Electronic commerce, or e-commerce for short , is the electronic environment in which the promotion, advertisement and trade of goods and services are made , that emerged with the increase in internet usage towards the end of the 1990s. Global e-commerce connections enable SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) to be more involved in world trade. In the mean time , electronic commerce for consumers , through the inscrease in product variety means , that the price of the products decrease while the quality of the products rise, and for the producers , that it provides minimum operating costs, easy market, easy advertising and one-to-one marketing of the products. E-commerce tools are ; technological products such as telephone, fax, computer, electronic payment, money transfer systems, electronic data exchange systems and internet. With these tools, e-commerce; has become a popular element with its lower cost , faster and easy distribution, cheapness, as well as its attractiveness. The branding process, which normally takes ten years, has been reduced to two years with the help of e-commerce tools and its global impact. Today, we see that there are tens of e-companies established a few years ago are in the list of the "World's Top 500" companies.
Currently, the number of people using e-commerce in the world has exceeded 12 million. Electronic commerce provides instant access to information, products and services offered over the internet from anywhere in the world, and it eliminates all kinds of time and place problems that restrict shopping with its infrastructure that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Being close to the physical market, which plays an important role in the establishment of businesses, has almost completely lost its importance with electronic commerce. In the global world, all products, services and information are now one click away from people. Of course, this situation provides dynamism in the market and brings a global rise to the economy. Looking at the past years, it would not be wrong to say that the global e-commerce volume could be around 2 trillion dollars in 2016. In Turkey, the e-commerce turnover volume reached 18.9 billion TL in 2015. In 2016, I predict that this figure will exceed 31 billion TL for our country. However, despite all these developments, we are not yet at the level of a developed country in electronic commerce. With the increase in mobile devices such as tablets, phones and smart wearings, I believe that the increase in mobile commerce is inevitable. We know that mobile shopping is increasing in countries where technological developments are strong and mobile internet is fast. Considering that Turkey has reached 4G mobile internet speed in this respect, I think that our country will also start to rise in the mobile shopping segment.
E-commerce, which creates equality of opportunity in distribution of services or products , shortly the resource produced in the market, also reduces the cost for the seller with the virtual market application. The important thing in e-commerce is to apply the right advertising policy by providing quality service. In this regard, social media, which covers a large part of human life today, is in a position to help e-commerce in advertising. Social media is very successful in creating a positive or negative perception about the brand while increasing brand awareness. which all companies that are small or large have to care about,. However, although social media ads are in a profitable position among the mobile marketing trends of 2016, I think that social media will continue to be an important advertising channel and cannot be an e-commerce platform.
It is said that e-commerce sector has difficulties in attracting foreign investors. But I do not agree with this view. Today, foreign brands are opening their online sites in Turkey, and even traditional stores have started to create their own e-commerce sites. This change will continue to increase in the coming years and the development process of e-commerce sector will proceed in a positive direction. By eliminating producer intermediary institutions completely with e-commerce, it offers the opportunity to reach the consumer directly in a faster and more reliable environment. In my opinion , it is a very exciting development that the consumers can reach the service they are looking for more easily, search for quality and price more easily, and complete their shopping, almost completely eliminating the time and space problem in the globalizing world.
As AKINSOFT, we penetrated the market in a timely and powerful manner, realizing that the e-commerce awareness has matured in our geography and the countries we export to and through a growth process in this regard. In particular, we have been keeping e-commerce at the forefront in the workshops we have held since the beginning of 2016.
AKINSOFT is a trusted and successful software company in the field of e commerce , as well as its other works , with more than 2000 Solution Partners in 24 countries. AKINSOFT has gained a solid place in this market with our New Generation E-Commerce software, which is capable of meeting the requirements of the industry, with its easy use, fast access to needs and its integrated working structure with many payment channels.
I wish you all days with New Generation E-Commerce.