A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives, a curated forum for enterprise technology leaders, nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the CIOApplications Editorial Board.
Love.Shopping.Fm and Owner of the tee Shirt Bakery
Benefits of an Online Store
Not all brands and businesses need a brick and mortar store, but those who do could benefit hugely through having an online presence. Other businesses like love.shopping.fm or eBay are entirely online-based and have no need for a physical store whatsoever, which also introduces some significant advantages. The option of selling your products and services online should never be dismissed, whether it will be an addition to a physical store or the main source of your sales.
Whether an online site should be the main place to sell your products will depend entirely on your business itself, but the benefits of selling online massively outweigh any other thoughts on this matter.
What are the benefits of opening an online store over having just an offline store?
1) Lower startup costs
By far, the most obvious benefit to opening an online store is that it costs substantially less money to run it. In fact, startup costs can be as little as $50! Comparing this to a brick and mortar store, where the startup costs can run into thousands, the savings are obvious. With brick and mortar stores, you have to pay rent, taxes, utility, and insurance amongst other things; all of these costs add up fast.
Plus, to run a physical store, you will need to hire employees, something which can be avoided or minimized through the operation of an online store. An ecommerce store costs a fraction of the amount a physical store does.
The costs of an ecommerce store typically include registering a domain and hosting your website, developing the general look and feel of your website, and the purchasing of an SSL Certificate. In fact, there are plenty of ecommerce platforms out there such as Shopify or WordPress which make the whole process even easier and cheaper.
2) Changes are easy to implement
With an ecommerce store, you can easily implement changes without any major costs.
When you operate online, you are free from the constraints of operating in physical premises
If you want to change the look of your store, this can easily be done by paying a website developer to develop you a new theme. If you want to re-brand, this can also easily be done and all you need to do is change your website and social media pages.
Changing the look and feel of a physical store, however, has substantial costs because you have to change all of your signage, furniture, and other related aspects of your brick and mortar store.
3) Higher customer reach
By having an online store, you are able to sell to more people all across the world. This is the main advantage of ecommerce and why it has become such a success. You can literally reach hundreds of millions of people across the globe, which can dramatically increase your sales. Over one billion people worldwide are using the internet on a regular basis, many of these for online shopping, so this is a huge number of people you can tap into and aim your marketing at.
In comparing this to a physical store, where you only have a limited reach depending on the location of your store, it is an obvious benefit. An online store can generate you a massive increases in sales if your products go viral, too. Far more people will purchase your product if they can place an order online as opposed to travelling across country to get it.
4) You are open 24/7
An online store can stay open at all times of day, all year round. There is no need for you to close on public holidays or lock up at night when you go to bed. This means that your potential customers have the chance to shop with you wherever and whenever they desire.
When you operate online, you are free from the constraints of operating in physical premises. The lights are always on and your door is always open, even when you aren’t in the country or when you are asleep at night. Prospective customers can shop whilst sitting in bed in pyjamas in the morning and sipping a cup of coffee, or on the train commuting to work.
Although there are several benefits associated with operating an ecommerce store, the usefulness of a physical location cannot be ignored either; people still love to shop in malls and retail parks, even though the popularity of ecommerce is at an all-time high. A physical store is not something you need from the very beginning though, and you should consider scaling yourself up online before thinking about opening a physical store.
