Successful marketing depends upon addressing a number of key issues. These include what a company is going to produce; how much it is going to charge; how it is going to deliver its products or services to the customer; and how it is going to tell its customers about its products and services. For the benefit of our readers from other fields, we will like to define the 4 p’s in Marketing especially how they apply to eCommerce.
The P’s are ;
Price
Place
Promotion
Product.
Price: A product is only worth what customers are prepared to pay for it. The price also needs to be competitive, but this does not necessarily mean the cheapest. Low quality products are more often than not cheaper, some people may beg to differ, but let’s keep that discussion for another post. Setting competitive pricing for eCommerce has now become a science with the advent of data driven decision making process which is complex but gives significant advantage over traditional methods.
Place (Distribution): This entails getting the products to the consumer. The product must beavailable at the right place and at the right time. In case of eCommerce this will mean categorized appropriately on your website and all the marketplaces you sell.
Promotion: This is where advertising comes to play and all the other elements of marketing communications. There are tons of promotion possibilities online but is a detail topic on its own.
Product: Refers to both tangible and intangible (Goods and Services) that meet the needs of the consumer. For eCommerce it also means doing justice to the product by providing appropriate content/images to ensure customers understand the value of the product.
The elements of the marketing mix must work together for a business to survive, none should work in isolation.