Before you decide whether the time is right to bring your retail business online, it’s best to firstly consider the advantages and find out if they outweigh the disadvantages when applied to your business.
For business owners that have yet to bring their retail business online,
it can be a daunting prospect. You will have to recruit a web developer, or appoint an agency; you will have to fulfil orders going all over the world; and you’ll have to ensure that you get enough online customers to cover your costs. While there are certainly lots of things to think about, and lots to do, the results can be very rewarding if you manage to do it right.
The Advantages Of Bringing Your Retail Business Online
Before you decide whether the time is right to bring your retail business online, it’s best to firstly consider the advantages and find out if they outweigh the disadvantages when applied to your business.
• Investors do not have a lot of confidence in offline retail businesses at the moment. That’s why it can be best to be in the online game as early as possible. Investors feel that more dollars will move online as customers become more confident about online shopping. Through having a position online you will be able to capitalise on this growing market.
• The market opportunity is so much larger for a smaller initial capital investment. Getting a website designed will probably cost less than a years rent for your shop, and the costs are very low on an on-going basis for hosting and domain registration. For this small amount you will get an opportunity to compete in a global marketplace.
• You will be able to save money on costs that you can’t avoid offline. You will be able to save on retail expenses such as rent and sales assistants’ wages. You will also not have to have physical goods on display, and that means you will be able to decrease the amount of stock that you will have to hold.
• You will be able to migrate some of your offline customers online, and you will be able to save money immediately. You will be able to save on costs straight away, and you may even choose to pass some of these savings back to the customer in the form of lower prices. Unlike some e-commerce businesses, you will be able to leverage your offline retail presence to work online.
The Advantages Of Bringing Your Retail Business Online
Here are some the disadvantages to bringing your offline business online with an e-commerce website.
•You will have to compete with businesses all over the world. You will no longer have a local monopoly, if you have that at the moment. This means that you may have to end up charging less online than you do offline in order to succeed. In doing this you may cannibalise your offline business.
•While you will find that many costs of sale will shrink, like staff wages and rent apportionment, you will now have to pay some expenses that you will not have to at the moment. This includes outbound carriage, internet marketing, hosting, web design fees, and more card processing fees.
