E-Commerce has become a popular choice for businesses either to run alongside their brick and mortar store or as their sole method of selling.
E-Commerce which is abbreviated from Electronic Commerce offers many businesses benefits for both themselves and their customers.
The Oxford Dictionary defines E-Commerce as ‘Commercial transactions conducted electronically on the internet.’
Our blog post will look at the advantages of E-Commerce and why it can help your business grow whilst saving your business money at the same time.
Ben Webster
Creative director at 1PCS. Addicted to design, SEO, pizza and helping companies big and small succeed online.
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24/7 Opportunity
An advantage of an E-Commerce business both for customers and your business is the ability to be selling 24 hours a day 7 days week. Potential customers can go to your online store anytime of the day and either browse your products or go ahead with making a purchase. Whether that be from mobile devices, tablet or desktop.
Whereas physical stores would only be able to trade during their open hours and even if happy to extend to longer hours, you then have the cost of needing sales associates to keep the physical store open. An Ecommerce business is always accessible, giving more opportunity for increased sales.
Another advantage to the customer is not having the need to travel to a a physical store. With the cost of fuel increasing, an Ecommerce business allows a shopper to easily make a purchase and look at products from the comfort of their own home with no costs to them.
Customer Testimonials
Not so obvious advantages of an Ecommerce website is the ability for your customers to leave you positive ratings and reviews for potential customers to see. It is typical for online shoppers to do research prior to making a purchase with product and price comparison.
Encouraging customers to leave a positive review will attract customers to shop online with your business. These reviews could also be featured in your social media marketing materials to attract even more customers to shop with your E Business.
When customers also leave positive reviews on Google as a result of their online shopping with you, this will equally help with your SEO to improve your organic ranking on Google.
Wider Customer Base
With brick and mortar shops you will typically reach new customers within a limited radius that people are happy to drive eg. 20 miles or perhaps more if it is an expensive purchase. When someone has to shop in person this will limit your geographical reach for your business.
Ecommerce websites allow for you to reach customers across the entire world if you wish to. This can be tailored to your business model for example could be UK wide, Europe or further afield for example to America and Asia. Without the need to hire employees to work in a brick and mortar store each time you are ready to expand your location.
Also with the ability for an online store to change quickly and easily best sellers and categorise their products, you can include as many products to your online business as you wish.
It is simple for a potential customer to search specifically for the product they are after and read at their own leisure the specifics about the item. This user functionality on an E-commerce site will likely widen your customer base further.
Reduced Costs
E-Commerce sites have significantly lower costs involved in comparison to opening offline stores. With mortar stores you will need sales equipment, physical storefront, a shop large enough to give you plenty of shelf space and sales associates to cover your opening times.
Business models which focus on their Ecommerce store won’t need any of the above, therefore businesses save money. So whilst there are costs involved to create an E-Commerce website, this is far outweighed by the benefits of E-Commerce.
Similarly as you expand E-Commerce advantages include being able to grow without limitations to your inventory. An online business sells as many products as it wishes at one time to work around them. E-Commerce businesses don’t ever run out of shelf space.
Consumer Trends
Other Ecommerce advantages with having an online commerce is it provides invaluable customer data from their shopping journey online. From the online sales you can delve into deep customer insights to help improve your business approach and sales in the future.
This will include supporting your pricing strategy and timing to create deals. The customer data will show you any market trends such as times of year particular products you have more sales of. Helping you to know when to increase your stock levels for those busy periods or when it might help to lower online prices to encourage sales in quieter periods.
With retail sales in brick and mortar stores it is harder to influence purchases of particular products. Whereas online businesses can feature best sellers on their home page, create deals for shopping online such as a limited time offer for a special deal or free delivery. Or showing how many are left in stock to tempt E-Commerce customers who don’t want to miss out on that product.
Targeted Communications
As part of our E-Commerce advantages to share in our blog, this is another important one. With the customer insights from online selling to customers via online stores it allows for the ability to re-target customers. With the ability to collect customer emails to create segmented customer lists to send a targeted marketing message.
The marketing message can include personal details such as their name and be made as bespoke as you wish such as referring to similar products to their recent purchase to entice them to become a repeat customer. With such personal touch on marketing materials, this can have a great impact to help grow your business online.
Facebook adverts are another great way to re-target your customers, with the ability to specifically target people who have visited your website. For example if they left something in their basket, the retargeting campaign is an impactful reminder that may lead to them completing their purchase.
How can we help?
We hope our blog post has been useful to show some of the many benefits of E-Commerce which could help your business to expand and grow with increased sales. From being able to sell online 24/7 to the business savings made with not having the costs of a brick and mortar stores. There are so many reasons to have an E-Commerce website for your business.
At 1PCS Creative our team are experienced at providing E-Commerce solutions for clients across many sectors and industries. Similarly if your current E-Commerce site needs a refresh or not performing as well as hoped, feel free to get in touch with our team. We would be happy to help and see where we can help your business.