Advertising
Your Business Home Base
In fact, the Census Bureau estimates that 2006 e-commerce sales in the U.S. totaled $108.7 billion, a 23.5 percent increase over 2005. eMarketer, a market research and trend analysis company, estimates that retail e-commerce sales will increase an average 18.6% per year between 2005 and 2009.
Still, doing business online doesn’t necessarily mean you have to sell a product or service online. What’s more, even small companies with only one or two employees can benefit by having an online presence.
Does your company have an online presence? Here are six reasons why it should:
1. Yes, it can make you more money—with the world as your marketplace, selling online eliminates a lot of overhead and makes it convenient for your customers to shop your business. What’s more, eMarketer says that shoppers are not only spending more online, they are buying more different types of goods, even big-ticket items like cars, refrigerators and treadmills, and even luxury goods such as designer apparel and jewelry, which opens new possibilities for creative e-tailers.
2. Your existing customers will look for you online—they expect you to have an online presence. Not having a web presence is essentially akin to not having your phone number listed in the phone book.
3. The web can be used as an excellent form of low-cost advertising. Establishing an online presence can you cost very little, yet provide your customers with enormous amounts of information about what you do or sell. A study by ShopLocal.com says nearly two-thirds of multi-channel shoppers now say the Internet is the most important shopping information resource, confirming the high value of online information about products and stores to local shoppers. “In fact, online consumers overall responded that they spend more time researching products online than they spend shopping in person,” the study says.
4. Your website can give you a world-wide presence—the world becomes your marketplace. Your business can be located in rural California, yet your customers can shop your business from Bangor, Maine or London, England. Distance is no longer a barrier.
5. Your website can save you and your customers time—put your product and service information online and your customers can do their research from the Web. Benefit: you spend less time on the phone or in person answering questions.
And yes, your customers will do their research. ShopLocal says 85 percent of adult Internet shoppers used the web to make more informed shopping trips to their local stores. Savvy consumers are using the Internet to do online research and price checking before they make the actual purchase at a local brick and mortar store. If you don’t have an online presence, with up-to-date information about your products and services, you’re not serving your customers well.
“Nearly nine out of 10 adults — from the 110 million Internet shoppers 18 years and older who go online at least once a month — were found to have used the Internet for local shopping, not an online purchase,” according to the study. “This confirms that the Internet is now widely used for local shopping information as well as making online purchases.”
6. Provide better customer service—we tend to assume that only a “live person” can truly offer quality customer service, but the Internet is quickly changing the dimensions of customer service. Consider Nordstrom, the Seattle-based fashion specialty retailer, which now offers RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed capabilities from its online store, Nordstrom.com. The new feature allows Nordstrom customers to sign up and receive the latest product information on their favorite brands.
Fashion is constantly evolving, so Nordstrom is providing RSS services so its customers can see what’s new at the online store in real time. “We see this tool as a way to offer customers a more efficient way to shop for the products they’re looking for,” a company press release says.
RSS delivers information about recently posted content directly to Nordstrom customers. By plugging a link into an RSS reader, customers can retrieve the newest content offerings without actually having to visit the site. RSS can be delivered to search engines, specialized RSS directories and special content aggregation sites.
Your web site is also the perfect vehicle to conduct customer satisfaction surveys, collect customer information, and respond to inquiries and complaints.
The Bottom Line
Over the next several weeks we’ll talk more about doing business on the web, but the bottom line is this: When it comes to benefiting from the Internet, the size of your business does not matter. Your business can be a one-man show or a corporate titan. The fact is, if you don’t have a website, you’re losing business to other companies that do.
To your online business success,
Steve Browne
www.SteveBrowneDirect.com