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What is E-Commerce? Advantages and Disadvantages
Are you thinking to open up your own online store and starting to sell products or service through the internet? If yes, then that is mean you are thinking about E-Commerce.
The birth of E-Commerce itself can be traced back to 1960s, where businesses started to use EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) to be able to share business documents with another company. After the trend becomes more and more popular in the 1980s, eBay and Amazon started to rise in 1990s and started the revolution in the E-Commerce world.
Nowadays, you can easily purchase various kind of items online, with just a few taps on your smartphone.
E-Commerce advantages and disadvantage
E-Commerce pros:
•Getting new customers with search engine visibility
With brick and mortar store, you will depend on relationship and branding. However, with E-Commerce, you can rely on traffic from search engine too.
•Do not have to worry about geographical limitations
If you only have a physical store, then your marketing and service area will be limited by the geographical area. With E-Commerce, the whole world can become your playground.
•Find the product or service faster
In an online store, you can easily find what you are looking for by simply typing the name of the product and tap the "search" icon. You do not need to push a heavy shopping cart and wandering around the aisle again.
•Low cost
One of the main reasons why many business owners like E-Commerce is because it costs lower than the traditional physical store.
•Compare prices and products
With E-Commerce, it is very easy to compare prices and products. There are several online stores with multiple merchants inside, where you can get a particular kind of products with various qualities and prices.
•Save more time and cost
Sometimes, people are simply too lazy to go outside and buy what the things they want. Hot weather, heavy rain, or traffic jams often become their reasons to not step outside the home. In E-Commerce, they can visit their favorite store anytime they want, with just a few click of their mouse.
•Able to provide detailed information
The amount of product's information that you can show in a physical store is limited. It is also will cost you a lot to assign a staff for each aisle to help customers whenever they have something to ask or when they need help. In E-Commerce, you can add as many information as you see fit.
•Open almost anytime
With E-Commerce, it is possible for you to open your store for 24 hours per day, every single day. For customers, this means they will have a freedom to shop anytime they want. For a merchant, they surely will get more order because of their "availability".
E-Commerce cons:
•Lack of personal touch
Yes, you still can sell your products well without meet your customers in person, but some retailers are simply valued human relationship greatly. Different people have different preferences. The lack of personal touch in E-Commerce may or may not become your business's disadvantage.
•Some products cannot be purchased online
Online shopping its quite convenient, but even with all of those wide variations of products, some items just cannot be bought online. Like easily perishable products, or a product with odd size.
•Takes time for the ordered item to arrive at your home
When you go shopping at the supermarket, you can bring the item with you at the same day you buy it. In E-Commerce, you must wait for a several days before you really can use the product. Even with the fastest shipping option, you still have to wait for several hours.
•Everyone can set their own online store
It is possible for anybody to set up their own online store in a mere 10 minutes. So, if anybody can do that, how you can make sure the site where you purchase things is a genuine one?
This is probably good for the merchant, but you cannot say the same for the buyer. In the end, they will buy things from a famous online store only.
•You can not sample the item first
You can't check whether the shoe size is fit or not. You can't feel whether the fabric of the garment is soft or not. In many cases, customers love to "test" the products before they decide to buy it or not.
E-Commerce categories
There is more than one kind of E-Commerce:
1. B2B, or business to business. In this kind of E-Commerce, companies will conduct a business with another company. For example, a manufacturer sells things to distributors and wholesalers, who will sell them again to the retailers.
2. B2C, or business to consumer. This is the most common form of E-Commerce, where customers buy things from merchant or seller.
3. C2B, or consumer to business. For example, a designer freelancer bid one company's design project, and the company accepts the price. This is commonly found in freelancer sites like Upwork.
4. C2C, or consumer to consumer. This kind of E-Commerce is easily found in a forum, marketplace, or on an online auction site like Craiglist and eBay.
Getting started with E-Commerce
Do you want to start your own E-Commerce business and sell some of your products? If yes, then there are a few tools that you can use.
It does not matter even if you do not have any skills in programming because some platforms like Wordpress and Woocommerce are user-friendly and free. If you prefer something more flexible and complex, then Magento can be your ideal solution.
