An online store provides more flexibility to provide information about your brand and services. There are many benefits of having an online store of your own and it never takes too much from you. Let’s get started from What is an online store?
An online store is a website through which customers can directly buy products or services anytime and anywhere they want. It can also be called e-store or internet shop.
Why it is beneficial to have an online store of your own?
Direct Transactions
If you want to expand your business with minimum cost and least energy then the internet is a good option. When you built your website as an online store it gives you more flexibility than e-commerce platforms like Amazon and eBay. For example, if you create an online store on Amazon take up to 50% commission on selling your products and that means you don’t get the whole profit. Whereas, if you create your own website it gives you the freedom to earn as much as you can. You can get a direct connection with your customers and can create brand awareness much better.
Branding
Marketplaces provide you platform where you can sell your products. Although this looks very easy and profitable it creates problems for you. You’ll get many competitors and your storefront are like more similar to them. It causes less chance a customer will buy products from you. It doesn’t even create your unique brand identity. These platforms get all the credit, name, publicity and commission as well.
Creating your online store makes you different from the others. It gives you the power to manage and control everything on your own. You can create ad campaigns and promotions on your own with less time and investment. It creates your unique brand identity and increases awareness in the market. It gives you the freedom to make your website as per your type and design, and it increases chances to get leads and customers.
Consistency score
If you stop promoting on Amazon after some time, then you go down in your list and sales get down. Instead of this, if you create your own store, consistency remains the same and there is no particular effect on sales. It does not affect the brand value and you can even remain consistent with the help of social media even when you’re not running any campaigns. It does not bother with the price at all, if a customer trust you enough, you never have to worry about the price margins.
Easy to manage
An online store is easy to manage for an owner. You can manage everything from a place of your choice. You don’t need a physical space or physical store to keep your products. You can sell anywhere in the world 24/7 and there are no geographical limitations. There is more visibility to your customers so that anyone can buy anything from everywhere. There are no limitations to customers or their type. You can sell to a large no of customers based on your preferences. You don’t need to depend on a particular payment mode or shipping system. You can easily manage payment methods according to your customers, and the payment gets the deposit to your account directly. Handling your own online store means less dependency, less investment, less time and less energy.
Get repeat customers
There are many ways through which you can connect an online store to your customers. You can manage your customers on your fingertips easily and even maintain the relation. Your customers become more communicative and loyal towards you. Always remember the 80/20 rule i.e, 80% of your customers come up with 20% of your profits. The remaining loyal customers come up with a huge 80% of your profits. This is only possible with making an online store. There are many online tools through which you can get customers back on repeat.
More convenient
When it comes to customers, online stores can prove to be a better platform for convenience. People love to buy things from the home so that they can avoid traffic and time. Make your website more convenient so that customers vary products according to what, where and how they can buy. They are no such thing like ‘the store is closed’. Your customers can shop at anything at any time comfortably. Your online store is ‘always open’. Make social media connections to your online store so that customers will understand your brand and products better. As a result, more and more customers buy from you and you get more engagement towards your brand.
Effectiveness
Instead of running a physical shop, an online store is much effective in terms of money and time. It proves to be less complicated to manage and customize everything. You’ll also get a better seller panel on your website that is completely made according to your preferences. An online store can be managed comfortably and user-friendly with not many tactics. You don’t need to pay any rent or water and electricity bills to run your store. You don’t need to pay any salary to employees. You can save expenses by avoiding these unnecessary things. It proves to be cost-effective, saves your time and energy and increases your productivity as well.
Search Engines do the ‘magic’
When you create your online store instead of selling on e-commerce platforms, your customers can find you by an easy search. Having a website can rank you in search engines like Google and when you get a higher rank, the traffic towards your website gets increased and leads to more engagement and more profits. You can attract more traffic and sales to your online store easily. There are many digital marketing strategies through which you can get that rank that every business owner wished for.
Content making strategies
An online store offers more freedom and more content to the customers. It provides more information and key content to your customers. You can add product comparison, pricing, and variants. ‘About us’ page can describe your brand story and webpages are dedicated to your brand image. You can also add blogs and posts pages to your website to make your brand powerful. You can add social media extensions to make it fun and exciting the way a customer like. This content marketing strategies prove to be helpful to your customers and can increase sales. You can target a particular niche to sell your products and services.
Customer Insights
One of the best things about having an online store is the way to collect customer’s data and manage it many times as you want. An online store can help you out by tracking customer’s preferences and interactions. You need to think on an ethical way to get customer’s data. If you’re getting private data then it is your responsibility that it must not get leaked. You can get customer’s data through the help of email marketing. You can get more subscriptions and interactions through this strategy.
If you require any kind of support for your online store startup and if you are planning to start an online store, there is no need to wait!
You can connect now to Designing Bulls. We can create e-commerce solutions for you!
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