Why E-Commerce Is Crucial for Your Website?

In this day and age, E-Commerce is used widely in every part of businesses, especially selling products or services. Many large corporations, including Alibaba, Amazon, H&M, Zara, and others which sell goods utilize e-commerce to make direct online purchases of gadgets for people who live far away or have mobility issues and are unable to visit the store on their own. However, why are every company and business owner pushing for having E-Commerce in their system even if their businesses are not mainly about selling products? In this blog we will explain to you first about what Electronic commerce (now more as E-Commerce) is and how it helps many business owners stay at the top without faltering and the examples with it.

What is E-Commerce?

E-Commerce (Electronic Commerce) is also the process of buying and selling goods, products, services. However, unlike traditional commercial in which the businesses happen in physical stores, E-Commerce helps the shops and their customers doing businesses online conveniently through electronic devices like Iphone, Ipad, Laptop, etc. After the orders have been confirmed on the eCommerce websites, the delivery services like FedEx, UPS, DHL, etc. will be employed to ship the purchased items to the customers’ houses. This not only helps the stores centralize their operation for cost optimization, but also helps them reach out to more buyer groups.

Consider an elderly who wants to purchase supplies but lives far away from the market and has no time to travel to the market. They can use their laptop or iPhone to access the store's website and purchase what they need. The store will then verify the orders and pack the items for delivery straight to the elderly’s house. Or when you want to buy electronic devices from the US or other oversea countries, you use their e-commerce website to search and buy, some days later, you receive a delivery package of your expecting devices with no hassles. 

There are three types of E-Commerce: Business to Customer (B2C), Business to Business (B2B), Customer to Customer (C2C). All of them involve selling products or services to others but their nature is different. 

- Business to Customer (B2C): Through the website, business sells products or services to customers/ end users for individual usages.

- Business to Business (B2B): Through the website, business sells products or services to other businesses for business related usages.

- Customer to Customer (C2C): Through the website, a customer provides products or services to other customers.

Many shop websites employ E-Commerce in orders to allow their customers to purchase and complete transactions instantly when they visit the shop websites. These website owners always upgrade and keep the shop websites up to date in both merchandise and technology - making it simple and convenient in customer experience.

However, the cost of making one website with E-Commerce build in is expensive depend on how service provider wants. It ranges can be about USD 10,000 to USD 100,000 depend on how complex the system is. But there are ways to avoid that by hiring outsource team like Dicom Interactive to help build a decent website with E-Commerce build in, so no more worries about pricing or difficulty in hiring in house website building team.

What are advantages of having E-Commerce website against business rivals?

1. Expand customer reach

With E-Commerce, the owners can expand their customer range outside of their native city to others cities in the country and go oversea for new customers. This helps them bypass time and location restrictions which limit them in their traditional physical commerce. 

In many online marketplaces like Amazon or Alibaba, the shop gets different rules from the marketplaces which are sometimes inconvenient for them and keep them from reaching more customers. By upgrading the website with E-Commerce built-in, the store owners now can ignore those tedious marketplaces and start expanding their reach to other customer groups independently.

The shop owner can also config their own website to have their digital marketing contacts like Facebook, Instagram directly in their contact info so people can click on them directly and start communicating with them for more information and for other long term benefits.

Take Apple as an example, their website has been built with functions for oversea customers to easily check their new products and buy immediately on the website. No need to go through third parties like Amazon, Alibaba, or even their physical Apple stores in their own countries if they don’t have time to come to the store. Apple website also got their Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, and many contact points for customer to contact immediately after clicking it.

2. Improving user experience

Few people are proficient with technology, especially the old people and the young who do not have enough knowledge to use the website or having physical difficulties in reading and buying around on small screens - making it hard to buy what they need. For that reason, many business owners focus on making their E-Commerce website simplify for everyone. 

Consider the elderly, who may wish to purchase essentials online; the website should include many user guides that help the elders understand where to click and how to navigate, making it easier for them to find the necessities they need. Additionally, it enables elders to learn and comprehend the navigation process, so they can access the items menu more easily on future visits to the websites.

The key principle of UI-UX design for a company's website is to enhance the user experience, making it easy for individuals of all ages to navigate without issues. Even if the business focus is not on selling products but rather showcasing content, prioritizing customer experience should always be essential for the company’s website. This approach distinguishes an effective website from those that fail to follow this guideline, who often result in lower sales.

The other important factor the owner must consider is how easy their website can setup new payment options which is fast and flexible such as, bank cards, wallets, etc. Which suit whatever the customers need to pay for them in the website. The technology grows fast with time and the business must adapt to the change quickly through this. As an illustration, consider Google, they adopt rapid technology changes. They have introduced new methods for consumers to make better online payments, and the owner must adapt their website to these developments with flexibility.

E-commerce allows business owners to set up a variety of personalized experiences for their clients, such as suggesting new products that meet their needs, offering limited-time promotions in which they can actively participate, creating a feature that allows them to view their past purchases, and much more. 

