Stridec: Driving Business Success with E-Commerce
Alva Chew, Founder Many companies—including est-ablished brands and corp-orations—still have a vague or superficial understanding of the impact that e-commerce brings to their business. More often than not, the conversation about e-commerce within these organizations are hovering around only tactile considerations such as adding a shopping cart function to the business’ existing website or providing an online payment option. A large proportion of B2B companies still regard that e-commerce has nothing to do with their business and do not have immediate plans to explore the possibilities, despite that B2B e-commerce growth trends in recent years have shown exactly otherwise.
Stridec, an e-commerce consultancy and solutions company headquartered in Singapore, advocates that e-commerce is the key communication language that businesses and customers engage with in the digital age.
Through its “Awesome in B.E.D.” program, a proprietary methodology that helps businesses address and streamline the three key pillars of branding, e-commerce and digital marketing. Stridec helps businesses become attuned and aligned to an “e-commerce state of mind”, elevating their understanding of e-commerce to a holistic and strategic level, allowing them to achieve management readiness, technological readiness, as well as operational readiness in the process. “Having an ‘e-commerce state of mind’ allows the business to be laser-focused in its brand messaging and galvanize the right set of technological and operational resources to achieve a leadership position in the market,” explains Alva Chew, Founder of Stridec.
Becoming e-commerce enabled or optimized is more than just taking the business’ existing offline operating model and translating it directly to online. At the start of its program, Stridec’s consultants take the client through a series of discovery consultation sessions to determine the core essence of the client’s business positioning and offering. Once identified, the brand message is crafted, strengthened and manifested through the crafting of workflows and processes that make up the e-commerce user experience.
Stridec helps businesses get “Awesome in B.E.D.” to achieve success in the digital age
At the same time, Stridec’s developers will look into either upgrading the client’s existing website or build an entirely new one, to effectively communicate the e-commerce user experience to the client’s customers.
Last but not least, Stridec provides knowledge and training resources, as well as service retainers where required, to get the client up to speed on the marketing and operational front - in areas such as digital marketing, social engagement, pre-sales assistance, customer service, technical support and logistics among others - to ensure smooth running and continuity of the e-commerce ecosystem.
Many companies have benefited from Stridec’s program. One such company is an established fire protection solutions provider in Singapore that aims to advocate the message of fire safety awareness and protection to the general public through an e-commerce platform. Consumers can easily access relevant information and resources, sign up for workshops or courses to learn more about fire safety, as well as buy gadgets and tools for fire protection needs in both homes and offices.
Through its program, Stridec has also helped businesses already active in e-commerce to reach even greater heights. An example is a watch retailer that has been selling watches online via eBay and Amazon Marketplace for years but concerned with a lack of control over its customer base, payments, and leverage against these huge e-commerce platforms. Stridec helped the client build its own network of e-commerce sites and put in the required systems, supporting infrastructure, as well as digital marketing resources, to control the entire customer communication process. In a few short years, sales from its own e-commerce sites overtook that of eBay and Amazon Marketplace.
Committed to the belief that e-commerce is the future of business, Stridec is setting its sights on regional expansion in 2017, with a stronger presence in particularly Indonesia and Malaysia, to cater to the rising demand for quality e-commerce solutions. So far, the results have been promising; already, a Japanese MNC has engaged Stridec to plan and execute a global rollout of its e-commerce initiative scheduled for the later half of this year.
The signs for e-commerce ascension are everywhere; businesses would do well not to ignore them and should start making immediate plans to tackle and harness it before the competition does. To those who are still unconvinced, Alva Chew has only this to say: “in today’s digitized economy, business and e-commerce are synonymous; get with it, or get out.”
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