Know what will become Expensive & What Cheaper under GST

The Goods and Services Bill (GST) is now fully confirmed and is ready to roll out and be effective from July 2017. After late last month, Lok Sabha passed 4 important bills related to GST and they got cleared by Rajya Sabha without any modifications.

Now, only various states need to discuss the implications of GST, before it gets rolled out nationwide.

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GST is hailed as the biggest & most powerful financial reform bill waiting to get passed since Independence. GST unifies the nation with a single tax regime which states that even you are selling a product from Assam or Tamil Nadu; it won’t matter from now on.

The common man is, no doubt worried about the real impact of GST on his pocket, and paying heed to this need, we are discussing here the major services which will become expensive after GST gets applied and 7 of those services, which will become cheaper:

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The Services and Goods going Expensive under GST

• Mobile telephone bills (from existing 15% service tax, telecom bills can now attract 18% tax under GST)
• Courier Services
• Insurance premiums
• Online booking of bus/train/air tickets
• Banking, Investment Banking, Wealth Management Services
• Residential and Commercial Rentals
• WiFi Services, DTH Services
• Metro fares/ Rail fares/ Airfares
• Healthcare/ School Fees
• Ecommerce shopping
• Cold Drinks, tobacco and Junk foods (290% tax on tobacco products and Sin Tax on cold drinks and fast foods already comes under the planning of GST)

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The Goods and Services going Cheap under GST

• Movie tickets (Entertainment tax would be eliminated under GST, hence, cheaper tickets)
• Two-wheelers
• Dining in restaurants (With reduced Service tax)
• Entry level sedans
• Washing machines
• Televisions/Refrigerators/ AC (As of now, TV’s and other electronic appliances are charged with 30% tax, which will reduce down to 18% for small-screen TV and 28% for AC, coolers, refrigerators and others)
• Gas/Electric stoves
• Basic food products like wheat, rice, pulses
• Essential food items like edible oil (Under GST, tax on these items will fall from 30% to 28% and in some cases, even 18%)
• Soaps & Oils
• To be unbiased, changes in GST for essential food products and petrol/diesel haven’t been yet announced. But as per the statements issued by GST Council, it is quite clear that all of the impacts on these commodities and services will be positive, and they would become cheap.

More Than 50% Of Urban Indians Won’t Go For E-Commerce Without Discounts

There have been some interesting results of the case studies happened on the habits of discounts and freebies of consumers from around the world. It is been observed that discounts form a habit hard to dislodge from the consumer’s mind.

This theory is now confirmed by a huge app based poll conducted by the news app Inshorts and global leading research company Ipsos on the behavior of consumers of urban India.

The discount factor is the most striking revelation. As a result, 54% of the urban Indians will not buy through e-commerce sites, if there are no discounts available and if the product price is same as in their retail market near their place. This can be troubling trend for the future digital entrepreneurs who are looking for online retail route because discounts may be a good strategy to attract customers but a bad strategy to run a business.

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The poll conducted from Inshort and Ipsos, the result reported that discounts are no longer a factor for Indian online consumers. The report had stated that value added services and the convenient search would attract more Indians to online shopping instead of discounts, a claim which has been punctured by Inshorts poll.

After government of India changed the rules for FDI for e-commerce marketplace and put restrictions on giving discounts by leading portals of e-commerce, its been reported how the dynamics of discounts is transforming as portals are now resorting to other methods of lowering the prices.

It is clear that e-commerce portals will continue to give discounts in order to capture the market, but the question arises that for how long and for how much.

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The poll conducted is significant due to the fact that urban mobile internet users from top cities were asked the questions and the overall replies gives us a glimpse of mood of the consumers who actively pursue e-shopping other digital activities.

Respondents from New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Bengaluru, Chennai and Lucknow voted their 12 lakh votes and 80% of them were under 35 years of age. Also when asked about the most popular and used medium between Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter, Instagram won by 54% votes as compared to 39% votes for twitter and 7% for Snapchat.

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In terms of watching, YouTube is still the number 1 choice with 80% share, meanwhile only 11% voted Facebook and 9% voted Whatsapp. However among 35+ year’s demography, Whatsapp is a little more famous than facebook. When asked about dating online, only 7% admitted that they met someone using an online dating application meanwhile 26% said they never used one.

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http://surevin.com/blog/more-than-50-of-urban-indians-wont-go-for-e-commerce-without-discounts/

Mistakes not to be made by E-Commerce Owners

E-commerce venture to start can be as challenging as it is rewarding. The entrepreneurs put all their efforts, savings, human resource, their heart and soul to make their venture to be successful.

A prudent road-map drawn primarily would include identification of critical points to achieve as well as hindrances to avoid and tackle. Here are the common mistakes which should be avoided in order to ensure the startups to keep going:-

 

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•  Do Not Choose the Wrong Platform

The software used or the platform used is the primary asset of any business. Choose it in haphazard manner without understanding and it will turn into a fatal mistake for your e-commerce startup as it will be over customized or irrelevant in long run.

To launch the website, there are options available for merchants like SaaS solutions and licensed software’s. These are to be studied along with their pros and cons. 5 points to be remembered avoiding this pitfall are- how soon the launch will be, security aspect, customization level, budget, technical team. Due to this, customer will enjoy optimal user experience SaaS solution is best for small businesses as they are budget friendly, have low technical know-how and takes only a day to launch its own web store.

