E-Commerce and its Benefits

E-Commerce

E-Commerce or Electronic Commerce means buying and selling of products, goods or services over the internet. E-commerce is also known as electronic commerce or internet commerce.

These services are provided online through the Internet network. The transaction of money, funds, and data is also considered e-commerce. The standard definition of E-commerce is a commercial transaction. Online stores like Amazon, Flipkart, Ebay, Quikr, Olx are examples of E-commerce websites.

E-commerce has changed the lives of people and continues to amaze people by many fortunes it offers in terms of convenience, ease, time saving and many other benefits to the customers and consumers. A well designed E-commerce website design can make a visitor’s online experience worthwhile and force him/her to come back again and buy the product/service off.

These business transactions can be completed in four ways:

• Business to Business (B2B)
• Business to Customer (B2C)
• Customer to Customer (C2C)
• Customer to Business (C2B)

Benefits of E-commerce

Availability

The e-commerce website is available 24/7, and visitors can browse and shop at any time. The website is always running and there are no working hours like a store. The business hours of physical stores are often fixed, and may even be completely closed on certain days. E-commerce websites can run all the time. From the merchant's point of view, this increases the number of orders they receive.From the customer's point of view, "always open" stores are more convenient.

Low Cost

One of the benefits of e-commerce is that it has lower startup costs. Physical retail stores have to pay up to thousands of dollars in rent to rent one of their stores. They also have some upfront costs, such as store signs, store design, purchasing inventory, selling equipment, etc. Physical retail stores must also pay employees to work and operate each location. Depending on the value of the products in the store, they may also need to hire security personnel. E-commerce will substantially lower the transaction cost. It eliminates many fixed costs of maintaining brick and mortar shops. This allows the company to enjoy a higher profit margin.

International reach

Using e-commerce, organizations can expand their markets to domestic and international markets with minimal capital investment. An organization can easily locate more customers, best suppliers, and suitable business partners across the globe. But bricks and mortar businesses sell to customers who physically visit their stores. With the help of e-commerce, companies can sell to any customer who can access the Internet. E-commerce has the potential to expand the company's customer base globally. Now sellers and buyers can meet in the virtual world, without the hindrance of location.

Job Opportunities

E-commerce is a job provider, period. In one word – Amazon. Amazon is employing over 300,000 people at the moment of writing. Not only that, but they’ve reached that number in record time.Digital companies are expanding all over the world. It’s not just the USA coast, but the whole country too.

Comparison Shopping

E-commerce facilitates comparison shopping. There are several online services that allow customers to browse multiple e-commerce vendors and find the best prices.

Eliminate Travel Time and Cost

It is not uncommon for customers to travel long distances to reach their preferred physical store. E-commerce allows them to virtually visit the same store in just a few clicks. E-commerce sites can also help you expand your product range faster than in the case of offline business.

Showcase Bestsellers

The benefits of e-commerce, such as being able to easily display the best-selling products, make it easier to show products to customers. Although you can design a physical store to attract people to buy certain products, customers can more easily find the best-selling items in the online store. The reason you want customers to buy bestsellers is because they have been proven. Other customers have already purchased them and are satisfied with the purchase.

Easy Accessibility

Customers in a physical shopping store may have difficulty determining which channel a particular product is located in. In e-commerce, visitors can browse product category pages and use the site search function to find products immediately.

Tension free

As the systems are computerized it becomes easy to maintain its working order without the tension of getting tired or becoming slow by the end of the day. It helps to make viable comparisons of the products and their rates and specifications which is not possible in physical outlets, hence the use of technology make online portals accurate, effective and efficient in their dealings with their customers

Availability of reviews

E-Commerce encourages reviews from its customers to know about customer satisfaction and what problems they are facing while using the products and services. One of the benefits of e-commerce is that these reviews can be obtained on its online site so that potential customers can read it and understand whether the product An E-commerce allows the vendors to read the behaviors, likings, dislikings and trends they follow so that they can come up with products and services which fulfill the needs of their customers and convert them into potential buyers. This provides good data that the vendors can utilize for designing impactful marketing strategies.

Effective customer service

Another important benefit is customer service. You can call it any time of the day and night as it is open 24*7. Online platforms have paid special attention to the customer services as they want to help the customers in their queries.

Scalability

In a physical store, if there are a large number of customers, it is difficult to deal with them due to limited staff. An important benefit of e-commerce is the scalability factor. You can sell a product to one or thousands of customers at the same time without any problem. There is no limit to the number of clients you can handle on your website as it is fully computerized and is able to tackle all the operations successfully without any problem.

Reduce the cost of managing inventory

If you are looking for one of the benefits of e-commerce, it can easily save time and reduce inventory costs compared to physical stores. The online portal provides functions and facilities to perform multiple duties automatically. It introduced a web-based system through which the website can automate and manage inventory by itself, thereby reducing operating costs.