Nowadays an important question asked by the traditional businessmen is, ‘Why should I switch to E-commerce, if I already have a settled business?’. It’s mainly because of misunderstanding of E-commerce among businessmen, that it is too risky, complicated and costly that makes them resist from E-commerce. Just as the internet has grown into the desired medium for marketing, advertising, purchasing of products, goods, and services; E-commerce has grown to become a rival to traditional shopping in many ways.

Millions of people engage in it daily in one form or another to do business and to buy and sell commodities and goods. Hence it has become a priority which we cannot work without. One reason why E-commerce is growing so significantly is that satisfaction levels of shoppers are as high as 83 percent. This blog will share the reasons why you should switch to E-commerce from traditional ways of doing business.

Most recent stats about the number of internet users worldwide are 3.58 billion, up from 3.39 billion in the previous year. Among these, there is a chance that over 2.14 billion people worldwide are expected to buy goods and services online till 2021, up from 1.66 billion global digital buyers in 2016. In 2016, retail E-commerce sales worldwide amounted to 1.86 trillion US dollars and e-retail revenues are projected to grow to 4.48 trillion US dollars in 2021.

In the past of E-commerce, CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress, Magento, Shopify has been a great help to set up and operate an E-commerce business. E-commerce based solutions made businesses directly profitable in the online sales world. Only a website isn’t enough for E-commerce business. Analytics and insights are a crucial element of digital commerce channels in helping engage with the customer and in providing personalized services. E-commerce makes local businesses go global operating round the clock & reaching a worldwide customer base. It helps you develop end to end E-commerce solutions for B2B, B2C and C2C types of business models. Futuristic E-commerce provides advanced insights and implementations into customer behavior, business operations, buyer’s behavior prediction, dynamic pricing, product recommendations, demand forecasting and sentiment analysis in E-commerce.

Why must you move away from your traditional business to E-commerce as soon as possible?

• High financial cost of investment and maintenance
• Cannot earn 24/7 potential income
• Cannot stay open 24 by 7 by 365
• Difficult to sell internationally across the world
• Difficult to showcase bestsellers
• Cannot give a personalized experience
• Difficult to encourage an impulse to buy
• Difficult to retarget or remarket to customer easily
• Difficult to gain access to customer data.
• Difficult to process a high number of orders
• Difficult to scale business quickly
• Difficult to grow business organically with content
• Inconvenient & tricky business
• Doesn’t offer extensive product information, discounts and offers
• Difficult to attract new customers
• Cost of inventory management is high
• Cannot keep eye on every consumer’s buying habit
• Difficult to allow happy customers to promote products on their social media
• Difficult to boost brand awareness
• Cannot expand the market for niche products

Comparison Chart: Traditional Systems Vs. E-commerce Systems

Why switch to E-commerce?

Traditional business has a huge setup cost. You need to buy/rent a store according to your inventory stock and in some cases additional warehouse for storage. You need to pay for additional maintenance cost of a store. Hence migrating to a new place can be very cost consuming process in this case. While E-commerce is a low-cost business setup, once you are migrated to E-commerce, you don’t need any additional cost to keep your business running. This can help you to run your business in the long run.

In traditional business, you need to operate from the same location of your store. You can’t abandon your store for an hour too because you can’t predict when the customer will arrive at your store. You must have a dedicated person in the store the whole time. E-commerce allows you to run your business without the need for any physical location. You don’t need to operate from the same location. With a good internet connection, you can serve your customers from anywhere. And you don’t need to process orders constantly on a website. You can process orders on a periodic basis. This will allow you to focus on other work too.

With traditional business, you are limited to customers who can visit physical location of your store. In this case, you may not give attention to each customer. This may lead to customer dissatisfaction. E-commerce can help you overcome this problem. With E-commerce, there are no limitations on the number of customers who can visit you simultaneously. You don’t need additional manpower if customers increase as in traditional business. Your website alone can handle thousands of customers at a single time. This gives personalized experience to the customer.

Many stores contain products of the same domain. Suppose a customer wants to buy some items for the party, so he needs to visit all retailer shops for each item he wishes to buy. Most customers don’t prefer to shop from multiple shops, they always prefer a store where they will get all items. E-commerce doesn’t limit your business to specific products. If the customer is willing to buy different types of products at only one shop without going to other shops to purchase other products, your E-commerce portal will definitely attract them. You can expand your business from specific domain of products to a variety of domains. This will definitely help you to expand your business from one specific domain into many.

E-commerce allows you to do business 24/7 without your presence. Hence it will reduce the cost required for additional manpower and increase your sales. A traditional store has complicated and long lasting accounting. E-commerce makes your traditional accounting more easy as all information about your business is available on a single click. You can get details of transactions anywhere, anytime with much easier readability. Hence, tracking of your business is easy and it provides better accountability.

Cumulative data from Statista anticipates a 246.15% increase in worldwide E-commercesales from $1.3 trillion in 2014 to $4.5 trillion in 2021. That’s a nearly threefold lift in online E-commerce revenue. If you don’t want to lose these global customers and are thinking to expand your business, your not alone. For now, the big idea is simple: the massive opportunities of global E-commerce are too big to ignore. E-commerce is the future of business. You will be out of the business competition if you don’t have an E-commerce. In today’s world, E-commerce is not an option anymore, it’s a compulsion to survive in the competition.

This article first appeared on Techprimelab