipped to expand globally in this recent times. The company is facing several issues of its own and these are funding issue, change in top management as well as marked down evaluation. The current situation of Flipkart in India is not quite healthy.

The company need to target in cutting up the losses and attain break-even. In this stage, it becomes difficult for the company to expand globally and this can be one of the hectic activity that need lot of planning as well as expenditure at the same time (Ruby, 2016). Issues with Flipkart that restrict international expansion It becomes difficult for any company that operates in developing countries like India to expand in the international market and get recognition worldwide (Ramachandran, Sebastian & Pillai, 2018). E-commerce industry spends more than $2.1 trillion in few years and they are planning to reach $5 trillion by the end of 2020.

Figure 3: Flipkart growth over the years Source: (Flipkart.com, 2018) This data make it clear that there is rapid growth in the Indian E-commerce industry as it shows strong market as well as increased customer demand. Even though, growth trends can be seen in this market, still there is companies who fails to take off within their initial years of operations. Likewise, Flipkart faces several challenges to survive in the E-commerce industry and get recognized all over the world (Prasad & Rao, 2015). The first issue faced by Flipkart that restrict the company to expand internationally is borderless economies.

Under the virtualisation era of 21st century, website of Flipkart faces frequent glitches with its website. With the number of users growing rapidly, pressure on the website is getting higher that causes the bugs to germinate within the operation and in case of internationalisation it can hamper the interest of the firm (Philomina&Amutha, 2016). The second issue that the company faces is trust issue for the brand as this particular aspect act as a key differentiator. Company cannot be globalized if they failed to meet the needs of the customers. Providing the needs of the global customers are very difficult to understand, the technological barrier to understand the needs of the ultimate consumer is limited (Nguyen, Newby & Macaulay, 2015).

The next issue that the company faces is managing different systems. There are several data management systems that need to be taken into account like Point of Sale, CRM systems and Enterprise Resource Planning.It will be beneficial for the company to use the systems differently on the basis of architecture, usage and deployment. Another vital issue that are faced by the company is lack of cross-departmental collaboration. It becomes a challenging task for the company to collaborate between various departments. It can be seen that most of the E-commerce managers should engage in learning ways so that they can operate strategically with the help of one integrated channel (Mishra &Kotkar, 2015).

Flipkart was accused for number of reasons and some of these are top-level exists, devaluation by investors as well as funding crunch. Flipkart was one of the successful start-up tech company if it is viewed under some of the parameters. These parameters are fund raising, employment generation as well as valuation (Mishra, Akman& Mishra, 2014). Brief description and capability of selected technology Increase of cloudy- Recently, it can be seen that cloud technology has become a huge business for most of the companies. As far as E-commerce industry is concerned, cloud technology plays vital role in the development of cloud services as well as regular communications and data centres (Lee, Thomas & Baskerville, 2015).

Basically the E-commerce companies like Flipkart, and others does not have their own products or service establishments or production houses. The company is just a connector and the buyer. All the business process like listing of the suppliers, manufacturers, selling, promotion, advertisement and all the things are performed by software and cloud storage devices. As the company is selling thousands of products every day and deliver it to the customer, it needs to track every single detail that is required for the product and after sales services. There are many segments of the organisation like headquarters, warehouse, transportation, delivery and others.

There are various functional bodies that intercept and work coherently to operate the business, therefore the cloud storing is required as the sales and the customer care executives can easily intercept the products by the help of cloud records, May the user is far away from the operational zones. In the given case the cloud computing is the most desirable technic that Flipkart needs to adopt it really want to become a global company. Amazon the global market leader in E-commerce has great cloud storage and modern tools, only because of that the company is able to track every single product that they are selling in 13 counties. Internet of Things- Companies who are operating in the E-commerce industry need to control huge amount of money as well as make arrangements in improving the wellbeing and opportunities for smaller firms (Khanna &Sampat, 2015). As discussed above, the companies like Flipkart and amazon are not the manufacturers and the producer of the products that they sells in to the market but they are interlink between the customer and the seller.

In that case Flipkart needs to make huge money tracking and product tracking. All the products are required to be track in an individual and efficient manner. The money that the company received should also be tracked individual and the company need it to deliver to the large number of suppliers in a correct manner. Further the company needs to be ensure that the suppler only receive what actually due to them.

