E-Commerce – it’s definitely getting bigger day by day.
No doubt companies are taking advantage of this concept: that we so very well know as “e-commerce” and definitely taking the online business to the next level.
E-commerce engine is the application or platform which manages your online business and helps sell your products, electronically.
The global e-commerce website sales were more than $22 Trillion in 2016 and e-commerce experts expect it’s going to reach more than $27 Trillion by 2020.
“In 2017 we will see a big leap forward. Technologies such as machine learning will do the heavy lifting, and empower “one-click” solutions to complex problems. Everything is getting easier. We are surrounded by ever-evolving new technology, and a constant need to learn new tools and systems.”
Victor Levitin, CEO, CrazyLister.com
“I believe it is so incredibly important to any business’s growth in 2017. Not every single channel will be right for every brand, but a lot of them will be.”
Tracey Wallace – Editor of BigCommerce
Year 2017, will see huge growth in the world e-commerce market. Industry will continue to drive more sales compared to the previous years. More than 90% American prefer online shopping and use the attractive methods like coupon code and discount codes to get better price that from physical stores.
Now, this reminds me of interesting stats that I have store for you guys. Have a quick look at the buyer’s interest in online shopping.
Out of top 15 e-Commerce market world retail sales, USA happens to be in the top among all other countries. Let me show you the market data (see below Figure 1) of e-marketer by gfluence to get the clear picture of the total sales in 2016 and the estimated sales in 2017;
Figure 1 | courtesy: gfluence.com
As a technical advisor and blogger for Andolasoft, I think the time is right for you to move your small business to an e-commerce store and offer your products or services through e-commerce engines.
That’s the future…
But it’s not an easy task to adopt e-commerce engine for businesses, it’s a bit dense…but the good news is, the complex part goes to your development agencies head – as they are the person who are going to devise it for you according to your requirements.
Now, this gives rise to some of the most important questions,
- Why should you move your business to ecommerce engine?
- How will you build or move your business to e-commerce store?
- What will be your best possible solution and in which platform should you go for?
These are certain questions that we very often get queried about from our customers!
Let me clarify the above questions for you –
There are various e-commerce platforms available to build your online store and you need to be very careful in selecting the right one amongst them. Some platforms are dominating the market and some are in the race to the witch mountain. The research team at Andolasoft, very carefully have collected information on different e-commerce platforms and how much they’re in use while developing such e-commerce websites.
Figure 2 | courtesy: engadget.com
Why should you move your business to ecommerce engine?
Online visibility of small businesses is vital for the overall growth and maximizing the sales.
E-commerce engine minimizes the operating cost and maximizes the online availability to your buyers.
Let me share with you certain vital points on why going e-commerce is smart thing to do in today’s business scenario and completion;
Contents
A. E-commerce Engine are easily customizable
An e-commerce engine is very much flexible, if I talk about ‘customization’.
Open source e-commerce engine like WooCommerce, OpenCart, Magento, and PrestaShop has progressive customizable options to modify the algorithms.
B. E-Commerce platforms are SEO friendly
Most of the e-commerce platforms are very much SEO friendly, which helps to bring your product in search engine result pages. So it saves the optimization time and money.
C. Everything in One Place
E-commerce engine also helps for integration of your marketplace with your social network such as Facebook, Twitter in case you want to promote some offers, deals that will benefit customers.
Instead of direct selling of your products or services, social network integrations with your marketplace helps to maximize the sales with multi-channel retails.
D. Mobile Friendliness:
More than 75% people choose to buy products through cell phones. Open source e-commerce engines are very much compatible with mobile to give a friendly customer experience.
E. Coupons and discount options
E-commerce engine has the provision to make your users happy with expositing coupons and discount codes. E-commerce engine like Shopify allows you to customize and apply discount and coupons to each of your products. Online coupon and discounts are the best way to hook new and existing users.
F. Fast speed in loading
Website that is quick to load is the ones that are always preferred by users or your customers – that directly impacts in your sales strategies.
Every user expects quick loading of a website within 3-5 seconds and e-commerce platforms normally takes very less time for loading.
Let me give you some quick picture about some of the dominating ecommerce platforms;
Shopify is the fastest-growing e-commerce platforms, that has managed to impress millions of store owners though its flexibility, easiness and quick-easy customization options.
WooCommerce is an open-source platform that is fully packed with features and more than 1,986,393 online retailers and seamlessly integrating it with WordPress. It has advanced customization options with custom responsive themes.
PrestaShop, open source e-commerce platform is mostly recommended for small businesses, those who regularly keep on updating their features with new ideas for their users. All types of administrative activities are smoothly executed with maximum level of automation possible.
BigCommerce is one of the self-hosted e-commerce engines for small businesses. It has a wide range of features that are made to meet all the goals of a small business.
So, it’s time for you to take the right decision before selecting the right platform to build your online e-commerce store.
But, before building your online engine, ask the right questions to your e-commerce developer or e-commerce agency so that you don’t miss out on important points before you start building your monetization plan.
If you have already built your online store for your business and not able to satisfy your potential customer, then Andolasoft e-commerce experts are there to help you.
