12FN-120 - Blog Entry - Advantages of E-commerce

E commerce Advantages

The advantages of e commerce for customers as well as businesses are as below.

1. To get over Geographical Limitations

A physical store limits the geographical area that can be serviced. An e commerce website makes the entire world your playground. Furthermore, the arrival of m-commerce has melted every left over constraint of geography.

2. Niche Products Market Creation

In the physical world, the buyers and sellers of niche goods can find it challenging to locate each other. Online, the customer has to only search for the product in a search engine. An example can be purchase of outdated parts. As an alternative to trashing older tools for lack of spares, now we can find parts online with ease.

3. Search Engine Visibility to Gain New Customers

Branding and relationships drive the physical retail space. Online retail, apart from being driven by branding and relationships, is driven by traffic from search engines. Customers usually follow a link in results of search engine, and end up on a website that they have never heard of.

4. Open 24x7

Timings of stores are now 24x7x365. Ecommerce websites can be running always. For a merchant, this raises the number of orders they get. For a customer, a store that is open always is more convenient.

5. Lower Costs

An advantage of e commerce is the lowered costs. A portion of these reduced costs can be passed on to customers in the form of discounts. Some of the ways in which costs can be reduced using e commerce are as follows:

• Use of advertising channels that are cost effective such as pay-per-click, social media traffic, Advertising and Marketing Organic search engine traffic.
• Personnel:
  Automation of checkout followed by billing and then payments, inventory management, and other operational processes, reduces the number of workers required to run an e commerce setup.
• Real Estate: A merchant of e commerce has no need of a prominent physical location.

6. Targeted Communication Creation

With the information provided by the customer in the registration form, and by insertion of cookies on the computer at the customer end, an e commerce trader can access a huge amount of information about its customers. This can then be used to communicate related messages.

7. Quick Product Location

An e commerce website makes it easy for customers to navigate through their menu and search for their products. Certain websites remember customer likings and shopping lists to enable repeat buying.

8. Enable Bargains, Deals, Group Buying and Coupons

Online shopping makes it easy to provide deals to customers. For instance if a customer has a discount coupon for shoes at one physical store and t-shirts at another, he may find it difficult to gain both discounts. But he could do that online with the click of a few buttons.

9. Comparison Shopping

Ecommerce enables comparison shopping. There are numerous online services that permit customers to browse multiple e commerce merchants and catch the best prices.

10. Remove Cost and Travel Time

Ecommerce websites allows customers to visit stores virtually with a few mouse clicks. This eliminates the need to travel long distances to physical stores.

 

Regards,

Shreyas Ravindran

12FN-120