Consumer behavior is increasingly changing with the ever-expanding technological revolution in the commerce industry. Today, the average internet users tend to buy compare and buy too many from online stores, starting from food to consumer-grade electronics products. Consumers also enjoy the convenience it creates for them as they can access a variety of products and overwhelming payment options, which is always a click away. Therefore, it is important to note that regardless of your industry, having an e-commerce website is indispensable as it constitutes a long term strategy to retain customers in today’s market. Brick-and-Mortar and eCommerce stores have many things common, yet anyone new on internet need to know about many things which makes internet special. Whether you are starting to build a brand or you have an established one already, consumers will need a site that doesn’t take longer time to load. Also, the checkout process should be seamlessly quick. It is imperative to choose a reputable e-commerce service provider with some key features for safeguarding consumer data. Remember that – consumers are increasingly concerned about their privacy and data.
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More access to consumer information
E-commerce is revolutionized by data analytics to predict consumer behavior and shopping patterns. Having a website with frequent visitors puts you in a position to collect data and use it to your advantage in as far as marketing and sales needs are concerned. Consumer data from emails, message logs, and purchase history can help you get demographic insights, especially with specific purchases. Such data can be used to make cross-sales of new products to existing customers. You can even send them marketing emails with exclusive offers to meet every individual’s needs. That way, you’ll retain as many customers as possible!
Improve customer relationships
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Managing customer queries and disputes from an e-commerce website is easier and faster than you can imagine. Your website is always 24/7 up and running, and customers can access you at any time. Machine learning and Internet of Things are increasingly been used to make the customer relationships unique with the seller. AI-driven chatbots can offer assistance in multiple languages and do repetitive tasks without losing patience, unlike with real human beings. Chatbots are also economical as they are operational 24 hours a day.
Decrease the cost of advertising
Running your business online can significantly reduce the cost of advertisement, especially if you have integrated your website to social media accounts. Digital marketing solutions offered by a website are way better and cost-effective compared to traditional commercial advertisements. For instance, social selling through social media can connect and convert if you engage buyers on an on-going, long-term basis. You can also monetize your website to subsidize your advertising costs. Websites with high domain authority will likely bring a decent income in different ways.
Operate your business from vacation or home
You might also consider the convenience that online stores bring to the owners as they can run the business from any corner of the globe. Moreover, you also don’t need to invest a lot of time into the business as the process of sales and payments will be automated through an online system. That gives you a lot of free time to focus on special offers, new products, and family time.
Precise targeting and polished marketing strategies
In a brick-and-mortar shop, you can not target the products and services for the adult audience avoiding the unwanted age group. But your business may sell innerwear, adult magazine, condom to sex toys. When you try to use attractive sales girls to promote men’s clothing, it becomes too loud to all. A marketing-aware customer tends to avoid even a good product. Online shops provide a barrier to different commonly known marketing strategies.
Remember to pick the correct services
The points mentioned above are glorious. However, for your business to rank higher, you must avoid downtime and get 99.9% uptime for your website. Researches show that a reliable web host can help you retain up to 70% of unique customers and visitors to a particular website. Uptime is the amount of time that web hosts can keep their servers up and running. For customers to stay on your website, the webpages must have not less than 99.99% uptime. The 0.01% is only an exception for unprecedented network failures. You can click here to read the article written by E-Commerce expert Jon Rettinger about the available alternatives for e-commerce hosting comparing various features and cost.
There are various services to handle online payments. Use a reputable, commonly used, popular payment gateway in your country which you can handle easily. For example, PayPal is widely used all over the earth for online works. But PayPal is least used in the shops of certain countries such as India. Different software companies provide chatbots. Using self-hosted WordPress offers the advantage to use various free plugins for professional-grade service. There is a WordPress plugin to integrate IBM chatbot. Various online marketplaces offer freelancers to work per hourly basis to work as your virtual assistant.
Google lists your business on map and web search for free. You can use PPC advertisements from Facebook, Twitter, Google to promote your business to the local customer.
Final Words
Just a free of cost Facebook page for your business is not enough today. In today’s busy world, customers run web-search for difficult to find products and the search engines tend to show the listed businesses closer to the location of the customer. If you only list your business on Google local business with a phone number, many of the customers will avoid placing a call and rather seek another business who has an online shop at least to showcase the products, inform something about the business. So, in today’s world, it is important to have an online presence for your products and services.
