Throughout the centuries that humans have been engaging in commercial relationships with each other there have been many evolutions of compensation, and those means of compensation have varied across the planet, for example moving from barter to local merchant credit accounts to cash only, to large credit corporations and now to e-commerce. Currently, we are in process of migrating to e-commerce. Many retail owners believe that e-commerce is not a situation in which they would like to venture. But before you close that door and block out many potential customers, here are some reasons why e-commerce can benefit any retail establishment.1. E-Commerce helps to insulate you against the local demographic shifts.For example, you have owned a vintage consignment shop for 5 years in a nice neighborhood, making decent income; enough that you have been able to hire a couple of part time shop keepers. Unfortunately, with the market saturation of chain grocery stores, your local “Save Mart” has closed. This reduces the amount of walk in traffic by about half. Your sales plummet as the only people stopping by now are the ones that want to place clothing with you to sell. If you have an online presence, you have online shoppers, you can cut your business hours and have one part time shop keeper help exclusively with the sales floor and one to focus on making sure that all clothing is photographed and uploaded to your e-commerce site online. You have been insulated against the local economics, because you have invested in a global marketplace as well.2. E-Commerce appeals to the consumer’s desire for transparency.The average consumer today will research most of their purchases before they ever walk out the door. If they are looking to buy a new bike for their daughter, they will Google it to find the one their daughter likes the best, they will look through all the major stores in the area, they will then move on to the specialty stores to compare prices. If a parent clicks to your site and all they receive is a statement telling you to come by to see your extensive selection, they are going to back out of the site and move on to the next. In a consumer’s mind, if you don’t post the prices, you have something, most likely higher prices, to hide, so they won’t go to your store. Being able to post your prices, even if they are a little higher allows you to post sales and the benefits of the extra cost because they buy from you. This transparency comforts the consumer.3. E-Commerce is a built-in sales management tool.When you decide to use an e-commerce solution on your website, you can track the amount of sales a particular item has. You can track the locations you are shipping to in order to target market those audiences more. Aside from sales metrics, you also have a data back-up of your sales records. This is helpful for many reasons, but mostly because you never know what is going to happen in the course of a business’ lifetime. All of the little mishaps that could leave your sales records unusable. The backup of a hosted web server for this information allows offsite backup and data recovery measures to be in place for you as a part of your monthly hosting fees; the insurance payment for your digital information.
E-Commerce Benefits For Retail Owners
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