Now that you know what eCommerce is you may ask why you should consider it and how could it help your business. Even if you are not familiar with online shopping or even computers you should take a serious look at eCommerce for several good reasons.
As with most of the articles on this site let us assume you are a pet shop owner. You have your shop on the main street, your goods on display in your windows and you are listed in the yellow pages and the telephonebook. Sometimes you even place an advert in the local paper and have invested in a couple of sandwich boards to place at the street corners. For a small shop like yours these are all good practices and should be undertaken, but there is one 21st-century flaw with all these marketing methods – they require the customer to physically walk into your shop.
What a lovely shop you have. Where is it again?
It’s true to say that I could look you up in the phone book and ring, perhaps asking what kind of doggy baskets you have. Without being able to see them it’s unlikely I would buy one though. The best result would be for you to convince me to come down to the shop and have a look and therefore we are back to square one.
So what if I told you that hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, could look at all your stock 24 hours a day and buy whatever they wanted? What if you could come into your shop every morning, check all your orders, take the customers money and post them their items? What if I said you could have many more customers this way than you ever have actually walking in? How could this happen? With E Commerce, thats how. The above scenarios are exactly what eCommerce does for your business.
Online shopping has never been bigger and in the UK alone it accounts for billions of pounds every year. Your business could have a slice of that pie if you plugged your shop into the electronic world. You don’t have to be a computer genius – basic typing and computer skills are just fine – and it’s a lot easier than you may think.
Here are Mr & Mrs Smith. Right now they are online looking for a new doggy basket. Is it going to come from your shop?
Every day people are searching the internet for every kind of item you can think of, including items you have in your shop. The most popular search engine on the web is Google and it’s possible to check the number of searches for any given item or phrase. You may be surprised to learn that in the UK in June 2010 some4,400 people searched for “dog basket” and 2,900 searched for “dog baskets”. These figures are exact and provided to me by Google itself. Ready for a bigger shock? Some 60,500 people in the UK searched for “dog beds” on Google in June. Now I ask you – did you have over 65,000 people walk into your shop in June who were all looking for dog baskets? I thought not, and that is why you should use E commerce for your business.
When these people are searching for these items they are probably looking to buy them and you have to make sure your shop is one of their options. Ecommerce is a great leveller and makes the playing field the same, so that pet shop with five branches isn’t neccessarily going to get more business than your little shop. If you don’t use eCommerce at all then you simply won’t be a buying option for all those people looking for dog baskets. Imagine the total for all your products – the sky really is the limit.
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