If you are running a business and deals in buying and selling of products or services, you can double your sales by increasing your digital presence. The one way of creating your digital presence is by having your e-commerce website or an online store.
Don’t know if your business is suitable enough to be converted into an online store? You can identify your business model and know if your business fits in the shoes of e-commerce or not. Here is how to figure out your business type.
If you fall in any of these categories, you are fit for creating your online store. The most preferred e-commerce store business model you will find online is the B2C business model.
Once you know your business is fit for an online store, next in line is creating a website store. There are two ways of creating an e-commerce store.
There are various e-commerce platforms out there with the help of which one can create online e-commerce stores. These are software solutions that allow businesses to not only allow selling products and services online but also providing the benefit of arranging delivery and transportation services. Some of the examples of such e-commerce platforms include Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce.
Another way of starting an online store is by getting your online store website developed by professional software developers. They can meet the specific requirements of your e-commerce site perfectly and even work upon making them SEO compliant.
Before taking the idea of converting your business into an online store further, it's important to know why doing so is essential. Is having a website enough to spike up your sales? Or is it worth investing in e-commerce marketing? To answer such queries, here is the added advantage of owning an online store:
Brick and mortar shops may not stay open throughout the day. However, with an online store, you get this additional advantage. Be it midnight or early in the morning, or on holidays as well, online stores are always accessible to customers for shopping with the least effort on part of the owner.
This increases the number of sales as the availability of your store increases multi-folds. Customers also purchase at the comfort of their home and can shop from anywhere anytime. This also increases the possibility of repeated customers without any additional efforts.
When you have a normal store, you can only sell products to the local people in the area. However, in the case of an online store, you can not only sell products in the area or state but throughout the country and even worldwide.
Also, as you don’t have to physically store a product or physically present it before a customer at a store to sell it; you can sell in larger quantities making your turnover rise by an exceptional amount. This widens the horizon of your business by large numbers that would otherwise seem unfathomable for a shop owner.
It is impossible to keep track of the customer’s purchasing frequency and behavior in a physical store. However, on an online store one can easily have an analysis on who visits your e-commerce store frequently, who abandons the cart, and information on the average time people spend on your website store.
Such statistics help you further in nudging them to make a purchase. This is done by sending sequence emails and adopting an omnichannel marketing strategy.
Ecommerce marketing is a marketing strategy that allows e-commerce store owners to increase their online sales. It includes the following strategies that lead to the wide exposure of your business.
his would involve integrating your online stores with social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. Making your products available on Instagram and Facebook would include creating shoppable posts. You can make use of Instagram's shoppable feed as well.
Doing so makes everyone know about your online store and your products. You can even indulge in certain campaigns, giveaways, and discount QR codes to enhance your sales.
Secondly, you can adopt omnichannel marketing for increasing your conversion rates. This type of marketing will make use of not only social media networks but the integration of various channels like email marketing, social media platforms, physical stores, etc. It’s a process of focusing more on the customer's actions and taking desirable action thereby. You can lure customers by sending emails of special discounts or displaying ads of the products in their wishlist on Facebook. You can even send them personal invites to the physical store.
Other than this, there is influencer marketing, affiliate marketing, and other sorts of marketing as well. However, investing in them would be too much if your business is still at an imbibing stage. Marketing strategies like social media marketing and organizing campaigns are easy and cost-effective to start with.
The future of e-commerce or online stores is clear and bright ahead. One can increase their revenue by threefold and even more when shifting their business from the physical store to the website store. Nonetheless, to say, there are various live examples of such business around you. Certainly, with the rise in presence of website stores, the competition is beginning to rise in this space as well. As new technologies and advancements make their way to enhance the shopping experience of customers, it’s only the survival of the fittest.
