E-commerce success example and its causes

AirAsia.com is one of the leading example of a successful e-commerce in Asia. AirAsia is a low fare airline in the Asia - AirAsia is one of the pioneers that started implementing online ticketing in the airline industry and has been expanding rapidly since 2001, to become an award winning and the largest low cost carrier in Asia. With a fleet of 72 aircrafts, AirAsia flies to over 61 domestic and international destinations with 108 routes, and operates over 400 flights daily from hubs located in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. To date, AirAsia has flown over 55 million guests across the region

How did AirAsia manage to achieve this in such a short period of time? Several factors have a role in the success of any e-commerce venture, and so does AirAsia.com

One of the reasons why AirAsia.com can draw customers to purchase their air ticket online is because they provide an attractive website. The tasteful use of colour, graphics, animation, photographs, fonts, and white-space percentage may aid success in this respect. As customers log in to airasia.com, they can see the striking red colour background and also two columns to choose which country and the language preference they are comfortable with. Besides, there is also a beautiful picture of airasia pleasant stewardess that welcome visitors that log on to the website.

Apart from that, airasia also provides personal attention to their customers. Personalized web sites, purchase suggestions, and personalized special offers may go some of the way to substituting for the face-to-face human interaction found at a conventional point of sale. In airasia.com, regular customers may join in as a member to be able to log in their personalize web pages to do online purchasing or online reservation. Customers are also greeted by their respective names in the web pages. Besides, customers will be notified personally if there are any latest promotions offered.

In addition, providing a sense of community is also a crucial success factor. For instance, having chat rooms, discussion boards, soliciting customer input, loyalty schemes and affinity programs can help in this respect. Airasia.com provides a blog to serve as a platform for its employee, customers, and suppliers to voice out their comments and feedback regarding the company’s services or problems encountered. This way, airasia can make changes to improve further according to the demand of its customers.

On top of that, providing an incentive for customers to buy and to return is another way to attract customers. Thus, sales promotions to this end for example, coupons, special offers, and discounts make customers feel that the purchase is worth the money they pay for. When the promotion is more worth it compared to the competitors, customers will choose to stay with airasia.

Lastly, the reliability and security of the airasia web site is essential to build customers’ trust. For instance, parallel servers, hardware redundancy, fail-safe technology, information encryption, and firewalls can enhance this requirement. With this backup and safety features implemented, customers will be more confident when performing transaction online to purchase the air tickets.