Figure 4: IOT framework Source: (Datta et al., 2016) In Addition to that there are some other technologies that holds substantial importance for making the Flipkart to Operate in the Global Market. Guided Discovery- It can be seen that customers do not have the time to spend hours for searching for one perfect product that is needed. It depends upon the E-commerce websites that can guide the customers to get the search item without any hassle. It is for this reason why it becomes important to create a user-oriented experience. Figure 5: Guided discovery framework Source: (Inuwa et al., 2016) It becomes necessary for these companies to provide an all-around personalized experience so that it motivates the customers to fill their shopping carts. Increased customer satisfaction as well as loyalty can be attained by providing a customized shopping experience to the customers (Eisenberg & Gupta, 2015).

What impact will your technology bring to the business? All the suggested technologies are mentioned above with proper justification that can help Flipkart for expansion in the global market. The company need to be forced to reckon with changes so that they can compete in this fast-revolving markets. Flipkart have to compete with their close competitors and it can be possible if the company select to use the latest as well as best of their kind of solutions. The company needs several technological improvements or solutions so that they can be recognized all over the world.

The selected technology should be used by Flipkart so that they can build more hybrid clouds as business mixes with private as well as public cloud services. The company should involve in bringing improvement in the performance of data centres as well as saving energy at the same time (Chae, Koh&Prybutok, 2014). It is thereby important for Flipkart to deliver personalized experience to their consumers (Avgerou& Walsham, 2017). The company should manage customer data and this itself is a challenging task. It is because the companies operating in E-commerce industry should be knowing about how to use that data of customer. Altogether, it becomes essential for the company to deliver customized content and this can be done through form of advertisements as well as special offers.

Further it is considered to be well if the present company instead of getting involved in global operation, it will be fruitful for the company work along with any recognised global company, who are already working in global markets. This not only led the confidence to the investors further the trust and other social issues can be reduced. In addition to that if the company works along with the established company the company might be able to review the abilities and the tools and technologies used by the company for the global operations. Further the company (Flipkart) may follow the technologies what Amazon is utilising to conduct its business operations.

This will be beneficial for the company as Amazon is the globally recognised competitor in the E-commerce Field. It is important to understand the fact that both Indian companies and the entrepreneurs are capable of growing and creating successful business through use of native intelligence as well as perseverance (Benson, Saridakis&Tennakoon, 2015). It is assumed that Flipkart will be operating well in the competitive environment where best of companies are allowed to operate. The Top Executive of the company were very excited about betting the future of the company on Artificial Intelligence.

The company aims at focusing on harnessing technological advancements as far as possible. The main drivers of success of this company is technology and they believe it all the time. The company believes that they have disrupted the market in a big way within a time span of 10 years. They are of the belief that their next wave of growth will emerge from AI-powered solution that will act as key enabler in boosting the overall Indian economy (Bhattacharya & Mishra, 2015). Robust Business-to Business E-commerce platform is necessary but at the same time, it should be operative.

The website need to handle more transactions and provide features that are well-designed as it will guide customers to find what they want instantly as well as easily. Strategy moving forward and conclusion At the end of the study, it can be concluded that Flipkart has no choice but to grow in this industry organically. Outside India, Flipkart is not well-known and lacks required brand recognition. There are several strategies that can be opted by Flipkart so that they can move forward and attain global recognition in the near future. Ease of use as well as technology advancements had helped the consumer to get more power and involve effectively in increased global competition in the E-commerce industry in India.

In addition to that, Omni-channel retailing can be seen as one step forward for E-commerce. It is important for the company to deal with certain technical issues that is needed for managing an online store and these issues are server issues, dynamic IP address as well as bandwidth issues and data privacy and security issues. It is all about the transition from the multi-channel business to an Omni-channel business and this is one of the aspect that are till now not adopted by most of the companies. To list the challenges in a nutshell that are faced by Flipkart to operate in developing nation like India are managing logistics, inventory accounting as well as seller registration. In order to overcome the above-listed challenges, it becomes necessary for Flipkart to involve in greater deployment of manual resources as only cloud services cannot resolve the bigger aspect altogether. It is a known fact that better customer service equals improved bottom line.

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