COD (Cash on Delivery) is the key for selling in Indian scenario by e-commerce webpanies (web companies) and other online sellers along with some discount. Many times COD product is rejected by the customer. They don’t pay for it or don’t want it any more (before paying to delivery person) or are not available. Existing e-commerce companies are making a loss as products are not being actually sold and are getting returned. These companies don’t have much information for a particular customer. Only in case same customer have done returns/not accepting COD product multiple times for a particular webpany then that webpany would have taken an action like banning the user account, not making COD option available for that user. If such data is reported for a particular area then COD can be stopped by that company there.
What if this is happening with many other users? Same user on defaulting for a company is now doing to another company. How new entrants, small webpanies or home sellers (homepanies) identify such customers?
There is no common platform to provide such data to other companies. All companies at this time are managing their own set of data for such issues. A common data pool can be created where interested e-commerce companies can share such issues with details like date, product category, address, area, customer email address, contact number. Various companies can subscribe to this data and get data/recommendation/values for a query. Like what has been the record of this customer with other webpanies. Whether there is some record, any default has been, what kind of default has been done. Concerned webpany can take action to process or not based on data received from datapool. Companies have to send back data to data pool about successful transactions with such customers so that data pool algorithms can provide more and better data to others next time.
Small webpanies and homepanies don’t have much customers. They generally don’t have COD facilities as sometimes COD is expensive and other times rejected COD proves to be expensive. Such a datapool would be very useful tool for such small webpanies and homepanies.
Along with customer centric data pool other data pool would be seller centric. This would include ratings by users to big market places, sellers on market places, small e-commerce webpanies, homepanies. For many customers they don’t trust homepanies. Homepanies generally take payments in advance and trust factor is low initially. To build trust factor, people can rate these small webpanies which are available to see by other customers.
As per my earlier post on RateKB (ratings knowledge base) is the future need there would be many instances like above where ratings of person, entity, product, service plays a key role in buying, selling and day to day tasks.