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How E-Commerce Can Help Your Business Grow
If you haven’t already realized it, having an online site is like adding another brick and mortar location. The internet offers a huge variety of companies to billions of daily browsers. And, just like with your brick and mortar locations, the right placement and the right advertising will bring in leads who are poised to become buyers. So, here are some reasons you might want to take a step further and create an e-commerce site with your online presence.
Decrease Your Cost of Doing Business
E-commerce is efficient and convenient. With the automated shopping cart, security features, marketing campaigns, and static help pages you will create, there is little to no manpower needed to run the selling part of your online company. That means your sales team can focus on the bigger clients and customers with more complicated questions. It also means that you will now have a constant effort going to finding and converting new leads without having to do all the work yourself. It’s like shifting from a row-boat to a yacht.
Open Up Your Availability
With a traditional brick and mortar location, you have to impose store hours in order to get a break yourself. With an online presence, your customers can shop and browse 24-7 without affecting you. Online shopping is so prevalent, you will find that many of your newer customers are confused if they can’t just browse, purchase, and pay online.
Increase Your Reach
With an e-commerce site, you can now open up your marketing efforts to include people from all over the country. While you can certainly focus your marketing efforts on those in your physical radius, having an e-commerce store means you are no longer limited to appealing to a few thousand leads. Now, you can start narrowing down the millions of hits to find the many qualified leads who are ready to make a purchase decision.
And now, more and more people are purchasing right from their smartphones. With lightning fast smartphones like the Galaxy S6 Edge, which feature large, sleek touch screens that make browsing a breeze, your customers will need a responsive website that adjusts according to the screen size of the device they are using. This means that even on-the-go customers can buy the moment they reach conversion.
Get Clearer Feedback
When you are selling online, you will start to notice trends that push your business in certain directions. Watching your customers’ actions online is much easier than watching them in the store. You will know where they came from, what products they are viewing, what content appeals to them, and what products are frequently purchased in the same transaction.
Have you ever seen how Amazon suggests products that you might like, based on what you previously bought or what you are currently looking at? They use data from both you and past customers to give you suggestions, increasing the likelihood of a bigger sale. When you have your analytics set up correctly, even regular traffic on your e-commerce site is like a huge survey that every visitor automatically completes.
Move to Global
With an e-commerce site, you can establish translator features and start marketing to a different country. You will probably want to consider this for the future as you start your e-commerce site, because the possibility is very real that you can expand to become a global company without a physical location in another country. This means you could have a huge leg up on the competition that is still stuck to the local area.
It might feel like building an e-commerce site is a big task, but you’ve already done a lot of the heavy lifting by getting your brick and mortar location established. Take the next step and increase your sales by offering your products and services online. Then, you will want to take a step further and start developing products specifically for your online customers. There is no end to what you can do when you have commercial real estate established on the virtual highway of the internet.
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