Is ecommerce the right business for you?

Published on October 03, 2007 Is ecommerce the right business for you?

Ecommerce could help you turn your website from an electronic business card into an electronic store. But is ecommerce right for your business?

Beautiful website graphics by themselves won’t help you sell your products and services online. But ecommerce will. Reach out to new customers with minimal financial investment and overheads. An ecommerce store is a low-cost and low-risk way of gaining new customers. Ozcart shopping cart stores are secure, flexible, convenient and very easy-to-manage. With low overheads they’re an ideal way for small businesses or home businesses to expand. They’re also ideal for large corporate customers. Here are some of the benefits of ecommerce to businesses like yours. It’s good to consider how important these factors are to you before deciding to go ahead with an ecommerce website or not.

• Faster payment methods for your customers. An ecommerce website gives the customer instant confirmation that their transaction has been processed. They don’t have to fill out a form and email you with an enquiry and wait an unknown time to get a reply. For customers purchasing things in a hurry this can make the difference between a sale for you or your competitors.
• Responsive customer service. There are many ways an ecommerce website can help you improve customer service. For example, it allows you post frequently asked questions or help to common tasks in a knowledge base. This saves your customers time queuing for service on a phone. It allows you to respond to enquiries promptly via email, or also allows you assign tracking numbers to the goods you ship, you can also allow customers to track their purchases on the way to them.
• Ecommerce could help you reduce your costs of doing business. Through reducing the costs of order processing and the time involved and in many cases reducing the costs of holding stock, hiring staff, reduced office space required and day-to-day costs like faxes and couriers that can be replaced by email.
• Faster order processing. Electronic ordering is more efficient than manual processing so can get goods to customers faster and save you a lot of processing hassle. Increase customer loyalty. Give customers a great experience and they’ll keep coming back to you, whether they’re local, from another state or international. With ecommerce features like tailored pricing, customer group discounts, pricing specials and advanced features like gift vouchers available you can keep customers repeat purchasing.
• You can also contact your customers with marketing techniques like specials for Christmas like 2 for 1 offers, discounts or gift vouchers to keep them purchasing.
• Modify your products for new markets with ease. If you purchase a translation of your content into another language, your Ozcart websites have the ability to display your products using multiple languages, automatically adjust for GST whether customers are in your country or overseas and you can determine what currency you wish to trade in.
• Online is great for marketing. The costs of advertising online (through things like Google Adwords) are often significantly cheaper and more targeted than advertising in newspapers on radio or using flyers.

Just about anyone selling anything can benefit from ecommerce. In Australia and New Zealand it could give you a real edge over your competitors too, because few businesses have really recognised the potential of the Internet yet. Talk to Ozcart about how an ecommerce website could help you.