E-commerce or electronic commerce refers to facilitating sales transactions over the internet. The E-commerce industry has changed the way business is conducted and transformed the entire retail landscape into a highly convenient and competitive marketplace which offers exhaustive accessibility to the consumer.
E-commerce has been the center of attention of the business world for quite a while now. If any of the versatile quirks of e-commerce even so much as cast a shadow over how your business runs, you are already too late to be learning about e-commerce. Considering the astounding yet consistent growth e-commerce businesses have experienced in the last 8-10 years. e-commerce websites have since been growing in number and the demands don’t seem to be fading away or even stabilizing in the foreseeable future in the least. Read on below to learn about e-commerce websites, and how you can build one for yourself to either start your own online retail business or create a platform to facilitate online buying and selling.
E-commerce websites remove the unnecessary checkpoints that stand between you and your product. Since these ‘checkpoints’ cost you major chunks of the price you pay for products & commodities, selling and buying through e-commerce saves the seller a huge margin on the product, and the customer enjoys reduced prices. This is what makes e-commerce websites stand out in the market and results in huge success for businesses that move over to online selling.
E-commerce Websites
E-commerce websites are online platforms that facilitate the buying and selling of goods online. Prominently, e-commerce websites merely mediate transactions between businesses and consumers, and between two businesses also. However, the extent of the functionality of e-commerce websites has grown to intriguing possibilities and is still evolving.
On one hand, where the flourishing of traditional, brick & mortar retail businesses relies on location, for the most part, e-commerce websites break free of that constraint on the other. Selling through e-commerce websites is a highly sophisticated activity as compared to running your business in the old-school way.
The Benefits of E-commerce
E-commerce websites provide a ton of options & functions to both buyers and sellers that are specialized for making the process of buying & selling online convenient and enriching. Businessmen as well as consumers enjoy a great many benefits & conveniences as attributes of e-commerce websites.
There are certain fundamental underlying strong points of e-commerce websites comprising –
1. Enhanced reach and wide coverage transcending across regions
A website can be accessed from anywhere, given that a place has internet coverage. However, it will depend on your logistical capabilities if you are able to ship products to difficult places.
2. Open for business 24/7
Unlike any brick & mortar store, e-commerce websites are 24/7 operational. This boosts customer convenience and helps businesses gather the section of customers who make purchases at odd hours.
3. Surprisingly cost-effective
It need not be said that running a business online through a website is way more cost-effective in comparison to running an offline business physically. This stands with the inclusion of the additional costs and expenses of marketing, advertising, and even the cost of hiring employees. You can hire a large portion of your staff from distant places since their work would involve programming and working on the online database of your e-commerce business.
4. Does not require a physical storefront; thus, easy and cheap to start a business from scratch
An e-commerce website lifts the reachability constraint from the store owner’s shoulders and frees him/her of the pressure to find a suitable and feasible location for the store, just so customers can reach the store in order to buy something. Since you don’t need the funds to set up your physical store, an e-commerce website allows you to get a jump-start for your business on the financial front at the very beginning itself.
5. No space constraint – add new product lines, place ads,
An e-commerce website gives you practically unlimited space. You can put up anything from large sale banners to lengthy product catalogs without a problem. Not just this, you can place different portals, menus, product pages, etc on your website and update any of that as and when you want. And of course, you can also use this space to make some money by placing ads on there.
Over the aforementioned ‘fundamental’ benefits of e-commerce websites, they also offer a more advanced and sophisticated set of benefits to cater to the modern-day business landscape as well. To name a few —
Fierce Marketing & sales-promotion options
Exploit all there is to digital marketing, captivate customers, and also enable impulse buying. e-commerce websites yield terrific potential for growth.
Go international
Unlimited scope to spread your wings. Widen your span and coverage to the maximum.
