Thinking of starting an e-commerce business? Awesome, there couldn’t be a better time than now. According to a report, online sales will hit $4 trillion by 2020. That’s a staggering figure, and one that will likely climb the dollar rung in the coming years. For businesses in Honk Kong, diving into e-commerce will afford the chance to keep the sales department busy in the face a possible tourism downturn. If you’re unsure whether heading online is the right move for your business, you want to find out the upsides of e-commerce. And we’ve got you covered. Here are top eleven advantages of starting an e-commerce business.
1. Ease of Entry
Unlike a brick and mortar business, it’s relatively easy to join the e-commerce train. From store designs to furniture, security infrastructure and sales equipment, location and logistics demands synonymous with physical stores don’t apply here, and you don’t have to go hiring more staff than your finances can accommodate if you go the e-commerce way.
2. Use of Virtual Assistant
Virtual assistants are basically online representatives that help with day to day activities of business. For any business, customer support and marketing teams are key. Thanks to the wide pool of freelancers worldwide, you can have a full team ready for less pay than you would hiring on-site personnel.
3. No Time Restriction
Most physical stores close business by 9 pm, sealing off potential sales until the next day. Thankfully, e-commerce outfits can stay open 24hours a day, and therefore opens your business to customers always. Working class customers who are constrained by time during the day would also find convenience hitting the order button at their most convenient hours.
4. Enhanced Privacy
Privacy is something all customers want, and it’s another department ecommerce gets the nod over offline stores. Customers get a more personalized experience when shopping online. They don’t have to worry about onlookers spying on their purchase, nor do they have to bother about interacting with people they don’t like, something almost impossible if they were to purchase from a high street store.
5. Easy Access to Customers
Selling online, it’s seamlessly easy to attract potential customers to your brand thanks to myriad of analytic tools available. The rule is simple, you can’t sell to people who have never heard of your brand. Regardless of the marketing platform you decide to go with, ecommerce offers wider reach in such scale impossible to attain were your business to be strictly offline.
6. Faster Feedback
Businesses thrive when they study, release and iterate their product/service offerings. After-purchase feedback from customers can be initiated and received at a faster turnaround. With a click or two, customers can rate their experience with your brand and provide invaluable information that will drive iteration and ensure you stay true to the core values of your brand. Even more, there are plenty of review sites potential customers can turn to when making purchase decisions. Thus, if your brand receives positive spotlight from customer experiences, you are more likely to sway potential buyers your direction.
7. Organic Growth
Running an ecommerce store allows you to leverage organic growth to boost reach and double down on sales. Whether through blogging or video marketing, ecommerce allows you to create, release and scale the voice of your business at will. Done and monitored over time, this will let you know what type of content works for your target audience, and where to cut back on marketing spend if they don’t.
8. Create Impulse Buys
Another key advantage of ecommerce is the ease at which you can drive impulse buys. For the most part, buyers are likely to cash in on your product when offered mouthwatering deals and discounts, a time-trusted way to attract sales and increase brand awareness. Except for big brands and stores with deep marketing budgets, an offline store is typically disadvantaged, and even more so in the fledgling stages of growth when building awareness and credibility.
9. Can process orders faster
Perhaps the greatest allure of ecommerce is the potential to reach and sell to customers globally. Unlike brick and mortar stores, an online business can target sellers from any demographic and location the world over. The payoff to your brand is higher sales volume, which puts you on course to turning higher numbers in the profit department, and faster than your brick and mortar competitors. With safety concerns stalling visitor trips to Honk Kong, an ecommerce store affords you global presence without bordering on the safety of travelers.
10. Sell Globally
Perhaps the greatest allure of ecommerce is the potential to reach and sell to customers globally. Unlike brick and mortar stores, an online business can target sellers from any demographic and location the world over. The payoff to your brand is higher sales volume, which puts you on course to turning higher numbers in the profit department, and faster than your brick and mortar competitors. With safety concerns stalling visitor trips to Honk Kong, an ecommerce store affords you global presence without bordering on the safety of travelers.
11. Re-target Customers
Not all buyers checkout their cart when shopping. It’s not uncommon for a buyer to suspend purchase if they find anything off shopping in an offline retail store. Identifying their pain points is difficult too, which could mean losing a loyal customer for trifling reasons. Here’s another area an e-commerce business wins the day. Online stores can see what products have been added to the cart, thus enabling them to monitor buyer journey and see the pain points that should be addressed. Also, selling online, businesses can to set up and utilize a very powerful tool – email marketing. An opt-in page can be all that’s needed to increase your customer base, build loyalty and have customers come back to buy in the future even if they drop their cart on their first visit. Tracking customer behavior and optimizing your marketing strategy to potential customers is another reason to think e-commerce when starting a business.