Ecommerce market entry assessment in emerging markets

Recently, the use of electronic commerce or eCommerce, which means buying or selling products over electronic systems such as the Internet, has been largely growing and adopted worldwide. There are, though, a series of countries, especially, emerging countries where the eCommerce has been growing at a constant and high rate, which is expected to outperform the ones from the developed countries at the end of the current decade. This tesina has as its core objective to understand the way the eCommerce is developing and work in those emerging countries, such as China and India, as well as to assess the market entry of western companies into these markets. In order to grasp a whole picture of the inner workings of the eCommerce in the emerging economies, an in deep research with reference to the Chinese and the Indian eCommerce was conducted, where many different secondary sources such as academic papers, reports from leading market research firms, a vast amount of blogs and eCommerce news portals were consulted to obtain a reliable representation of what the current eCommerce in both India and China is, as well as its potential future in the coming years. After having portrayed the Indian and Chinese eCommerce main indicators, the Chinese one was selected to perform and in deep analysis, which contrary to the former one, it was focused understanding the micro perspective of how the eCommerce in China operates. In order to do that, different local articles and blogs were analyzed, where a special emphasis was placed on highlighting the main cultural differences that Chinese online shopper’s represent, which at the end are the main areas where western companies tend to erroneously approach. Once both the macro and micro perspective of the eCommerce in China was studied, an outline of the main factors concerning a successful entry strategy for a western company was established considering the entry method, marketing, distribution and other factors that reflect some of the main concerns that a new entrant must assess in order to craft a strategy on how to penetrate the Chinese market. Different white papers, books, articles and other sources served as the basis to depict each one of the factors already described and some case studies, containing examples of how leading western companies entered foreign eCommerce markets were added to reinforce and clarify the relevance of these drivers. Finally, in order to summarize the findings of the tesina, a rough roadmap was designed that stresses the importance of conducting and especially merging a macro with a micro analysis, that can serve as the main input, which if correctly assessed, can serve to define the main strategic factors to consider before defining a operational plan a new entrant can employ to enter an emerging country.