Ecommerce - Its Meaning and Importance

By: Monalisa Boral Maitra

The Internet is now a successful industry. With the expertise advancing at a swift rate, more and more people are open to computers and Internet. Increasingly they are learning to utilize the Internet for their day to day needs. Here Ecommerce websites take a first place, moving out to the millions of people probing for your kind of product or services online.

Putting it simply, Ecommerce or Electronic Commerce means buying and selling of goods and services on the Internet.

Prior to drawing a final conclusion in any business, you must always remember to take into account the advantages your company would obtain upon executing the new approach of ecommerce. So, the first and foremost thing that you need to know is whether your kind of business needs an ecommerce feature enabled website?

Is ecommerce website for you?

The initiation of ecommerce websites has brought upheaval in the process of purchasing and selling goods. In this regard, it is important to consider websites like ebay, amazon etc. They have widely used the ecommerce method to earn sales revenue.

So, whether you already have a business or beginning a new one, whether the volume of your business is large or small, you can always gain advantage by demonstrating your products or services online, thereby gaining a huge amount of viewer exposure. In a nutshell, just any selling/buying business can profit by the ecommerce method.

So how can you earn bigger sales revenue from an ecommerce website?

The benefits of having an ecommerce website are many.

Publicity – The products displayed on your website present large publicity to the millions of visitors on the web. For example, if you have a computer showroom in a city, the visitors would include people from in and around the city. Infrequently there will be visitors from places outside your city. Thus your product exposure is limited. On the other hand, if your products are put on view on a website, it joins you to the plentifull people who access the internet and looking for similar product as that of yours.

Time and Convenience – Time is one of the fundamental factor in our lives now-a-days. A customer may find it difficult to visit your store physically everytime. Alternatively, if you have your store exhibited on the Internet, anyone can pay a visit to your online store at their expedient time.

Your store closes at some point of time. But your e-store works 24X7 for you to fetch in customers.

Moreover, with all your product images and descriptions provided on your estore, the customer gets a systematic idea about your product and you do not have to expend time outlining the same thing to each and every visitor to your store. It further saves time per transaction. Each sales representative would take some amount of time to demonstrate your product to any customer. Your ecommerce website carries out similar job to hundreds and thousands of your potential customers at the same time. As all the information about your product are provided earlier to your customer’s visit, it takes less time for them to understand its benefits and hence closing the deal is easier. Thus, several number of transactions can take place within a day.

Showcasing your Product through Demonstrations and illustrations, depicts a clear and thorough idea about your product without the effort of hiring and training personnel to do so.

Cost Effective - Sustaining a store in a primary locality is not highly expensive. Alternatively using the ecommerce is a whole lot easier system of showcasing and giving information about your products.

Besides advertising of your store and its products should be carried out from time-to-time. Using web as a media of advertising your website, is much cheaper compared to that of other audio-visual medias, like radio or TV.

In an ecommerce website all that you need is a professional website design, that have a look and feel equally potential as your competitor, Search Engine Optimization to rank your website with your other competitors, and the annual hosting fees.

Broadly speaking, there are no major obstacle of Ecommerce websites.

With time, more and more people are realizing ecommerce as a viable purchase method over the existing traditional methods. Thus, with this ever budding technology, ecommerce will continue to flourish globally and in due course become a crucial business strategy that has to be adopted, to thrive in the fast-growing market and keep abreast with your competitors.