17 advantages of eCommerce to business that you can’t ignore
There is no one on the planet who can deny that online business has boomed exponentially in recent times, especially after the pandemic when every physical store was closed, online business got its big push, and Amazon literally doubled its income when the offline stores were facing losses. There are several examples of only online businesses like GymShark, Maverick, Indian brand Nykaa, etc. that have seen so much growth in no time. Those success stories show the possibilities and advantages of eCommerce to businesses that a modern-day business owner should be asking for.
Yeah! we don’t deny the fact that offline stores have helped your business a lot previously but this old-school approach will soon fall short in today’s competitive time especially when most of your competitors may have already started taking the benefits of eCommerce for their business. The best strategy today would be to have an eCommerce store along with a physical store to cater to your local customers with a human touch.
Here is one most important thing you should remember though it will be awesome to start as soon as possible as e-commerce is already a super competitive market and every possible business is coming to take its pie in the limitless opportunity of the online World coming early will help you capture the market.
What is eCommerce?
eCommerce is Selling and buying goods over the Internet. It started back in the late 60s and accelerated from 1995 with the birth of Amazon and eBay. There are 3 types of eCommerce present in today’s world
B2B: When a product is sold to a business for commercial purposes, it is called B2B business. Examples of B2B business owners are producers, retailers, and wholesalers. A consumer is absent here.
B2C: Here the product is sold to the end-user to be consumed.
C2B: When a customer sells his product to the business it becomes a C2B transaction. Examples of it can be affiliate marketers and drop shippers.
Now, that you know what eCommerce is and how it works let’s check the advantages of eCommerce to the business you can have over an offline-only approach.
what are Top advantages of eCommerce to businesses?
No border limitations
One of the biggest eCommerce advantages has to be crossing boundaries in less than a second. Most off-line business’s performance highly depends on the place it is situated, and you also cannot reach so many customers together in so little time. On the other hand, eCommerce is created to break those limitations. You will be able to sell products where ever you want whenever you want. The best thing is there is basically no limit to the number of customers you can handle at a time.
Sell from anywhere you want
If you want to operate a business from anywhere you want, without worrying about other things, and live a “Laptop Lifestyle”, selling on your own eCommerce platform can be a great idea.
Here you won’t have to think about going anywhere you will just need proper internet and a laptop and you will be good to go.
The search engine is your best friend
Everybody is searching online about what they are interested in and that’s a GOOD thing. Especially when you have an online presence even better if it’s a professional eCommerce type of website. Even if your physical store has a presence on maps through “Google My Business” it can only be found as nearby places.
If you want to do business beyond that area you need a more professional approach like a professional-looking eCommerce website. The advantages of eCommerce to business are far too many but these kinds of small things help a lot, especially in the starting days when you won’t have large search traffic, Your visitors will come from local search traffic and use your website, This will eventually increase your domain authority and eventually, you will be getting organic traffic.
Though there is one thing you should remember you should try to stay in the first 3 results of the first page of Google search results without it, you won’t get much organic traffic.
Low-cost barrier
The advantages of eCommerce to business get more clear when you Imagine yourself opening a physical store, You invest so much money on things like rent, repair, inventory, etc. When a store is totally new you barely make any sales and profits are completely another things at that time, Given this situation just think if all those things are necessary ?.
If you have been doing business for a while, taking the consideration that it is now doing good and quite well known and you have some employees helping you, you still have to spend money on things like scaling, salaries, renovations, etc. While on the other hand, you don’t have to spend that much money if it is on eCommerce. For both,
if it is an online-only e-commerce business where everything is online so you can save money on things stated above or an older business where you can grab more customers and lighten the crowd on your physical store at the same time which will help you with more profits and fewer costs coming from rents of a large store and employees helping you.
It is not that you don’t have to spend anything on eCommerce, Weather you are making your own eCommerce platform or selling on some other eCommerce platform like Amazon, you will have to spend on hosting and domain, and for third-party e-commerce platforms, you will need to give commissions but still a so small compared to the money you will spend for the physical store. If you are still thinking about taking your business online there are more reasons here.
