Benefits, Limitations And Barriers of e-commerce

BENEFITS OF E-COMMERCE:

Today, e-Commerce has revolutionized the way companies are doing business. Now, consumers can purchase almost anything online 24*7 a day and get an ultimate shopping experience.

Before you opt for an e-Commerce business, have a look on its comprehensive benefits that you can enjoy:

Convenience & Easiness:

For many people in the world, e-Commerce becomes one of the preferred ways of shopping as they enjoy their online because of its easiness and convenience. They are allowed to buy products or services from their home at any time of day or night.

The best thing about it is buying options that are quick, convenient and user-friendly with the ability to transfer funds online. Because of its convenience, consumers can save their lots of time as well as money by searching their products easily and making purchasing online.

Offer Product Datasheets:

Consumers can also get description and details from an online product catalog. For your customers, it is very much important to get information about the product no matter whether the time of day and day of the week. Through information, your customers and prospects are making decision to purchase your products or not.

Attract New Customers with Search Engine Visibility:

As we all know that physical retail is run by branding and relationships. But, online retail is also driving by traffic that comes from search engines. For customers, it is not very so common to follow a link in the search engine results and land up on an ecommerce website that they never heard of.

Comprise Warranty Information:

No matter whether you are looking to choose including warranty information with product descriptions and datasheets or providing it from within an ecommerce shopping cart, you need to make sure that customers must be aware of important terms and conditions that are associated with their purchase.

Decreasing cost of inventory Management:

With e-commerce business, the suppliers can decrease the cost of managing their inventory of goods that they can automate the inventory management using web-based management system. Indirectly, they can save their operational costs.

Keep Eye on Consumers’ Buying Habit:

The best thing is e-commerce retailers can easily keep a constant eye on consumers’ buying habits and interests to tailors their offer suit to consumers’ requirements. By satisfying their needs constantly, you can improve your ongoing relationship with them and build long-lasting relationships.

Competence:

For effective business transactions, e-commerce is an efficient and competence method. Setting-up cost is extremely low as compare to expanding your business with more brick and mortar locations. Very few licenses and permits are required to start-up an online business than physical store. You can save your lots of money by using fewer employees to perform operations like billing customers, managing inventory and more.

Allow Happy Customers to Sell Your Products:

With lots of customers’ reviews and product ratings, you can easily increase your sells as new customers find that your products are good and effective. Make sure that you mention your clients’ testimonials, reviews and product ratings as such things can help your new customers to purchase your products.

Selling Products Across the World:

If you are running a physical store, it will be limited by the geographical area that you can service, but with an e-Commerce website, you can sell your products and services across the world. The entire world is your playground, where you can sell your complete range of products without any geographical limits. Moreover, the remaining limitation of geography has dissolved by mcommerce that is also known as mobile commerce.

Stay open 24*7/365:

One of the most important benefits that ecommerce merchants can enjoy is store timings are now 24/7/365 as they can run e-commerce websites all the time. By this way, they can increase their sales by boosting their number of orders. However, it is also beneficial for customers as they can purchase products whenever they want no matter whether it is early morning or mid-night.

Economy:

Now, you don’t have to invest your money in the physical store, insurance or infrastructure as all you need is a wonderful idea, unique products and well-designed website to reach your precious customers to sell your products and services. We can say that this makes an e-commerce a lot more economical and reasonable.

Boost Brand Awareness:

As like e-commerce business can help B2B organizations to get new customers, so it will be helpful for e-commerce businesses to boost their brand awareness in the market. Developing pages that can be indexed by search engines crawlers is one of the best ways to enhance your website’ search engine optimization and enhance the target audience on your site.

Decrease Costs:

One of the most positive things about eCommerce is that you can decrease the costs of your business. Below are some of the costs that you can reduce by opting for ecommerce.

Advertising & Marketing Cost:

If you opt for ecommerce, you don’t have to spend your money on advertising and marketing. However, organic search engine traffic, social media traffic and pay-per-click are some of the advertising channels that are cost-effective.

Personnel:

A complete automation of check-out, billing, inventory management, payments and other type of operational costs lower the total number of employees that you require to run your ecommerce business.

Eliminate Travel Cost:

Now, customers do not have to travel long distances to reach their desired stores as ecommerce allows them to visit the e-store anytime without traveling. With few mouse clicks, customers can make their purchase and have wonderful shopping experience.

Offer Huge Information:

One of the best benefits of ecommerce for customers is they can get huge information that is not possible in a physical store. We all know that it is quite difficult to equip employees to respond to customers who are looking for information on different product lines.

Analytics:

We can say that business 2 business offers an excellent platform to organizations to launch their complete range of analytics campaign. Through ecommerce, organizations can easily calculate and evaluate sales effectiveness, customer effectiveness, marketing campaigns, product mix, customer engagement and more.

Expand Market for Niche Products:

It is difficult for buyers and sellers to find each other in the physical world, but it becomes very easy for them with the inception of e-store. Customers can search their required products on the web and can purchase it from any corner of the world. No matter what kind of product customers are looking, they can find all types of products without any hassle.

Scalability:

With effective ecommerce solution, you and your organization grow and scale easily to meet market demand as well as customer requirements by introducing different sales channels and reaching market segments.

Ability of Multi-site:

With ecommerce platform, it becomes easy for businesses to launch channel specific and particular brand ecommerce website. This ability enables you to provide co-branded websites for your specific customers and allows for websites catering to specific international spectators.

LIMITATION OF E-COMMERCE:

1. Security: the security risk in ecommerce can be

• client / server risk
• data transfer and transaction risk
• virus risk

2. High start up cost:

The various components of cost involved with ecommerce are:-

• connection:- connection cost to the internet.
• hardware / software:- this includes cost of sophisticated computer, moduer, routers, etc.
• maintenance:- this include cost invole in traning of employees and maintenance of web-pages.

3. Legal issues:- these issues arises when the customer data is fall in the hands of strangers.
4. Lack of skilled personnel:- there is difficulty in finding skilled www developers and knowledgeable professionals to manage and a maintain customer on line.
5. Loss ofntact with customers:- Sometimes customers feels that they doesnot have received sufficient personal attention.
6. Uncertainty and lack of information :- most of the companies has never used any electronic means of communication with its customers as the internet is an unknown mode for them.
7. Some business process may never be available to ecommerce:- Some items such as foods, high cost items such as jwellery may be impossible to be available on the internet.

BARRIERS TO E-COMMERCE:

5 Biggest barriers to e-commerce-