Is India ready for E-Commerce in a niche area?

India has traditionally been a country where most shopping is done on neighborhood shops or unorganized markets. But with a booming economy, a young population well versed with internet and increasing purchasing power. It is likely that businesses are sure to operate online.

Indian customers are skeptical about purchasing products online; therefore, for an online portal the most important thing would be to build trust. A recent study has shown 70% of the customers on these websites are repeat customers. Once a level of trust is achieved a website’s business could grow exponentially.

There are many websites operating already Flipcart.com, olx.com, superbazaar.com, etc all already there and with Amazon coming in soon there is intense competition with big giants already.  In the midst of all competition small businesses could find a suitable business opportunity in niche area.

Take the example of T-shirts, there are numerous websites selling only T-shirts in India. Or daily deals websites, there is a multi-million dollar industry in India already. This business model can be implemented in other niche areas like groceries, furniture, shoes, etc.

Internet marketing takes E-commerce to a different level. Though it is in its emerging stage in India, once broadband and internet goes deep, it will be play a major role in deciding how the business can be done in India. Soon the generic market will saturate and there will be a need for selling products in niche market areas. Adapting to different thinking, their acceptance to technology and their approach towards buying things online of course, needs to be addressed.

Yawer

Developer E-nova Technologies

Front End Development Code – (Is exactly for Front End view only?) -

If properly written “Reduce time and overhead for a web agency as well” !!!

As many people think that Front End Development is only useful to make web sites enrich in colors, styles etc and to apply CSS to make the web pages beautiful, but there is a BACK END view for Front End code also.

Back End view is no where defined or a legal term, but this is what I consider in terms of Cleanliness and the way of presenting the HTML/CSS code in a formatted way. So that it can be well understood while implementation by a Back End Developer.

The way of presentation of the code is I think a very important in the life cycle of a Front End Developer. Like a Front End Developer write CSS code to make the web pages beautiful, same as he/she also take care of the Commented code for well implementation.

A CSS file can be look like –

.my-class{color:#fff; font-size:12px;font-family:arial,helvatica;font-weight:bold;text-decoration:none;}

And in another way –

.my-class{

color: #fff;

font-size: 12px;

font-family:arial,helvetica;

font-weight: bold;

text-decoration: none;}

Similarly a HTML code can we well presented by commented code which help the developer to easily locate the desired code or block.

Many developers never focus on enhancing the quality of CSS/XHTML which results in time consuming activities while website maintenance and re-development activities.

It is not always possible that a web site which is developed by a web agency, is also be maintained by the same web agency. Maintenance is very crucial when is come to the front end enhancement. If the Front End code is not properly written, it may take several hours to first understand and apply the new styles.

So a neat, properly written and well commented Front End code is easy to maintain and majority of times save the developer’s time and web agency overheads.

Rahul

Developer E-nova Technologies

DRUPAL CAMP NEW DELHI 2011

Drupal Camp Delhi 2011

Well, last Saturday (April 16), I went to the first ever Drupal camp in Delhi. I wished for a Drupal camp for a long and finally it happened. Well, it’s a pleasure to see active Drupalers here and to discover the talents of each individual. I don’t call myself even a half of what they are, so for me it was an experience to gain free knowledge and exposure to various new techy stuff.

I would like to give a short introduction of the topics discussed on the camp:

Multimedia in Drupal 7

This Media module along with some other modules collaborating with each other provides comfortable platform for handling video, images, audio and other filetypes and 3rd party services like Flickr, Youtube, Picasa…etc.
This module will be a great help for admin as well as developer. Rich media module earlier used to a divided world, having too many modules to choose from as there was no single exact solution we are looking for. Thus the idea behind media module is to use same library for flash embedding, video trans-coding or audio trans-coding. You can find Media module at http://drupal.org/project/media.

Introduction to Open Publish

As the tag line of open publish says –“Power of Drupal for today’s online publishing.” It is a Drupal flavour suitable for magazines, newspapers, journals, trade publications, broadcast, wire service, membership publications.

