The rise of the internet and ecommerce has brought down many major high street retailers. There have been many high profile bankruptcies such as Game and Woolworths. While ecommerce seems to be threatening the survival of traditional retailers, it also offers many lucrative opportunities that can directly and indirectly benefit an offline business. Those remaining traditional retailers must adapt to the new technology and utilize it to grow their business or to survive. Indeed, many major retail companies have already embraced the concept of ecommerce and are doing quite well by it. However, many small local businesses are slower to adapt. This has to change if they are to compete with the major retailers as well as many thousands or even millions of virtual sellers that are fighting hard for their customers.
By setting up an online shop, the business can reach new customers in new geographic areas. By increasing the size of the potential market the business can generate more sales and improve profitability via greater economies of scale. The fact that an online shop is much cheaper to run because there is no expensive rents associated with maintaining a website and the business owner doesn't need to hire any shop assistants to attend the shop means online sales can carry much greater profit margins.
Besides greater potential sales and profit margins, having a website can help your offline business in a number of other ways as well. Here is just a couple.
Information
Your website can contain information that is not physically possible to display or convey via your physical store. Customers can read stories about your company, news announcements, terms and conditions and even watch tv adverts and promotional videos online, which they wouldn't do if they were visiting your physical store. This means you can put all the information you think is important or you'd like your customers to know about on a platform that can be accessed by all your customers 24/7. This helps customers have a better understanding about who you are, why they should shop with you and more importantly the terms and conditions. Should there be any problems with a particular sale, customers can access your terms and conditions online, which reduces the work load and cost of your customer service operation.
Customer Database
It is much easier to build a customer database online than it is offline. Many of your online shoppers could be customers who live nearby and also visit your physical store. When people shop in your store, they pay for what they buy and you do not have much data to build a database that will allow you to track customer spending habits and offer product recommendations. However, online orders usually require the customers to identify themselves for delivery or collection. This makes it easier to build a database that will allow you to build relationships with your customers and make future marketing efforts more effective.
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