By Hasnain Zaheer

It's time to lift the e-veil. Behind those PCs that are her gateway to the marketspace you are creating, she's been kind of anonymous all this time. Let's face it: your innovative e-commerce strategies, your hot on-line buying technology, your nifty Webpage design, even your low-cost product offering-none of these will amount to anything unless you know just who your e-customer is. How many of her kind there are. What inspires her and what inhibits her. What attracts her and what repels her.

Sure, every venture on the Net is, in its very essence, global. But as the global experience shows, every successful e-venture gets an overwhelming majority of customers from within its own geographical shores. Will that be the situation in India too? Yes-and no. No, because on-line products and services directed at the Non-Resident Indian population, obviously, have a market outside the country. But that's for the niche players. For anyone who wants to command the marketspace in India, it has to be by catering to the needs of the resident Indian.

Who, then, is she? To find out, International Data Corporation (IDC) India-part of the well-known global infotech researchers IDC Group-conducted a massive countrywide survey of Net-customers. Covering 13 major cities across the country-Delhi, Calcutta, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Bhubaneshwar, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Kanpur, Pune, and Surat-IDC polled 4,122 respondents, consisting of both users and non-users of the Net, across the corporate, government, education and research, and home segments.

The objective of the survey was to capture the usage pattern, to figure out the factors driving the medium, and the barriers to usage. An extract of the survey results has been presented exclusively to BT by Utpal Ghosh, IDC's Manager (Consumer Research). The numerical profile of what drives India's e-customers is interpreted by BT.

THE BIG PICTURE. Your e-customer universe in India will grow at least as fast as you expected it to and, given the explosion of ISP services taking place at present, even faster. IDC expects the number of Net connections alone to climb from 5.2 lakh in March, 1999, to 11.41 lakh in December, 2000. How many users-each a potential customer for e-Commerce and other Net-related businesses-does that translate into?

Well, back in July, 1999, when the total subscriber-base stood at 3.1 lakh, the corporate sector represented 73 per cent of these accounts. Educational and research institutes, and government accounted for another 8 per cent while the home segment made up the rest of the remaining 19 per cent.

Assume that those proportions stay unchanged-although the home segment is likely to grow faster than the rest-and you'll have, in December, 2000, 7.33 lakh commercial accounts, and 1.06 lakh home accounts. Now, BT's estimates reveal that the average number of surfers per account in corporate India stands at 16 while the corresponding figure for the home, going by demographic trends, is likely to be. Add to that the probability of at least 20 people using each of the 42,000 institutional accounts, and the outcome is an actual user-base of 71.64 lakh people in March, 2000-rising to around 1.76 crore customers in March, 2001.

How large is that? For comparison, consider the fact that the National Council of Applied Economic Research estimates the topmost slice of India's consumption pyramid-people with household incomes of over Rs 5 lakh per annum-as numbering just 21.77 lakh individuals. And this is the segment at which marketers target their premium consumer product brands.

In other words, there are already more than thrice as many customers in India's Netspace as in the premium segment. Sure, there's a degree of overlap between home and office-users as some people surf from both places. But even so, the on-line population is large enough to be an addressable customer segment.

HOME IN ON THE HOME SEGMENT. For, if you're operating in the B2C space, this is where much of your business is going to come from. The home-user of the Net is, usually, on the lookout for new Web experiences, and anything that you do to communicate, or do commerce, with her will be received positively.

True, the penetration of the Net among PCs in the home segment is still an extremely low 9 per cent-although that only talks of the potential yet to be tapped. What's more, not all of these households even use their own Net connections, with an average of 35 per cent of families using others' accounts-half of them being company accounts, and the rest being equally distributed between friends' and borrowed accounts. But what this distribution implies is that usage is outstripping supply, which, in turn, signifies that the right pricing and service from ISPs could lead to a boom in usage.

So, the chances of the home segment's growing are high. To figure out just how fast this base can grow, monitor 3 critical factors: whether phone rentals are falling-72 per cent of India's e-customers will use the Net more if they do, whether Net access charges are dropping-62 per cent-and whether access speed is improving-55 per cent.

Of course, the barriers to customer-entry into the marketspace remain high. Cost, lack of time, lack of interest, and unwillingness to tie up the phone are among the principal reasons.

But, significantly, the Net is also perceived as a provender of unwelcome influence, with as many as one out of 6 people citing moral and cultural factors for refusing to log on. Being more intangible than connectivity bottlenecks, these are the obstacles that may take much longer to be removed.

Which of their on-line habits can you leverage? Remember, for starters, that Netspace traffic peaks on the weekends: while 46 per cent of this group of customers enters cyberspace at least 3 times a day on weekdays, the proportion climbs to 53 per cent on weekends. And the total time that is spent on the Net increases too. That's the time to offer your best deals and reveal your USP-besides, of course, accounting heavier customer traffic.

However, you have to make sure that your best e-offering pops up on your customer's screen, after factoring in the slow connection speeds in India, within 5 minutes of your customer hitting your Website. For, the highest proportion of customers in this segment-30 per cent-spends between 10 and 15 minutes at any Website, and only 5 per cent stay longer.

Thus, if you expect to conclude any kind of e-transaction at a single setting, it has to be done within 15 minutes. Ensure, therefore, that your e-Commerce software is simple enough for a purchase to be made within this timespan. Beware: not every e-Biz venture has yet managed to implement so quick a system, given the slow download rates in the country.

e-COMMERCE INERTIA. Wondering how good your chances are of conducting B2C transactions? You need a lot of patience. As things stand, only 20 per cent of the home segment is even aware of e-Commerce although the gap between awareness and action is quite low in India: 1 out of every 7 e-customers who know about e-Commerce have actually purchased things off the Net. Predictably, the products that the e-customers are most likely to have bought are computer-related items and books.

What is it that's holding people back? Inertia, for one: 44 per cent are too comfortable with their traditional mode of shopping to feel the need to shift. And 42 per cent are unsure about the quality of what they'll get while 37 per cent complain of a lack of sufficient range of products and services. Looking for geographic focus? Try Mumbai first, which is India's most e-Commerce-aware city-followed by Calcutta and Delhi.

The conclusion for e-ntrepreneurs: home-shopping on the Net has already made a beginning in India. Right now, the potential-of the number of on-line customers in the country, as well as of the proportion that can be converted to Net-shopping-outweighs performance. However, the universe is still large enough To be a targetable customer segment.

Don't let it e-lude you.

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