What is E-Commerce?
E-commerce has led to online shopping becoming much more popular than traditional shopping. commerce is simply the exchange of goods and services through electronic data transfer. it is as easy as paying online and either downloading an electronic item you’ve purchased like a digital book or music, or have the physical goods shipped to you. Just about everyone has used E-commerce at one point or the other. Online marketplaces like eBay are a form of e-commerce known as C2C or consumer-to-consumer commerce. File sharing software such as Kazaa and limewire from back in the day are P2P or peer-to-peer e-commerce.
E-commerce existed long before the rise of eBay or Amazon.com. Before the internet became popular when businesses exchanged information electronically, the term e-commerce was born. The internet however, made e-commerce a wide-spread thing used by the average consumer.
Why Does My Business Need to Have an Online Presence?
As more people gain access to the internet, they are introduced to the convenience of e-commerce, and with that sales grow as internet usage increases. Most traditional retail stores now have an online presence that accounts for a large percentage of their sales. Even small local Mom & Pop shops often have online stores that allow them to sell electronically and bring local business into their retail stores. People even search for items online and make comparisons before they go to stores to make purchases, making stores without an online presence almost obsolete.
The advantages of e-commerce to any business makes running an online store a highly desirable thing to do. If you take care to ensure that your search engine rankings are good your items will show up in online searches. You will also attract local customers as well as long-distance customers who can order your goods or services online regardless of location.
Adapting to Trends
E-commerce also allows merchants to change their prices and even their business structure by simply making changes to the website. It’s also easier to keep track of marketing campaigns in order to make comparisons and choose what campaigns work best for what items. The ability to quickly adapt to trends and adjust sales efforts is one of the chief advantages e-commerce offers over traditional marketing and promotional methods. If a print ad or even television commercial isn’t giving you results, there’s little you can do. But a banner ad online can be changed and tweaked until results are more favorable. Customization is one of the advantages e commerce offers merchants and consumers. Web sites can be designed to offer recommendations based on a customer’s last viewed or purchased items.
Conclusion
Additionally, with e-commerce, there are no traffic, no lines and no gasoline being paid for in order to shop. It certainly makes things easier for the consumer and is no doubt, a huge selling point for any business.
