E Commerce has a number of moving parts and often the success of an E Commerce venture depends on integration of all these parts to achieve the targets either in terms of awareness or profitability.
Some of the parts are common between E Commerce and offline business, such as products and customer service. However, there are some parts exclusive to E Commerce as business which are vital to success.
Let us understand both the parts that form a complete E Commerce business and also contrast them with offline businesses
Website
The most important component of E Commerce business is of course that it has something that can be accessed over internet. With an offline business, you can just walk up to a store or call up your neighbourhood grocer to deliver your grocery. But the real E Commerce concept kicks in when you have a website that has a store front, a product listing page, a cart page and way to place the order. The website is designed often to help you browse and move the products to the cart just like in physical world but just online.
Sign Ups and Login
Sign ups and login form an important part of E Commerce ecosystem. People signing up either for ordering or just receiving your email newsletter are a stamp of approval for your website and brand. Sign ups means that people have moved one step into the sales funnel and with enough encouragement ( such as social proofs, promotions running at the time) or your brand image, they are now inclined to make a purchase.
Logging back indicates that users are still willing to buy from you and want to understand if something in terms of pricing or delivery has changed.
Online marketing and newsletter
People may find your website from the search results on the search Engine page or if they happened to browse on social media and come across content related to your website. The important part is that this type of marketing is directly integrated into your E Commerce website and purchasing decisions can be very quick. A user seeing an impressive ad, clicks on the suggested link, where they can see the product. They then add to the cart and make the payment. This can happen in a span on minutes.
Newsletters are another way to integrate E Commerce marketing. Newsletter helps your customers stay update with your offers and often they make purchases right after clicking on the links in newsletter.
Shopping carts and Order process
There is marked difference between an offline store and E Commerce. Even though you are not physically putting products into a cart, you are essentially ordering them still. The order process involves checkout which is like any offline store just that you are making a payment, adding address, checking discounts happening in real time on website.
If you decide not to complete the order, the system may retain your shopping cart even if you decide to logout and close the browser. A good E Commerce system may even inform later by email that you have certain items in the system that are waiting to be processed and ordered.
Analytics
In an E Commerce setup, you can analyse the customer’s behaviour in real time and correlate it to their purchasing habits at a much granular level compared to offline stores.
You can also use Search Engine Optimization to learn more about how your individual product pages are performing.
Data analysis of user reviews and feed back from social media can help in understand more details about product issues which can help improve your overall offering.
Expectation matching and Customer Service
In terms of expectations management, E Commerce needs more work than an offline shop. E Commerce often involves viewing products and guessing their attributes to some extent. It is possible that there could be a colour mismatch or size mismatch or even features that are not visible before purchase because user ignored the associated text.
This may lead to higher returns affecting the profitability of the store.
Photo by Connor Lucock:
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