Himanshu PatelYou are operating retail operations through a physical store. That’s great but not enough. Why is it so? In the tech-savvy world, being up-to-date with the latest technologies and retail trends is all-important to stay on the top of the customers’ minds and seize an edge in the market.
The trend that’s dominating the retail world for the last ten years and has made an invaluable contribution in increasing sales, revenue, and UX across the globe is- Ecommerce development.
The growing sales figure is a clear indication of how beneficial is Ecommerce development for the retail industry. Apart from this, the retail stores enjoy a plethora of impressive advantages.
Take a look at the advantages of the Ecommerce development solutions
Improve brand exposure
The seller with a brick-and-mortar store will have reach to the limited number of buyers in the neighborhood. Neither they can extend their reach to the customers cross-borders, nor they can sell and grow ROI.
The Ecommerce development creates your store’s online presence that enables the store to be available where the target customers are searching for the products. It facilitates the customers to order the items from the comfort of the sofa. In this way, your playground becomes the world where you can virtually sell the products/services to unlimited people without bounding yourself to a geographic location.
Keep your store open 24/7
It’s difficult and expensive for the physical stores to keep the store open all the time. Ecommerce makes it possible for your store. You can accept the orders with all the transactions while you are asleep.
What’s more? You can manage from inventory and transactions to user experience without looking at the mobile even once. Plus, no extra dollars you need to spend for keeping the store on 24/7.
Go greener
With online store development, the manual processes that include a lot of paper usage, processing errors, and inefficiencies get eliminated. Everything is safely maintained in the database, thereby bid goodbye to the paper processes. The online venture would help your store reduce carbon footprints, save time with environment-friendly practice, and save natural resources.
Stay in communication with the customers
The online store keeps tabs on the customers at every touchpoint while they are browsing and shopping. It helps in communicating with the customers in a tailored fashion. The buying patterns, browsing behavior, and like/dislike information create a meaningful connection with the customers. What’s more? Here, the communication becomes two-way, which helps the stores in responding to the customers’ problems.
It’s cost-effective
The Ecommerce stores running offline stores need to invest a huge amount in store rent/purchase, appointing staff, store design, ongoing repairs, stocks, and maintenance. This investment eats up a major share of their profits.
On the flip side, the Ecommerce solution is an inexpensive endeavor as opposed to long-life spending with the offline venture. Ecommerce development is an affordable solution that eliminates the upfront cost and pays off in dividends. It’s a good opportunity for the sellers to make money when they don’t have huge start-up capital.
Improve with analytics results
In offline retail, you can’t keep an eye on everything in real-time, from inventory to fast-selling items and customers. That’s where Ecommerce turns out as a powerful solution. The online store enables businesses to segregate, organize, and analyze all the data stored disparately in silos. The rich insights help in improving customer engagement, increasing conversion, and uplifting marketing campaigns’ effectiveness.
Marketing becomes effective and affordable
The retailers keep aside a good budget for product marketing activities. Traditional marketing requires huge investment because billboards, flyers, pamphlets, and others are not reusable or recyclable. Every time, the business has to spend bundles when marketing campaigns are modified.
On the other hand, Ecommerce facilitates advertising and marketing at a fraction of traditional marketing costs. Ecommerce marketplaces provide advertising tools and DIY features that helps in creating personalized deals and automatically sending them to the intended customers. The customer insights tools help in marketing the right customers at the right time with the right message.
Delight your customers
Nowadays, lure in customers amidst fierce competition is a daunting task. With the offline store, it’s a little more difficult. The Ecommerce development provides the comfort and convenience that the customers of the 21st generation expect the least. At first, it allows the customers to browse and buy from the comfort of the sofa.
It meets the instant gratification need with handy tracking of the order anytime, anywhere. The convenience of free shipping, subscription advantages, deals, and others turn them into potential customers. The customer reviews are a valuable asset that helps you know the gap between what you are offering and what customers are expecting. The positive reviews make new customers shop happily.
Improve loyalty
Acquiring new customers costs 90% more than retaining the existing customers. The army of loyal fans generates 80% of the revenue to the store across the globe, and the rest is generated by frequent and new customers. It signals loyalty is of utmost value. Plus, the precious commodity also helps in increasing positive word of mouth and become your brand ambassadors for free. It makes perfect sense in pouring in dollars and efforts in building a strong relationship with the customers. The meaningful relationships create return customers, and thus the higher ROI.
Easy to scale
Let’s accept it: the Ecommerce stores are recession-proof that we have recently experienced during pandemic times. Even the sales and ROI skyrocketed by multiple times. During this crisis, when the number of users increasing unexpectedly, the stores have successfully met the growing demands due to scalability. It doesn’t exist with the offline store as they cannot accommodate twice of the customers in the store overnight. Ecommerce stores can scale up or scale down based on the requirements.
Customer service gets up a notch
If you own the physical store, no one better than you know how much you need to pay to different staff members every month disregard of sales and profits. With an Ecommerce shop, the costs nearly get eliminated. The chatbots integration, live chat, and FAQs are great ways to provide the best customer support to the customers.
The customers get the optimal response at speed from the comfort of their homes. The AI-based bots are powerful in connecting the dots and making intelligent recommendations to the customers that don’t make them feel like a salesperson is pitching the product.
Epilogue
Building an Ecommerce store is a brilliant idea. The immense benefits convince the retail stores how the Ecommerce development is a must-have solution for them to survive and thrive in the market. Impressed and need help? Get connected with our business consultants that will help you in every possible way. Let’s talk.
Anil Patel
