Within a decade, the importance of e-commerce sites has increased 10 times. The hectic life, busy schedule, restless lifestyle, lack of commodity management &decrease of unemployment have actually cast a spell behind this sudden hike. People get less time to go out and shop and window shopping? Who has the time? Everyone is running behind money and once coming back to the home exhausted in the evening, turn on the desktop, PC, Tablet or mobile and order something from the e-commerce store.
This is somehow the daily routine of all the busy people out there? Isn’t it?
Well, the luxurious deals that the e-marts promote to allure us in the festive seasons are quite lucrative and unavoidable. Moreover, the discounts that they provide us simply help us to pick up some awesome products at a very cheaper price and that really works! E-commerce has mobilized business truly and has given it a new aspect from both the ends of the customers and the sellers.
What is an e-commerce site?
E-commerce sites simply mean shopping through the internet. The history of online shopping dates back some two decades ago in 1991 when commercial use was allowed on the internet. At the beginning, the term was used only for the implementation of the electronic commercial dealings via EFT & EDI. Later the coinage was changed in the presently used meaning, i.e. the e-commerce websites or the websites that deal with the retailed products or services.
History In Brief
It all started like this. In early 2000, a huge number of business organizations in the United States and the Western Europe started representing their business on the internet. This led to a revolution and people started to buy goods directly online. Even that time the term e-commerce development company didn’t exist.
The internet was also new that time and dot-com collapse had damaged a lot in the international market. But one of the retailing companies ‘Brick & Mortar’ stood irresistibly and utilized the benefits of the electronic commerce stratagems. Once the concept was established, the types of e-commerce, such as the Business-to-Business model or B2B, Business-to-Consumer model or B2C and other models started approaching.
Revenue Generation
A recent survey has revealed that within three months, the global e-commerce sites generate over $1,50,000 monthly revenue and approximately $3,30,000 yearly revenue. It is estimated that after few years the amount will rise up to $1 million, which means it will increase some 230% within the gap of 3 years.
Some E-Commerce Sites
Within the time span of 1971 or 1972, the ARPANET was executed to organize a cannabis sale among the students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Stanford and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It was an online seminar and is thought to be the first e-commerce sale activity of the world.
In today’s world, with the huge success of the Amazon and Flipkart, e-commerce sites have started popping up like crazy. The importance and convenience of selling products and services through just one click have approached many business people positively. So, as the consequence, thousands of e-commerce websites are mushrooming up almost every day. But creating an e-commerce site requires a good management skill, marketing knowledge and development caliber that can optimize your site in the crowd of other such online shopping sites.
So what to take care of? Let’s have a look-
Web Hosting Service
Hosting your website on the internet properly will help your customers’ to access your website easily. Choosing a good hosting service is, thus, so important for launching your e-commerce site. The best web hosting service uplifts your website loading speed, makes it secure and deteriorates offline going rate. Before you choose a proper web hosting service, check out its availability, reliability, proper uptime and authenticity. Jimdo, Weebly are some of the web hosting services that have the drag and drop feature that facilitates hosting e-commerce websites.
Mediators or not?
The term ‘affiliate marketing’ depicts the presence of a mediator between the vendor and the customer. It prevents them to interact and transact directly with each other. The entire task is managed by the mediators for which they receive commissions for each transaction. But it’s up to you, whether you want to keep a mediator between or not? Many e-commerce sites work via a mediator and sometimes, the businessmen want to become the mediator as it generates more profit than a direct sale.
There are some sites that directly sell the products or services without any mediator. Sites like e-bay, OLX interact the customers and the sellers directly without any kind of mediators.
Call-To-Action
Transforming your promotions into conversion for generating ROI requires a call-to-action strategy. Call-to-action is not only the button that your end users click on their purchase. It depicts the benefits that your clients get from you or want to get from you. Thus, the discounts or offers that they get can also be the call-to-action strategy.The margin cut for the products or services depends on the discount or deduction you are providing for its each sale. The availability of the products and the proper categorization also attracts the attention of the consumers.
E-Commerce Platform
Hiring an experienced e-commerce development company for creating your own e-commerce site provides you benefits from all the aspects. But do you know, there are many online e-commerce platforms that provide you the benefits of customizing your e-commerce site? Well, there are many to learn about. Let’s have a look on them.
Shopify delivers online e-commerce software for stores and retail sales.
You can easily add e-commerce functionality in the Wix.com, a cloud-based web development platform that permits its customers to create HTML5 websites and mobile sites by using online drag and drop tools.
BigCommerce creates e-commerce software in order to enhance your business.
There are some technical platforms too.
WooCommerce is the best of them, which is basically an e-commerce plugin for WordPress.
Magento is one of them. This open-source e-commerce platform is written in PHP.
So, if you are looking for creating an e-commerce site of your own, ask few questions. Determine the products or service you want to sell, the group of customers you want to target and make a thorough survey of the market and then try the tips given above.