5 Reasons to Add an eCommerce Solution in Your Business
There’s no denying the impact that the global COVID-19 pandemic has had on businesses. Many companies and businesses who have been otherwise apprehensive to adapt to the digital age have been left with no choice, as online sales and demand has surged since people were forced to remain home. Businesses without an online or digital presence have been left badly exposed and many are playing catch-up.
While the pandemic did catch most businesses off-guard, it has accelerated the shift to prioritising e-commerce within businesses. Not only is it more convenient for the customers and business supplying the goods, but has the potential to be much more lucrative in countries like South Africa where many more people are developing the habit of online buying for the first time.
There are perks to being late adopters of new technology, including greater reliability, cost-effectiveness, and improvement, allowing smaller businesses to update their online shopping ‘facilities’ relatively easily; and there are some key reasons as to why your business should make the leap into the digital shopping world:
INCREASED SALES
Digital sales are allowing companies to be flexible, responsive, and dynamic; playing an important role in helping companies to find new opportunities quickly, meet customer expectations and increase service levels. By enabling efficiencies up and down the supply chain, an integrated B2B e-commerce platform makes it easier to meet those service levels, deliver on time, and keep orders flowing in, with customers benefiting too.
IMPROVED BRAND AWARENESS
An e-commerce platform enables you to build a strong digital presence for your brand. It offers the perfect platform to connect with your target market and create meaningful conversations and exposure about your brand. It tracks the buying patterns of your customers and alerts you to when they might be running out of products, so that you can alert them about restocking. Furthermore, it also allows you to personalise the customer buying experience, helping your business to build its brand.
Providing detailed product information and features is key for an effective branding strategy. You can demonstrate care about the needs and concerns of your customers by providing them with relevant information, including key features and benefits.
ENHANCED CROSS- AND UP-SELLING
With the digital analytics tools at your fingerprints thanks to e-commerce systems, you are able to implement cross-selling and up-selling, which essentially means identifying related products and services from initial purchases, and then creating appropriate offers.
Informing your customers of additional items that might complement their current order, such as a bag or carry-case for a product they purchase, can help you grow your average order value with relatively little marketing effort.
TESTING GROUND FOR NEW OFFERINGS
Testing an audiences response in a new offer in a physical retail space has always been an expensive and tricky endeavour, but with an e-commerce platform, it’s easy to get real-world feedback and to gauge future demand. Testing product viability ensures that you aren’t wasting your time or money when launching a new product or service is a great way to gauge the direction of your company.
PROVIDING AN OMNI-CHANNEL EXPERIENCE
An e-commerce platform can support multiple channels of customer engagement – web, voice, digital, email and more. Supporting multiple channels within a single interaction is the complete omnichannel customer experience that is expected by today’s B2B and B2C customers.
By embracing e-commerce, digital transformation can allow you to scale your business significantly by making further improvements to efficiencies, reaching new customers in new markets, and attracting, retaining, and empowering the best talent to help them grow.
Choosing the right e-commerce platform for your business needn’t be a daunting and tough decision, nor a time-consuming task, and Digitise makes it simple by having a website and online store-builder, CRM system, and marketing toolkit all in one place. And of course, keeps affordability in mind with flexible pricing packages. The drag-and-drop store builder gives you the ability to add products with ease, grow your client base, and feature multiple payment options, so that your site is ready for the hungry South African market.
Why not sign-up and get cracking on your business now? Check out Digitise here.