Hudson/Jenkins in your development process

For Continuous integration (CI) Hudson is great choice and is extremely easy to use.
The target for using hudson is to control quality of software and in turn reduce the development cycle time of the software. Hudson was originally designed to work with java but with but with few hacks and plug-ins we can make it do good stuff for us.
For more information: http://fourkitchens.com/blog/2010/05/09/drop-cron-use-hudson-instead
Thus Hudson is gaining high popularity in Drupal community for its easy to use tools for automation and monitoring repetitive build tasks.  The Best thing about Hudson is that it can manage plug-ins all using GUI.

Domain access in drupal

Vidhatha from E-nova Dream Team at the Drupal Camp Delhi 2011

Running affiliated group of sites using single Drupal installation with a single shared database. Yes that the awesomeness of Drupal. Drupal is well blessed with rapid development structure, thus in big multisite projects domain access can be used to cut down the development cost to a handsome amount. This is useful in projects where there are many sub-sites with almost same look and feel (content types) but each one of them has different content to be published by different users. Using Domain access module one can share user, content and configurations across the group of sites. And with the Domain prefix module more control over the database tables can be implemented as it allows selective, dynamic table prefixing. The concept of active domain in Domain access determines the user access based on the current active domain that user is viewing rather than checking the belonging of the user to the domain. As per Drupal 7 up-gradation is considered it can be done very smoothly following few simple steps. For case study on domain access click here.

See what E-nova is doing with the Multi-site E-nova Drupal Distribustion.

Ravish
(Web Developer) E-nova Technologies

Neemrana Hotels: Drupal Project

Neemrana Hotels

Neemrana Group of Hotels had a website presenting their hotels and integrated booking system. They are known for restoring old heritage, turning it into magnificent hotels and manage its uniqueness. With the old website, it was not very efficient to increase the visibility of all the properties. The presentation needed to be enhanced and moreover managing of the website needed IT persons.

E-nova was asked to propose a new website with improved design and which included all the existing functionalities. One of the most important tasks was to improve viewer’s interaction with the website. The clients wanted to manage the contents of the website easily, so Enova proposed to use DRUPAL (open source content management system).

Major tasks performed:

Multi-Domain Website:

Each of the Neemrana Hotels has a unique blend of royal experience and rich hospitality. So we created a website with multiple domains. (It gave the advantage of using one codebase for different websites managed centrally.)

The key for the new website was not only to focus on the Neemrana Hotels brand, but also to put the focus on each of the properties. A simple page of description is definitely not sufficient.

Each property will have a page describing its history, one presenting the rooms which with a filter system for price and number of occupants, and another one presenting the services. Each room will also have its own page displaying its details.

Content Management System:

The solution developed by E-nova was based on a CMS (Content Management System).

A CMS gives a lot of advantages:

The updates to the site can be easily done by a non-technical person.

A lot of flexibility to modify and add more features in the future.

Contents for all the Hotels could be managed by the clients.

Code optimized for Search Engine Optimization which will be Drupal based in addition to the modules developed by E-nova.

Improvement of the design

The website focused on the Unique Selling Proposition of each property, its history, and gives a good outlook of the facilities and services provided. To make it more user interactive Java script, flash etc was used.

The color scheme of the website was selected keeping in mind the historical prospective of the Neemrana hotels and of course the advertising details provided by Neemrana Group.

Addition of new features:

When a new website is launched, it generally loses its visibility in Google. And for this, a proper Search Engine Optimization is required. But, the website developed by Enova is designed keeping all possibilities into consideration.

To visit the website, login at Neemrana Hotels.

Shruti
Project Manager at E-nova Technologies

Article about E-nova in the French magazine Entreprendre

Special Report on Outsourcing by Entreprendre Magazine

Entreprendre Magazine presented E-nova Technologies in  Decembre 2010 edition. This special report lists all the advantages that come with the Outsourcing process especially when it’s for the development of a new website or ecommerce. Please check the full article here.