 

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•  Going Without SEO

Start investing smartly into marketing and optimize your online business. New in the market focuses mainly on print media advertisements for awareness and promotions. However, if the website does not show on search results, the business is bound to suffer.
SEO is the tool for visibility of website. It makes the website easy for both users and search engines. Though it takes time to show results, therefore there are other options like Ad words and facebook targeted campaigns. But SEO remains powerful in the long run which will draw traffic to the website even after one stop spending on paid ads.

 

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•  Overconfidence is not Good

There are around 1.4 billion web stores over the internet and only 4.74 billion pages are available on web. So how are you going to sustain & grow in such a competitive atmosphere? An exceptional website and great content is not enough, it must be shared, liked, followed and talked about on social media. This along with SEO will ensure the website picking up and featured in online results as the metrics relies on relevance & importance by tracking what people do over internet.

 

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•  Not Building a Social Image

A social profile is important with good number of followers and updated with regular posts, images and videos. Engage customers on daily basis on all platforms. Do this by- optimize posts with high conversion keywords, instead of sales pitch, provide share worthy content, users should be your marketing channels- share their reviews, interact with them by adding share buttons, joining groups, starting a blog and using Hashtags.

Efforts in this direction will build a positive social image in the minds of the users and will lead to increased interaction and engagement, better reviews and thereby result in increased traffic and business.

Conclusion 

As it may seem benign, avoiding these mistakes can be the difference between a thriving business and a web store no one knows about. You can choose to start taking certain steps in order to avoid these mistakes which if allowed to continue, can turn into a complete demise for your e-commerce startup.

Source Url :-

http://surevin.com/blog/mistakes-not-made-e-commerce-owners/

E-commerce firms Stopped Renting out Office Spaces; Paytm Hints of Unification in E-commerce Market

Indian e-commerce firms have stopped leasing out the office space across India because of cost cutting measures and slowdown in funding. Office space rented out by ecommerce firms have collapsed down by 78% while first half of 2016 according to a latest report.

 

Previous year in the first six months, 4.2 million sq. feet of office space was rented by these firms from prime 6 Indian cities which are Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai. However, later it reduced to 0.9 million sq. feet which is a reduction of 78%.

 

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The major impact in real estate by e-commerce was seen in Bengaluru where the reduction was as big as 95%. In terms of office space rental by these firms, a total of 4 transactions were materialized which carried by Makemytrip and Redbus.

Comparatively, previous year, Flipkart and Amazon leased out 3.2 million sq feet of office space combined, except from booking.com, Tinyowl and Groupon pitching in with huge deals. There was less reduction faced by Delhi-NCR region as compared to other cities as office spaces rented out by e-commerce industries dropped down to 3.5 million sq feet from 3.7 million sq. feet respectively.

All across India, office space lease out increased by 12% to 20 million sq. feet from 17.9 million in the last year. Viral Desai said that e-commerce segment had a share of 30% in overall office space absorption during 2015. But their share has been dropped significantly in the first six months of 2016.  The growing pace of e-commerce players is becoming more challenging.

 

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Meanwhile, Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma hinted at massive unification in Indian ecommerce space, as according to him, 2 major players i.e. Amazon and Paytm will remain in the market within coming 6-9 months.

He says that e-commerce business as well as its market is reaching the maturity of the players. In coming months, the key contenders of this business will get revealed. In order to fight with Amazon, a strategic player is needed and which is why it makes sense for people to align with Alibaba v/s a lot of others.

Apart from this, he also informed that Paytm’s new E-commerce unit is going to be there anytime soon till Diwali this year. They will make separate marketplace and then raise funds which means looking up to acquiring correct optimum sized companies to become big.

 

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Paytm’s only aim is converging on their payment bank apart from expansion of user base of their mobile wallet. Talking about unification, there is a possibility that Flipkart and Paytm can combine their efforts to fight the might of Amazon in the near future. The concept became stronger after Flipkart started delivering the orders of Paytm through their dedicated logistics branch Ekart.

Is Paytm and Flipkart going to merge this coming diwali to create a new e-commerce entity? We will soon find out.

Source Url :-

http://surevin.com/blog/e-commerce-firms-stopped-renting-office-spaces-paytm-hints-unification-e-commerce-market/

12 Million Jobs to be created by E- commerce in coming Decade

The limit of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) for individual companies that are listed with Indian Stock Exchange has been increased from 5 to 15%. This decision was in accordance with the promise made by finance minister Arun Jaitely in the budget speech in February which was focused at attracting more investments from foreign bodies so that they get on par with the ones made by domestic entities.

 

Global competitiveness of Indian exchange will rise up because of this move as Indian markets will experience best in class practices of foreign exchanges.

 

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With the advent and hike of e-commerce giants in India, this front is expected to build 12 million jobs in the next 10 years in the country, according to HSBC study. India is trying to create estimation of 50% of the number of jobs in coming 10 years. On having 12 million jobs will result in 20 million “gross” jobs in customer care, logistics& delivery, management and IT sector.

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Accelerated growth e-commerce services and of online retail stores has resulted in considerable losses for mom n pop stores. Studies reveal that India will follow China’s footsteps by bringing the village merchants into the e-commerce sector through which around 5 million village traders will benefit.

 Image Courtesy:-www.economictimes.indiatimes.com

The time when Apple’s universal business was slowing down because of reversals in china, India provided them the hope for a better future in this field. Apple CEO Tim Cook earlier said that India is a fastest growing economy and the sales of iPhone, Mobile n Apps in India have shot up to 51% on every year basis. Yesterday Cook confirmed the company’s plan to open its retail stores in India. He said that there is a wide potential in a country like India and that they look forward to open a retail store in this vibrant country.

 

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Source Url:-
http://surevin.com/blog/12-million-jobs-created-e-commerce-coming-decade/