Low Running cost
Low costs of hiring employees, business maintenance, and make-overs / upgrades to the website. (provision of dynamic websites)
Unparalleled customer experience
Focus on the customer’s comfort, ease of navigation, and demand; provide the bliss of needing to have zero interaction with potentially annoying salesmen.
You can do Dropshipping
Operate through strings with your e-commerce website. Cash in on the efficiency of drop shipping.
Platforms to build E-commerce websites
Selling products online has its fair share of advantages like the ease of operation, cost-effectiveness, and of course the huge reach it rewards you with. However, all that doesn’t come so easy. In order to pull off a reasonably profitable e-commerce business, you need an attractive, high-functioning & well-optimized e-commerce website. Now there are a couple of ways to build an e-commerce website and they are categorized on basis of their mode of creation.
The more popular and wiser of the two ways to go about building an e-commerce website is to make use of one of the many e-commerce website-building platforms that exist today. The other one obviously being – writing the HTML and CSS code for your e-commerce website yourself and handling everything manually. That is however a job for experts of website development and coding geeks. The e-commerce website-builder way is the way you would want to tread. Yes, it is as easy and seamless as it is beginning to sound! There is a range of software platforms that allow you to build your e-commerce website using them. You can fabricate your website design, layouts, templates, etc using the tools and options available on the platforms. They offer great flexibility in matters like your budget, extent of customization you want, and the end-user experience which depends on various technical factors.
It is worth mentioning that an easy and clutter-free way to get an authentic and top-grade e-commerce website for yourself at a low cost is to hire an expert, like Techomining. A website expert such as Techomining does all the work and returns to you with a finished product matching your requirements. At times, not that seldom, you need to make changes or modifications to the given website’s CSS or HTML code. This is also taken care of, with this option. This popular option is wise to go with as it even rewards you with a great return on investment.
All in all, you get complete, finished websites with aspects including:
- Smartly crafted package deals for the development of e-commerce websites of different types and capacity
- Customized templates
- Search engine optimization for your website
- Feedback & response analytics
- Integrated payment gateways
- The widest range of digital marketing options
- Integration with multiple other websites & applications like search engines and social media platforms
These are only some of the features & options that these platforms offer. There’s a whole lot of other benefits and knick-knacks that you enjoy if you choose to build your e-commerce website through them.
These are basically the top E-commerce website building platforms that are available today:
Wix
Best e-commerce website builder for beginners.
Wix is counted among the best e-commerce website builders going by the users’ reviews as well as many business magazines. It offers great value for money and thus, is great for small businesses or newcomers to the online retail business. One more place that Wix excels in is its customer satisfaction. It provides a multitude of customer-friendly options. The building, customizing, and organizing your website is really easy to use and convenient process. You also get a decent lot of apps with your Wix subscription.
Wix’s highlight offerings include:
-
- Flexibility in choice of the product you want to sell
- Stunning presentation
- Wide & diverse range of payment gateways (15 payment options)
- Great Inventory management
- Multichannel selling
- Wix’s App market – 200+ apps crafted to make your job easier and reward you with great profitable benefits
- One of the best built-in SEO tools
Wix gives a tough fight to its competitors like Shopify because of its simple and flexible design, a respectable range of integrated e-commerce features, and its budget-friendly packages. All this makes it one of the best e-commerce website builders out there, especially for the newcomers of the play.
Shopify
Most popular e-commerce website builder lets you customize and personalize as you may like.
Shopify is quite likely the biggest name in the game. It checks all the boxes that a person looking to build an e-commerce website would want. Shopify has a really user-friendly interface. You don’t need to have any coding knowledge at all to build or design your website; even first-timers will find it smooth and intuitive. Shopify sports a ton of features and functionality. You get plenty of SEO & marketing features, designing & organizational features, and finance-related features & options. It has a handful of tools that make running your store easier. Thus, it tops in the features department.