Easy marketing
If you sell products for motorcyclists you won’t sell many products showing ads to car owners, so targeting is important when you are doing marketing. Try to think of one easy way to do that with a physical store and you won’t find many, Even if you manage to somehow do that it would bring so little to no ROI.
Meanwhile, other advantages of eCommerce to business come here to rescue with the help of PPC and digital marketing, Google and eCommerce sites have many targeting tools that can be used to know your customers according to their demographic and choice and help them by providing better solutions. Above all eCommerce being a visual medium it can be used to show infographics, videos, and images to increase interest among consumers.
Bigger profit margin
When you save money from those two places it cost most of it. You will save so much money saved that it will be seen on the overall profit graph. Which can be used to do paid campaigns like PPC ads and search ads. That will bring you traffic which will be beneficial for your website to the search engine in the long run.
More traffic means higher sales figures and reduced costs. That means an even bigger profit margin.
Huge on-tapped customer base
There are even more benefits of eCommerce that you just can’t even think of while doing offline business, Think about it just about 26.28 percent of people shop online which means most people are still not buying things online that suggests there is still so much untapped potential in the market. From a store, you can only reach your local customers and with some referrals of your customers, you can reach new people and send them your products. This process is not only lengthy and hard it’s also, inefficient and can’t produce that much ROI.
Taking your business online triumphs here too, With the help of e-commerce, you would be able to reach all sets of customers through different sets of channels promoting your products.
For example, let’s say you sell fertilizers and farming tools, as the small videos are popular in rural areas and this is where most of the farms are you can use short videos for TikTok, InstaReels, YouTube Shorts to cater to the needs of your audience and solving there issues while promoting your products in your eCommerce store. It will not only bring you more profits but it will also create a community where you will be able to sell your future products.
Available around the clock
Before going to the next reason for taking your business online answer this-how long do you keep your store open is it open 24×7 365 days no right? Even if you do this you will need to spend more on employees and the maintenance cost will skyrocket as you will be using your appliances so much now. Now that the advantages of eCommerce to business are just too many another one for it can be being able to stay available around the clock.
People can be online from 1 pm to 9 am and still can get converted into customers. Do you physically capable enough to do this? if you take help from eCommerce you will not lose customers during the times you are closed
Space for product showcase
Every eCommerce platform is super visual. You can put information like product size color finish fit everything that your customers might be interested in knowing, in a very eye-pleasing manner with photos and videos. Not only this, a well-made eCommerce website is capable of showcasing product diversity very brilliantly.
It is quite hard to do with a physical store. Making a well-made website, for example, it needs to be easy for them to find a product or information, interact with page elements, compare items and checkout, etc, making a website like this is on the harder side but with WordPress, it is easier but, to get that professional look an eCommerce website made from scratch with code is better. You can do that yourself or you can take help from us, We have years of expertise in that field that will help you make a website that will get results quickly.
If you want to make your own eCommerce website from scratch or with WordPress we can help you with both, you can ask us for a completely FREE if you want any help.
The best thing about eCommerce is that you will get to share your products on social media, from where people will come and sell the beautifully decorated showcased products category-wise, from there they can even end up buying multiple products.
Shop for convenience
There can be several reasons why people prefer buying online, and one of them is obviously staying safe which we saw during the pandemic other reasons can be, convenience, The convenience of shopping from home returns system, etc, are a few examples of conveniences. With the help of rich features of current-gen eCommerce platforms, businesses are able to satisfy their customers.
Personalization for customers
When you buy a book from Amazon you get a small card with a small message on it, you know it’s generic and probably everyone gets it but still, you like it. That is the magic of personalized marketing.
Epsilon did a survey that shows that 80% of people like to buy products from companies that brings something personal to them. If people show interest in your personalized messages they are more likely to purchase from you. People who get influenced by those messages are more likely to become your most faithful customers. If you provide some personal offers like “birthday discounts”, “First-time purchase promotions”, “loyalty programs” or any customizations, you will get some of the most loyal customers and so many referrals from them.