Do not forget to install several payment options in your online store. PayPal is quite common to use. Of course, you also can sell your products in a marketplace site like Amazon. They will be the one who handles the payment and shipping system for you.
If you sell physical items, do not forget to consider how you will ship them. You also need to do a research about the law in your area, whether you will need a special permission to sell things online or not.
Dropshipping is a good choice if you do not want to bother with production and inventory. Dropship supplier will send the products on your behalf, with your packaging and brand.
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You will get all details of ecommerce news, ideas, technologies, advantage, disadvantage, please visit Intellect Outsource blog. I am sure, you will definitely enjoy
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Thanks a lot for the information here, it is very important and interesting indeed. Which platforms do you recommend? I want to try opencart because I have just found some great deals on the themes from Templatemonster. What do you think about it?
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Well, thank you for reading this post! Well, that will be depend on several factors, like the size of your business, the functions you want for your online store, etc.
However, if you want to reserve your website for future growth, then I recommend Magento. It is very easy to customize. It surely can give you more benefits for the long run. Due to its open source nature, you can find thousand (or even more) available themes and plugins/extensions for Magento.
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thank you. this information is very interesting and obviously helpful
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The buying & selling of products & services by businesses & consumers through an electronic medium without using any paper documents. eCommerce is widely considered the buying and selling of products over the internet, but any transaction that is completed solely through electronic measures can be considered eCommerce.
ADVANTAGES OF ECOMMERCE
* Faster buying/selling procedure, as well as easy to find products.
* Buying/selling 24/7.
*More reach to customers, there is no theoretical geographic limitations.
* Low operational costs & better quality of services.
* No need of physical company set-ups.
* Easy to start and manage a business.
* Customers can easily select products from different providers without moving around physically.
DISADVANTAGES OF ECOMMERCE
* Anyone, good or bad, can easily start a business. And there are many bad sites which eat up customers' money.
* There is no guarantee of product quality.
* Mechanical failures can cause unpredictable efforts on the total processes.
* As there is the minimum chance of direct customer to company interactions, customer loyalty is always on a check.
There are many hackers who look for opportunities and thus an eCommerce site, service, payment gateways, all are always prone to attack.
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E-Commerce Advantages -- The customer base is very important factor in any business. Either you are offline or online, it is always a central factor for businesses. Online business has the biggest advantage of getting the customers from all over the world. They can access the store anytime.
E-Commerce Disadvantages -- There are security issues for all sort of businesses. online business has the biggest issue sand disadvantage of hacking. Hackers can ruin your customers and can disturb your online business.There are many areas in the world where bandwidth can create issues. Before setting up the e-commerce.
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One of the most tangible positives of e-commerce is the lowered cost. A part of these lowered costs could be passed on to customers in the form of discounted prices. Here are some of the ways that costs can be reduced with e-commerce:
Advertising and Marketing: Organic search engine traffic, pay-per-click, and social media traffic are some of the advertising channels that can be cost-effective.
Personnel: The automation of checkout, billing, payments, inventory management, and other operational processes lowers the number of employees required to run an e-commerce setup.
Real Estate: This one is a no-brainer. An e-commerce merchant does not need a prominent physical location.
Hope this helps!
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Thanks for the information. E-commerce websites are really easy to setup these days. We have websites like Shopify, Woocommerce, Magento etc to build web shops from scratch. If you manage the hard part like shipping, accounting, sales etc, i think it's pretty much a simple path. Implementing the right marketing strategy is also really important. You have to put some money into digital marketing, target your ads to the right people, and i believe you're set to go.
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Thanks for your information...
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E commerce site is best for online shopping so that is give the offers, discount, cashback websites .
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E-commerce is such an umbrella term with different types of online business models that come under it that it can be a little confusing to understand. I must appreciate your detailed post with all the pros and cons well-explained.
I started my ecommerce journey with dropshipping model as a student back then with minimal funds and time to invest. If you have a 9-5 job or are a homemaker or student, then I think this model would work best for you.
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Thank you for your useful information about the advantages and disadvantages of an E-commerce site. I would like to know which is the best E-commerce platform to create a website.
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In my opinion, Magento is the best platform to get an e-commerce website. You can find more information in our website.
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