What does eCommerce do?
Once upon a time, when businesses wanted to sell their products or services, they needed physical premises in which to showcase their wares. Today, eCommerce platforms have moved this entire process online. In their simplest form, eCommerce platforms allow online selling, but many have also been developed to include website building tools, accounting and inventory systems and customer service platforms. ECommerce platforms can also be used for making money transfers and transferring data.
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In their most basic form, eCommerce platforms enable businesses to sell products and services online.
Is it right for you?
eCommerce could be good
for you if you…
- Are selling products or services to a customer base
- Need to build a website for your products and services
- Want to manage your product inventory in real time
- Need to transfer money or data globally on a regular basis
- Want to unify core business processes in one place
- Need to improve collaboration across different departments
- Are looking to streamline business processes into one tool
- Want to create personalised online experiences
eCommerce might not be right
for you if you…
- Don’t sell products and services, or transfer money and data online
- Have no inventory to manage
- Only use one tool for your entire business
Technology Benefits
- Brings everything together
- Before eCommerce platforms were introduced, online sellers had to juggle multiple tools that often failed to integrate properly. With eCommerce platforms, all the tools required (including inventory management, customer service tools, SEO functions and checkout systems) are unified in one single environment, which boosts the stability and profitability of your website.
- Makes analysis and reporting easier
- When all of your tools are in one place, collating data becomes much easier. By increasing the efficiency of data collection, analysis and reporting on key performance indicators becomes far else time consuming. In turn, this means that more effort can be dedicated to improving the business’ processes and increasing productivity.
- Creates a highly personalised experience
- Personalisation is key in a hyper-competitive market where businesses are vying for the attention of customers. By adopting an eCommerce platform, a customer’s journey can be tracked from A to B with ease, allowing personalisation at every opportunity. Data proves that customer-specific journeys are more likely to result in an action, thereby boosting a business’ cashflow.
- Manages inventory effectively
- How can you create a good buying experience if you don’t have real time data on your inventory and where it can be found? Unfulfilled orders and a delay on sending items are highly undesirable in a highly competitive market. By unifying your order management systems on an eCommerce platform, you’ll be able to increase efficiency and effectiveness easily.
- Increases your reach
- Content is king in the eCommerce world, so it makes sense to have all your content management systems included in your eCommerce platform. In-built SEO tools can help boost your rankings on Google, while an integrated CMS means that content can be updated anywhere on the site in reduced time, allowing for reactive marketing in a fast-paced world.
- Supports easy expansion
- As your business grows, the need for rather business channels increases. Today, eCommerce platforms have been developed to enable rapid expansion, allowing for multiple channels, countries, currencies and languages to be easily incorporated into one environment. Not only does this reduce the time and cost of developing separate sites, it increases your reach far quicker, allowing more revenue to be brought into your business faster.
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£ 4.8T
Data retained by Oberlo suggests that worldwide e-retail sales are expected to grow to £4.8 trillion by 2021, serving 2.14 billion people