It’s 7 o’clock in the morning and Sarah is getting ready for work. She has just remembered that it’s her best friends’ Birthday tomorrow, and she hasn’t bought her anything! By the time Sarah finishes work all the shops will be shut. However, ecommerce can quickly solve this problem. Sarah goes online and orders her friend a lovely necklace with next day delivery. This is all done in the space of fifteen minutes, and she never had to leave the house. Selling products online has several significant advantages for you and your business.
Open 24/7
Unless you’re a major fast food chain or supermarket, it’s unlikely that you will have the money, time, staff or resources to be able to stay open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. For most businesses it wouldn’t make sense anyway. After all, how many people are trying to buy clothes on the high street at 3 in the morning? Not many. One of the greatest advantages of having an online store is that you never have to shut your doors. Your products are available for purchase all day, every day. Customers can make purchases right through the night. When you wake up and start your day, you can process the orders then. This means that you never miss out on a customer.
Global Reach
Traditional brick-and-mortar businesses are extremely limited in their reach. This is because customers have to come to them. Most customers won’t travel more than a few miles to buy something; hence geographical location really limits the reach of a business. This is not a problem with an ecommerce store. Anyone in the world can look at your site and buy the products.
It is up to you to decide which countries you will post your products to. If you had a UK-based ecommerce store selling handmade jewelry and you just decided to post to the UK, your customer base would be UK-wide. This is a far greater reach than you could have with a brick-and-mortar business. Even stores with dozens of branches across the country are missing out on customers that can’t or won’t travel to their store. People who sell digital products can sell to anyone in the world because the products are delivered digitally. Much Quicker Sales Cycle
Well-designed ecommerce sites allow customers to make purchasing decisions quickly and easily. However, this is not the case on every website. If you sell products over the internet, it is your responsibility to ensure that your website is user-friendly, simple and intuitive. If customers can find your products easily, then they are more likely to buy. Another element of the sales cycle is the payment methods. Nowadays, there are a number of excellent payment systems that you can use. Paying through systems like Paypal is quick, easy and secure.
Significantly Lower Costs
Today, everything from building your website to installing a shopping cart function can be done at an extremely low cost. In terms of staffing, it is much easier to initially run an online business from home yourself. When business picks up, you can easily employ other people to help you. The ecommerce system means that you are outsourcing much of the administration work to the customer – they pick their own product, they enter their own customer details and they make the payment. These are all things that you would be paying a member of staff to do in a physical store. You can even increase your site’s visibility on the search engines and promote your site for free yourself, providing you have the knowledge and the time.
No Initial Need for Premises
Many successful ecommerce businesses started out of the owner’s home or garage. As long as you’ve got some storage space if you’re selling physical products, you can quite easily run the business from home. When business really starts to pick up, premises can be rented or purchased. However, almost all physical businesses need premises before the business starts trading. If you’re selling shoes, people aren’t going to come to your home and try them on, you’ll need a shop. Premises are usually one of the most significant costs to any startup, and this cost can be avoided if you take the ecommerce route. Many business owners now combine the two: they have both a physical shop and a website.
Low Barriers to Entry
The internet has created much more of a level playing field for businesses. More or less anyone can set up a website. People with no knowledge of website coding can make impressive sites with software like Wordpress. In theory, you can compete with major retailers, although this is not an easy task. However, it is relatively easy to set up an ecommerce site, promote your business and get customers. Many small ecommerce businesses that started with just one person have grown to multi-million pound businesses in just a few years.
No Human Interaction
This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. However, if we look at this purely from a business and costing perspective, this is a huge advantage. No human interaction makes transactions simpler, faster and cheaper. Additionally, an increasing number of websites now use Live Support so that a technician or virtual sales assistant can assist customers with their purchases and handle any urgent queries. Obviously Live Support Software needs someone to provide the support, but this can be outsourced for a fraction of the cost of employing a customer services representative. Additionally, one person using Live Support software can deal with several customers at once.
As you can see, ecommerce has many unbeatable advantages. From having a global reach to being open all day, every day; these things are impossible or impractical for the vast majority of physical businesses. There are also considerable advantages in the areas of costing, efficiency, speed and simplicity. Technology is changing and improving quickly, so the systems that you need on your ecommerce website are constantly becoming cheaper, more efficient and more intuitive.
