For any business serious about expanding its market, utilizing an online store is a crucial step towards gaining customers and breaking traditional boundaries.
If you’re planning on making serious business advancements in the 21st century, taking advantage of an online store is not only an easy task but an axiomatic must-have feature. For the average business, sticking with a street store comes with a plethora of limitations to deal with. Not only are you limited to working hours, staff wages and a set location, but you’ve also got to handle a ton of overheads. That’s why any business (hopefully yourself) which understands the power of a good eCommerce store will not refuse the addition.
For those small businesses who still haven’t faced reality, the truth is, the world is moving online. Searching for a product in 2022 doesn’t typically involve searching the streets for a store, on the contrary, people do one thing. They reach for their pockets, unlock their phone and search google. Unfortunately, for every business which misses this reality, its sales will be immediately stolen by its major competitors and behemoths like Amazon. Those who do catch up, however, will not only be able to compete with competitors but will also find themselves rich in sales channels.
Because that’s what a website allows you to do. It allows you to remove the typical boundaries of location and expand your stores literally anywhere on the planet. Having a website also means that you can market your products globally. What was once a small newspaper advertisement pointing towards your street herbal store, can now be reproduced en masse using social media channels pointing directly to your website. As a consequence, a fromerly small street store relying on footfall can now open itself up to however many people it likes. In addition to this, the use of automated sales techniques means that purchases can be made at any time of day, overriding typical open hours.
Regardless of the holiday, the time, the weather, not even a war cannot close down the running hours of your website. This means customers can make flexible purchases at any time of day, giving you the time to overview them whenever you’re ready. Moreover, if you usually struggle with high volume orders, an ecommerce site can once again resolve this issue. Not having to provide products pver the counter gives you serious time to produce and send the orders you’ve recieved.
If you’ve ever dealt with a physical store, you will know the pains of overheads. Not only have you got to pay employees, but you also have to deal with rent, utilities, and various other costs. With an eCommerce website, these costs are all put aside with all but the basic tasks of fulfilling orders and sending them away. What’s more important is that you can put aside the stress of thinking you need a massive investment to create massive business expansion; now all it takes is a website capable of reaching customers globally and a dedicated mindset ready for what’s to come.
Unlike a physical building, your eCommerce store will be located on a search engine. Search engines use codes that crawl web pages across the internet to determine what content they contain and, in turn, what the pages are about. Once they’ve gathered enough intel about the type of information available on each page and determined that this content will be useful to their searchers, they add these pages to their index. This is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and has a huge advantage for business growth.
Businesses who can provide good content through the use of blog posts, articles, and well-described products will find their websites gradually rising in the search engines. As a result of this, ordinary businesses get the chance to compete with major competitors without having to spend millions on buildings and rent. Moreover, the use of digital advertising services like Google Adwords means that websites can pay very little to list their websites on the top of specific search pages. For example, a small coffee company could pay to have their eCommerce store listed on search pages related to coffee, such as “what’s the best coffee company?” Just like that, Johnscoffee.co.uk is competing on the same page as Nescafe, Starbucks and Costa.
Having a professionally designed website isn’t just a piece of technology; it’s the brand face for the thousands of people who choose to visit, which in consequence determines how search engines list your page and thus how many sales you can expect to get. By looking at major luxury brands like Gucci and Versace there is a clear lesson to learn: people do not buy on quality, they buy on brand. And that’s what your website does; it is the front for how thousands will perceive your brand.
If you don’t know about your customers, you don’t have a business, what you have is a gambling machine. A good business needs to have the right information regarding its customer’s buying habits, popular trends and opinions. Without these, each product released is a simple gamble with no direction. Worse yet, every marketing scheme for that product has no groundwork for success and good money has been wasted.
If you choose to start an eCommerce site, the former paragraph of struggles can be put to an end. Unlike the traditional clipboard and pen at the counter, an arduous job that requires time and effort to write down customer information and buying patterns, collecting data with an online store is a lot simpler. Because every transaction is automatically done online, software like Google Analytics will simultaneously pick up data on the customer and store it in a dashboard. Such data can include what country and region they are visiting from, what channel they came from, the device they are using, and, if the customer has bought, other details like age and gender demographics will also be stored.
Better yet, online purchases and customer data can all be accessed within one simple dashboard. Most online businesses will use WooCommerce, an app that connects to their website and tracks all customer habits and purchases, paired with an app called Google Analytics. Using google analytics, store owners can see every page their users click and for how long. Customer habits are a valuable lesson, by matching your online targeting methods directly with analytics data, you can be sure that your online marketing campaigns will be far more effective.