E-Commerce, short for electronic commerce, is the buying and selling of products or services through the Internet. The term E-Commerce is often used to describe business that is conducted over the Internet using technologies such as online shopping carts, online transaction processing , inventory management systems, electronic data interchange (EDI), and electronic funds transfer among other Internet technologies. Some common examples of E-Commerce include online shopping sites like Amazon.com, online auctions like eBay.com, or online ticketing sites like TicketMaster.com. Basically any type of transaction that is conducted through the Internet between a business and a customer or between two businesses can be considered E-Commerce.
The rise of the Internet in the mid-1990s has had a revolutionary impact on our culture and commerce, and businesses began listing their products and services online for sale. Many people accepted and adopted this new method of shopping and began enjoying the benefits of being able to browse for products in online stores and marketplaces from the comfort of their homes. Fast-forward to today’s competitive business world, and businesses are finding that having e-commerce is more important than ever for them to stay competitive. This is especially true if a business wants to grow, expand their sales, and reach customers beyond their local vicinity. E-commerce enables all types of businesses, large and small, to reach their target markets around the world, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, without the need for them to even be physically present. Not enabling your business for e-commerce in today’s times could even be risky, as you may lose sales and customers to your competition in just one click away.
If you have a physical store, you are able to serve your customers within the vicinity of your store location. But it doesn’t go much further than that. Additionally, your customers can only be served during your store business hours. With an e-commerce website, there are no limits and instead of serving just your city, the world is your playground and your business is open to millions of potential customers. But that’s not all. Your business can now be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. Each product page in your online store is like a sales person who doesn’t need breaks or holidays!
One of the best advantages of e-commerce is lower costs. Unlike a physical store, an online store doesn’t require any real estate property. Instead, it just needs a domain and hosting, which are both very inexpensive. Plus, you won’t need to hire any employees to manage your store. The automation of check-out, billing, payments, inventory management, and other operational processes allows your e-commerce business to virtually run on its own, and completely slash all of your personnel costs. And if you need to advertise your business, you’ll find that advertising channels for e-commerce such as search engine optimization, pay-per-click, social media, and email marketing are all very cost-effective. With such low startup and management costs, it’s no wonder that online retailers are outpacing the growth of physical retail stores, according to Forrester Research.
With E-Commerce, you have the ability to collect data about your customers. Using the information that your customers enters in the registration form, and by placing cookies on your customers’ computers, you can access a lot of information about your customers, such as their buying behaviors, likes, desires, and so forth. This, in turn, can be used to communicate relevant messages to your customers based on their interests and buying habits in your e-commerce store. Additionally, this data will allow you to adapt your store to your customers needs over time and make it even more effective in driving your online businesses’ sales and future growth.
We can help you design and develop end-to-end e-commerce solutions to streamline communication, automate workflow, manage high volume transactions, user management and authentication, data and content management, shopping cart applications, and payment gateway integration. Our design service includes:
Based on your unique goals and requirements, we deliver custom ecommerce solutions that you will not outgrow. You will get a stable and secure full-featured Ecommerce web solution that has all the bells and whistles you need.
We will help you to achieve your goals and to grow your business.
We are building bridges in web technology in order to connect the client’s goal to reality