How E-commerce Platforms Help Small Business Sales Soar
This is a collaborative post
The humble high street might be dying out, but with e-commerce sales in the UK soaring, your small business has plenty of potential shoppers to target. Whatever it is you’re looking to sell, you’ll need an e-commerce platform to allow you to sell easily online. These platforms not only allow you a convenient way to create your e-commerce site and start selling online, they also allow for customisation opportunities and let you delve into analytics so you can tailor your business activity accordingly.
Getting started selling online
When it comes to selling their own products and services online, many budding home business entrepreneurs cast their attention to the likes of Amazon and eBay first. There’s a certain reassurance about using these online marketplaces that many people love. They’re established with impressive authority and, for the most part, can be counted on for reliable user experience for both seller and buyer. However, these marketplaces aren’t designed solely to foster the profits or your home business. There’s the obvious cost of transaction fees applied to all e-commerce orders, while personalisation of your brand identity is somewhat limited when selling through such platforms. Furthermore, it’s harder to glean analytic insights that can help refine your strategy.
Dealing on these kinds of marketplaces is a heaped plate of perks and problems for new e-commerce ventures, whether it’s a home-based hobby or bona fide business you’re looking to push forward. It certainly makes commercial sense to utilise these marketplaces, both early on and further down the line of your e-commerce business endeavour. However, unless some exceptional circumstance means you’re restricted to dealing on such marketplaces, you should really be taking steps to migrate your sales to a dedicated e-commerce platform.
Enhanced features of e-commerce platforms
In short, e-commerce platforms are software that provides you with the freedom to personalise a site and take control over everything relating to your e-commerce venture in a singular, simplified location. The bare bones of an e-commerce platform facilitates the presentation of your product range and the ability to process sales transactions. In addition to this, you have the added benefit of being able to meticulously track sales and delve deep into analytics, embark on SEO initiatives and add custom content to your site.
A dedicated e-commerce platform puts you firmly in control, allowing you to manage your entire product portfolio in a centralised location, adding or updating product details and price information as and when. Unlike with other marketplaces and platforms, you’re not limited when it comes to personalisation. You can join in with seasonal sale offerings and introduce promotional campaigns whenever you wish. Using a dedicated platform also allows you to get a deeper understanding of your customers and their buying behaviour, with analytics on hand to help sharpen your selling strategy and influence the development and introduction of special offers.
However, these platforms will only satisfy your requirements for a time. Once you’re secure with established authority and sustained growth, it’s time to think about scalability. As business needs become more complex, an enterprise e-commerce alternative to on-premises platforms needs to be considered. It’s the logical next step for businesses keen to migrate to a multi-channel platform, with everything in place to accommodate scalability efforts without having to assign precious resources to basic tasks like making sure your website runs as it should. One way in which you can make your organisation scalable and flexible is by investing in hybrid cloud network architecture. Significantly enhanced levels of automation, customisation, and analytic insight are also welcome standards that allow you to focus on pushing your business even further up the ladder.