Imagine your customers who buy dress favor red dress over others, you can setup the limited offers of many red dresses in many styles for your customers while recommend new kind of dress below the offers, and they can check how many and what kind of red dresses they have bought in the past through your purchase history function in your website.

3. Increase revenue and conversion rate

E-Commerce allows business owners to optimize the customer’s purchasing process, making it faster and more convenient. By solving the problem of difficult and slow process of customer purchasing items, the shop can reduce the abandoned cart rate and reduce bad customer experience.

The more the website got optimized, the conversion rate of customer will be increased for their likability increase from good experience in using the site.

The business owners can identify which products are popular and provide opportunities for upselling and cross-selling, benefiting both buyers and sellers while boosting revenue. Take Lego as an example, the lego company will analyze which lego set is more popular than the others from the children then create opportunity to upselling those lego set while cross-selling other lego sets with same theme to it.

One of the advance functions of E-Commerce website is the ability for manager or owner implement promotions and discounts in their marketing campaign. The website must also ensure the purchasing process is simple for them without going through complicated procedures.

4. Better business management

In many big companies, their E-Commerce websites are not only used to check revenue, setup offers but also automate your work on setting up order for each customer for more efficiency in inventory management. By providing clear intention and the design of the inventory management system in their website for the developer team to create, their managers can automate the order the customers make so their job not get burdened from manual task.

Their websites can also track the customer’s data and know what products the customers favor in, and use that info to analyze with other marketers to create a marketing campaign of those favored products. The analyzed data can also be used to assist the owners in decision making for their business in the future with more certainty.

5. Gaining competitive advantage

By adapting E-Commerce into your website, you will have a chance to gather customers from overseas, understand their needs and plan your way to get benefit for your company and win against any business owner who cannot adapt fast enough. In this world, although most businesses already got their own E-Commerce website but some doesn’t have proper E-Commerce website and still rely on physical store and marketing to attract customers to their store, you can take that chance to bring your E-Commerce website to the customers which is more convenient than the other businesses and pull more to your side. 

Nowadays, everyone carries an electric device with them everywhere they go, such as an iPad, laptop, or iPhone, and they use it most of the time. This has led to the necessity for online shopping from a distance rather than wasting energy traveling to physical stores. The business owners understand the need and apply E-Commerce into their website to solve their need.

From a professional view, any company got E-Commerce website already build up their business identity which helps them to be more recognized by customers the next time they see them. The simpler and more convenient the website is, the more impact on the customers to remember you, which is how Amazon, Apple, eBay, Alibaba got remember by all and stand at top.

6. Easy Integration and Scalability

One of the last important things about E-Commerce website is how they can accept integration and scalability easily. There are many marketing tools which can improve your workflow such as CRM so your website must have the ability to integrate them without any problem, they will become the toolbox for your need in the next campaign in pulling more customers for your company.

For instance, if your company specializes in selling fragrances, your website will need to integrate Shopify, Paypal, Stripe, etc. By addressing the complex and cumbersome purchasing process, the organization can reduce the chances that customers will leave their carts, experience dissatisfaction, and depart.

For B2B eCommerce, scaling up your website system can also allow you to link to other stores in the city and possibly abroad, giving your business access to a wider range of client data from other locations.

AI and chatbot can also be integrated in the website to act as customer assistants in answering common questions from the customers thus lower the workload on your employees and they can focus on other important tasks, and business can improve efficiency and productivity.

In online shopping for fashion clothes, the sellers will receive many repeated questions from customers which overwhelming them. With chatbot and AI assist, their workload will reduce about 40% and save time on handling difficult questions.

From what we have discussed above, we now know that many companies and business owners build websites with E-Commerce to gain many advantages, including ability to grow and expand, attract more customers, improve management workflow and support decision-making from the customer data businesses gain from their purchasing. 

For that to happen, finding a team specialized in making website is crucial but it is costly. However, you can always outsource this hard task. And a small website development company specialized in eCommerce is a good nominee. Our team at Dicom Interactive can help you with that with fair price!

Making an E-Commerce website for your special business needs is not a simple task. It will demand more resources and time than building a basic eCommerce website, defined clear workflow to build and the cost scale with how complex the website is. Talk to us and we will help you build your custom website with appropriate price.

About Dicom Interactive

Dicom Interactive is one of the top boutique software developments with offices located in Ho Chi Minh City – Vietnam and Melbourne – Australia, with over 15 years of experience in the business.

We have been working on a variety of projects across the continents, with focus on digital marketing, education, transportation, entertainment, game, healthcare, insurance, food & beverage, automobile, and travel industry. We can provide IT services for your Digital Marketing strategies and improve your business. You can check for our Service and Portfolio here.

If you need help with any services beside Website Development, you can contact us for a free consultation on defining your scope as well as the required workforce for your project. 

Dicom Interactive