As explained, the magazine shows that outsourcing solutions are increasingly integrated in conventional processes of project management. It is now very easy to work with offshore partners, even if he is based in another country. Internet shortens the distances and creates a direct link that will facilitate your everyday work.

We made the choice to settle down in Delhi for this exact reason. And we may say that it was the best choice for us since we have now numerous customers and we manage a great number of website development projects every single working week.

If you want to learn more about our Offshore Web Agency, please check our main website or read the article written by the Magazine Entreprendre!

Want a bike ride in mythic Royal Enfield ? Discover the new website of Vintage Rides

The site being developed on the CMS Drupal, any member of Vintage Rides team can update easily the website through a dedicated management dashboard. They can add new content and inform their customers about the availability of new raids on motorcycle all over India.

We invite you to go to their site and visit the products gallery to see the offers of this amazing travel agency.

E-nova Technologies

Click On French, our online French course was on TF1 (a very popular French Channel) today

Click On French - learn french online

Click On French is our famous online French course that we have launched in India a few years ago, and which today is used by some 20,000 students worldwide.

At the occasion of the French president M.Sarkozy visiting India, TF1 was interested to show to the French audience why thousands of students are learning French on Internet, and who is the Indo-French team behind the website. The reportage explains how, thanks to Click On French, several thousands of people in India can now access to a quality and affordable online French course.

Thanks to the journalists who have not just been very professionals, but also very nice !!! Because we are also nice, we’ll give them a free registration

E-nova has just released a new Drupal module : CustomSlogan

We are proud to announce the release of a new Drupal module developed by E-nova : CustomSlogan.

The module allows to have a custom slogan on a drupal website, there is no module to handle it with this much flexibility on drupal.org. The modules admin form allows you to set slogans using *tokens for each content type, each vocabulary, front page and a default slogan. It overrides the slogan from theme variable (vars['site_slogan'] ) .

In addition to it the module also provides a text field in all nodes/terms for content types/vocabulary for which custom slogans are enabled from admin page of the module. The slogans at module and term level will override the pattern set for the content type/vocabulary.

This module comes additionally to our 3 others popular modules :  JMyCarousel, JMyPuzzle, et MagicLink

To discover Custom Slogan, it’s here : http://www.enova-tech.net/eng/lab/custom_slogan

For the records, We have developed this module for the SEO needs of a website that we manage : Bali Premium. You can see the result at the top of each page where a custom tagline/slogan is. And thanks to Vidhat, Drupal lead at E-nova, for his efforts and efficiency in the module development.

We hope that this module is just one more among many others to come, contributing to a philosophy in which we strongly believe : The Open Source.

Certificates: OpenERP Functional and Technical training held @ E-nova Technologies NewDelhi

A very sucessfull OpenERP Functional and Technical training session held @ E-nova Technologies from 28 june – 13 july. Each student is presented with a training completion certificate.  We have also organized a certification exam for the students of which  we have put 3 levels of grading as per

60-75% silver
75 – 85 % gold
85 % and above platinum

As shown below

Good news is that OpenERP belgium is soon going to start some similar certification exam for OpenERP.

Update:OpenERP Functional and Technical Training @ E-nova Technologies

OpenERP Training @ E-nova Technologies are going great . Students are getting more and more enthusiastic about OpenERP and opensource technologies and they seems thrilled with new innovations day by day. Considering functional we can compare them with someone having 1 year of experience as they have covered sales, purchase , manufacturing , finance , project management , HR management , CRM , Admin configuration and intrestingly they bring new ideas to be implemented everyday.

Today is the Third day of Technical Training and its going perfactly as per scheduled. Basic understanding of framework is almost covered . At the time of  writing this blog students are being taught using  functions and inheritance with OpenObject Framework. We are providing daily challenges to students to implement new feature based on thier understanding and more and compairing the  performances next day.