Accelerating Your Growth Online with E-Commerce
How Setting Up an E-Commerce Business Can Accelerate Your Growth Online
Are you struggling to find leads in these tough times? Are you worried that your small business will be just that, small? E-commerce could be the one thing that could take your business to the next level. A multitude of small businesses has used e-commerce to grow into large, successful, money-making entities.
To keep up with demand and changing times, one way to be successful is to adapt with the trend of e-commerce. Most companies that skip out on this trend tend to lose out on reaching a multitude of potential sales.
Starting or shifting to an e-commerce business can be one of the best ways to boost traffic to your site, increase sales and keep your customers loyal.
This article will give you insight into everything e-commerce and how it is the key to opening the door to future sales.
6 Ways E-commerce Puts You Ahead of the Competition
1. Connect with Local Buyers and Beyond
Imagine you’re a unique supplier who is struggling to reach the right customer at the right time. Sound familiar? Say, a landscape supplier offering a unique variety of stone or mulch. With the proper e-commerce set-up, you will be able to market your business to thousands of people who may not have known your business exists. Although you have been just around the corner for years, they are now familiar with who you are. Around 93% of buyers want to shop local and online, but most need to know you exist first. The convenience brought to your customers by a fully functional and robust e-commerce experience will drive your sales and therefore your profit. It will allow you to expand your reach of buyers.
2. Improves Your Customer’s Experience
Nothing is better than giving your customers the ultimate shopping experience. Something that keeps them wanting more. You may think, is this even possible online? The answer is yes.
An e-commerce site gives customers the best of both worlds. Customers can shop online but also have an in-store experience of being able to ask staff questions through features like an online chat or through your business phone number.
When your e-commerce site is well categorized and mobile-friendly, it gives your customers the ultimate shopping experience. Something that is easier than going into the store and browsing.
Your site also supplies convenience to shoppers where they can shop online 24/7 from anywhere.
3. It is Scalable
Your goal is to grow your business and never stay stagnant. The worst that could happen is that your business stays at the same growth for years, never reaching your optimal goal.
Having an e-commerce site lets you scale your business accordingly. As your business grows it is likely you will want to grow your product range, your target audience, or geographic service area. Having an e-commerce website lets you transition and grow easily and effortlessly.
You can add more product lines, more payment options, and even choose where you ship to, without having to worry about changing your store location or moving to a larger facility.
4. It Gives You More Marketing Opportunities
Marketing is a robust business component. Something that every business owner knows they need to partake in, but some miss the mark.
Your website is one of the best marketing tools your business has. There are many advertising and marketing options that can work alongside your website including search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, social media, and email marketing, all linking back to your online shop.
What is interesting about e-commerce is that you can pay for placement, impressions, clicks, etc. for specific products on publishers like Facebook, YouTube, or TechCrunch, for example. Driving people to purchase your product right from the source. Another opportunity is Google Shopping Ads, which show a carousel of products people can choose from.
5. It Increases Your Revenue
You have been successful this far without creating an e-commerce platform so just consider how much more you can gain by expanding your customer base so widely online.
Your business will gain many new clients, more loyalty, more equity, and a better chance of growing in the long term by opening the doors and inviting everyone to shop.
Ecommerce allows you to grow and keep leads to improve your financial success.
6. Makes Your Company Unique and Stand Out
Online shopping is expected to continue growing at an alarming rate where most demographics will make purchases online.
One thing that is at the forefront of most business owners’ minds is: “how can I beat out the competition?” and “what makes me unique?” Knowing how to beat your competition makes you one step closer to success.
According to SurePayroll's latest Small Business Scorecard, just over a quarter (26%) of small businesses in the U.S. have an e-commerce website. To put it another way, this means that about three in four (74 percent) don't have an e-commerce site.
Stay on top of your competition by joining in on the e-commerce game. This is what makes you unique and gives you a competitive advantage. You will want to target all those online shoppers and make more sales faster than your competitor. The odds are that your competitor has not yet hopped on the e-commerce train yet, beat them to it. Download our eBook to learn how you can accelerate your sales with e-commerce.
To learn more about how you can accelerate your growth online, contact our experts today!
Download your FREE copy of 5 E-Commerce Roadblocks to Overcome and Speed Off to Sales.
The Types of E-commerce Platforms Available to You
If you conduct research on e-commerce platforms, you will find there are many options available It may feel as though you do not have enough time to go through all the information. You know it is important to find the best one, but how do you do this without wasting time?
Here is a list of some of the top e-commerce platforms available for you:
- WooCommerce
- Shopify
- Wix
- Weebly
- Squarespace
- Magento
Do not be discouraged by this extensive list, each e-commerce platform has its own special qualities but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of things, they all help you sell online.
Stay tuned for one of our next blogs featuring a comparison chart of each e-commerce platform and gain insight into which one will be best for your business.
How to Adopt Ecommerce with a Complex Business Model
You may be thinking to yourself “there is no way my business process can convert into an online store.”
There are many companies that deal with a complex business model and buying structure that makes it seem impossible to adopt an e-commerce site.
Even the most complex business models can make the transition to an e-commerce platform.
With e-commerce, there are a variety of features to help your online business run the same as your retail store. It can be customized in almost any way to make your online business run as smoothly and efficiently as your in-store process, if not more so.
Want to learn more about how this transition can occur? Sign up for our blog updates for a case study that outlines how a company with a complex business model made a successful transition to e-commerce.
The Best SEO Practices for Your New E-commerce Business
If your e-commerce site does not rank in search engines, it will be harder to generate traffic and you will not be able to make as many sales as you forecasted.
Design your site with shoppers in mind and avoid clutter and long URLs. You will want your site to be designed in a way that makes it easy for navigation and is accessible to all.
Optimize your category pages, you will be offering multiple products on your site, make them easy to find.
When it comes to your e-commerce site, SEO is extremely important, for a complete list of SEO best practices for your e-commerce site, sign up for our blog updates to get notified.
Final Thoughts
Adopting e-commerce into your website will accelerate your growth online. It is a fantastic opportunity to expand your customer base and product line and to even expand the regions you serve.
Interested in adopting an e-commerce site but do not know where to start? Contact [email protected] and we can talk about converting to an e-commerce site and all the results it will yield for you.