Shopify’s Sales Tools and Features:—
- Apps
- Shipping
- Dropshipping
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Product management
- Payment options
- Multi-channel integration
- Digital selling
- Tax
- POS
The prices of Shopify’s packages may seem a bit high to some, as it tends to provide some of the best and top-tier features in its basic packages as well. But, since its heart looks to be in the right place, we believe it can be let go of. All in all, Shopify is a website builder that matches the customer’s professional aspirations, provides supreme ease of use, and packs a hefty feature list. If one is okay with the prices, they can’t go wrong with this one.
BigCommerce
Best for scaling with omnichannel sales.
BigCommerce is designed to cater to rather large businesses or those which are on their way to make it into the field of the big players. Therefore, it offers suitable functionality for the same. BigCommerce shines when it comes to scalability. It is the most scalable e-commerce building platform that you will find and
All the merits and demerits that BigCommerce has are attributes of the fact that it is a platform specifically crafted to serve large businesses. It compromises on its ease of use because of its advanced features and not so simple interface. It even makes use of complex terminology in the processes of designing, organizing, and setting up the whole website. However, on the other hand, since BigCommerce intends on paying great attention to detail, it offers the highest number of sales and marketing tools. More than any of its competitors. It provides not only quantity but also quality. Quality of the features and functions it provides. For reference, BigCommerce’s SEO tools & implementation is one of the best you can find. Excellent multi-channel integration is also to be found; including Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
In a nutshell, BigCommerce is most likely the best e-commerce website building platform for the large scale businesses out there.
Here are some more really refined platforms that you can use to build your e-commerce website:
Weebly
Best for entrepreneurs and small business owners.
3DCart
Best e-commerce site builder for developers and experienced store owners.
Squarespace
Best site builder for beautiful and creative e-commerce store designs.
Square Online
Surprisingly cost-effective.
Big Cartel
Cheap plans for e-commerce stores with limited products.
Ecwid
One of the most feature-rich e-commerce website builders out there
GoDaddy
Well suited for small business owners looking for an easy to use and relatively basic online store builder.
ResellerClub
Quite often mentioned in the good books of users, it’s really reliable and offers decent functionality & customer support.
How the product lineup is decided
While building an e-commerce website, you need to configure your products lineup really carefully as well as smartly. The product lineup to be put up on an e-commerce website is decided to keep two factors in mind. One, the target audience, and two, what your competition is offering. General practice is to select only the high-end products to sell online initially. Many business owners go down this lane as selling their high-end flagship (and expensive) products & services earns them a high-profit margin which is desirable at the start of their business. It also works positively for the brand image, establishing your brand as a top-tier brand with quality offerings. Otherwise, there are always different innovative ideas of business owners regarding the product lineup which can be brought into play for experimentation purposes. Or, you can discuss with or consult business experts on this topic. In some cases, these experts are the same as the ones who built your website for you. You can take their help, as part of their job is to analyze your business parameters, map out your target audience, and conduct a thorough competition analysis. It can’t be said for certain that the service provider you go with would be actively able to do all that for you, but Techomining sure has that to offer.
CONCLUSION
The e-commerce industry spans across the 4 major market segments – Business-to-Business (B2B), Business-to-Consumer (B2C), Consumer-to-Business (C2B), and Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C); and stands as the most prominent in the Business to Consumer (B2C) sector. This retail sector dominates sales & revenue in the e-commerce industry.
Having started in the 90s, the e-commerce industry is at its all-time-high currently and still growing at a wild pace. More than 1 lakh e-commerce websites are registered daily in India.
Clearly, e-commerce is a river of opportunities, which flows towards growth. It has proven to be a boon for businessmen and retailers who have chosen to take a dip in it, and also naturally, for the ones who decided to set up an e-commerce network (aka website) of their own. Whereas, it is greatly rewarding for the customers as well. To sum it up, e-commerce can be very rightly said to be the modern face of the business itself as it links and engrosses almost all the commercial industries on a broad level in today’s date.