Small Business Owners: Are you using E-Commerce to Grow Sales?

E-Commerce sales continue to grow at rapid pace. Online retailers such as Amazon and eBay have been growing at double digit rate for the last several years and are expected to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Traditional brick and mortar retailers have recognized this trend and have started to take aggressive actions to increase their online presence. Every single retailer is focusing on integrating traditional and online shopping with the ability to order for online items right from the store and return items purchased online to the store.

Small business owners can benefit equally well by including ecommerce channel with their traditional operations. As I will explain below, when you consider what is required to set up the ecommerce operation and the resources available to do so, it becomes a no brainer to set up an online store. You can improve sales by tapping into this additional channel to get customers who otherwise would not visit your traditional store.

Some small business owners are still hesitant to jump into ecommerce for fear of skills and effort required to do this. They are afraid of the infrastructure required for online sales as well as technical knowledge needed to set up the website and online catalog. However, this fear is unfounded. The advancements in ecommerce software have made it easier than ever for non-technical person to set up online store. Companies such as SecureNetShop.com provide turnkey solutions to build website with little technical knowledge. In addition, ecommerce juggernauts such as Amazon and eBay are providing services to take care of warehousing, shipping and other logistics.

Anyone wishing to establish ecommerce presence needs to consider five different elements for online channel. The sections below explain effort involved in each and what help is available to take care of them.

1. Website – This is the most visible part of the ecommerce channel. This is where customers browse your products and place an order using web shopping cart. There are number of software packages available that provide out-of-box functionality to establish the website and accept orders as well as payments.
2. Payment Processing – While Paypal has become the widespread payment processing solution for online shopping, you can also integrate solutions from other third party providers to accept payments using credit and debit cards as well.
3. Warehousing – If you have sufficient warehousing capacity you can utilize it to help with storage of inventory for ecommerce operations. In addition, companies such as Amazon and eBay provide warehousing services that you can tap into to avoid hassle.
4. Shipping and Returns – This is where brick and mortar companies can edge out online only operations. Instead of shipping items via mail you can have customers pick them up from your store. You can also utilize services from Amazon and eBay to handle shipping on your behalf for a nominal fee. This makes it easy for small businesses that do not have capability to handle warehousing and shipping.
5. Marketing – You can utilize number of online marketing avenues to attract customers to your online store. Tools such as blog, social media and online advertisements can help build audience for your ecommerce store.

As you can see it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to establish ecommerce operations. Those who fail to take advantage of this growing online trend stand to lose customers and sales to those who do.

Do you have an ecommerce success story to share? Let us know in the comments below.