Several payments methods
We have already said people love PERSONALIZATION it’s no different for the part of the payment. Taking your business online will give your customers the option of paying however they like UPI, cash on delivery, card on delivery, net banking, EMIs on credit or debit cards, and pay-later credit facility.
How this will help you? You no longer have to lose potential customers due to a lack of available payment methods.
Customer insights
If you want your customers to feel great while shopping or while receiving their products, what you definitely should want to, If you want them to be your lifelong customers you would want to enhance their user experience so much that, even if they don’t want to buy anything from you, they should visit your eCommerce app just to check as it looks good, it is the most important thing.
THEY SHOULD VISIT YOUR ECOMMERCE SITE EVEN IF THEY DON’T WANT TO BUY ANYTHING.
You would want this to happen because even when they don’t have any intention to buy and still they buy stuff anyway, you just got a conversion without putting any effort.
It will only be possible when you have a great user experience. Like for example, amazon uses colors like (1)Black(2)Blue, and (3) Orange. Black influences superiority, which shows its superiority over competitors, blue brings a very calm feeling that suggests you stay on the website and Orange brings enthusiasm which influences you to buy stuff, all of them together bring a nice user experience, though the Colour Theory is still a theory and NOT proven by science, most of the brands use this and you should too if you want a great user experience like Uber uses black to come as the professional-looking superior choice.
The “catch” here is you have to Know Your Customer to give them a legendary user experience For that you need to require Customer insights, if you use eCommerce, the advantage will be being able to collect data and understand it so easily. It gets even easier to track and interact with them. We also have data analytics tools such as Google Analytics, to collect data like your customer’s age, gender, location, profession, interests, etc, and how they interact with your website.
You can use all those data to improve your user experience which in turn will influence them to come to your website and buy your products bringing you more and more profits in no time. It is only possible with customer insights.
This is another reason why you should be taking your business online.
Firstly you would need to be able to collect data and understand it. Online selling makes it much easier to track customers, collect data, have interactions, and analyze them.
Recurring Customers
While talking about the benefits of eCommerce for business some things will resemble your offline business counterpart. For example how many of your everyday customers are new customers? most of them are your regular recurring customers, right?
The same goes for eCommerce. You literally have so much of their information from the time that visit when they purchased an item. It will be super easy for you to re-target them. The user info collected from them will be used to influence their interest to buy it. Interests can be increased by doing things like coupon sharing and special discounts.
Better customer support
No one can forget the effective customer support system of eCommerce while talking about the advantages of eCommerce to businesses and customers that it can provide far better customer support compared to its offline counterpart. Here they can read reviews, get their FAQs answered, give complaints if they don’t like anything, and even give super effective real reviews that will eventually increase sales.
You will also be able to give them the solutions they are looking for that will increase their trust and the feel of more human touch also helps to increase conversions
Improve your brand image
Now when almost everyone has a website having an eCommerce platform gives you a competitive edge over others. On the other hand, if you don’t have an eCommerce presence, You can’t blame your customers when they can’t take you seriously and go to your competitors who have a professional-looking website and effective online presence.
Above all, you should have an online presence because everyone is looking online to find the things they’re interested in so everyone expects you to have a professional-looking online presence.
Scalability
As every business wants to grow big and spread its feet around the world. If a large group of customers flocks into your store you won’t be able to treat them all because of the physical size of the store and the limited number of staff members you have.
If you have read all the things above you know how eCommerce will bring you, customers, in thousands of eCommerce you won’t have any problems handling those and this is what will grow your userbase gradually. Which is not possible in a physical store. So scalability is the topmost important reason why you should use eCommerce for your business.
Wrap Up
Here are the advantages of eCommerce to business. If you own a physical store or just to have an online-only presence these are the things that will help you. If you have very limited technical knowledge and need help in taking your business online you can ask us for a free consultation. If you still are confused about the benefits of eCommerce for business, we assure you that this is the most helpful and easiest way for a business to grow.