E-commerce is not a new thing now but it’s surely growing at a fast pace. The reason for the growing trend of E-commerce is that it offers a wide array of benefits to both the customers as well as businesses. Let’s have a look at a few major ones.

Benefits of E-commerce Applications to the Businesses:

In contrast to retail, developing E-commerce applications offer the following advantages to the businesses:

Lower costs:

When you build a physical store, you have to incur big costs in terms of rent, utilities, salaries and for marketing expenses. On the other hand, for an online store, you don’t have to have a prominent location. The automated billing, check in, check out, information providing bots make it possible to reduce staff and the expense subsequently.

More geographical coverage:

When you own a physical retail store, there is a limitation on the customers that visit you. The customers from a certain radius visit your store, usually. When you take your store online, you remove those covert boundaries. The entire world can be your potential customer.

Access to new customers:

Even if you’re a new online venture, still you have chances of getting traffic through search engine optimization techniques. Isn’t it common that you’re visiting a website and upon a suggestion or a relevant ad you land onto a page you’ve never even heard of? That’s the thing!

Easy marketing of deals and discounts:

When you launch a discount or a deal it requires great amount of investment in order to communicate it to the audience in a conventional marketing channel. E-commerce on the other hand, enables you to easily and cheaply communicate it to your customers through website, email or sms marketing and through social media platforms.

Information gathering:

With time, it is becoming evident that major successful business ventures are the ones that can gather and use information to the optimal level. E-commerce brings you the most relevant information regarding your customers in a manner that does not feel stingy or uncomfortable to them. The biographical data and the shopping trends can easily be tracked and stored and used to discover various purchase patterns. Later on, you can show relevant products to the specific customer and also offer similar products in accordance to their taste to upsell or cross sell.

Always open:

With E-commerce standing by your side, you can easily brag that you’re “always open”. A store that is open 24/7 has more probability to receive orders than the one with limited hours.

Niche marketing:

E-commerce has opened avenues for vendors with niche markets to cater or niche products to offer. It is very difficult to place a store physically in the best place to suit your chunk of niche market. With online presence, you can attract your customers from around the world and turn into a very profitable venture even with a limited number of customers.

Competitive advantage:

For many business giants, E-commerce has resulted into a source of sustainable competitive advantage. Amazon, Instacart, Alibaba, and the list of such venture goes on. Their business models are based on the perks of E-commerce and their success speaks for itself. Even the physical stores are moving towards having an online presence sooner or later to stay competitive.

Benefits of E-commerce Applications to the Customers:

The success of E-commerce applications lies in the fact that they offer benefit not only to the businesses but to the customers as well.

Saves travel time and cost:

When as a customer, you have to go to a store to shop, you incur costs like fuel, time, energy, transportation, etc. If you’re a parent, you may have to arrange some babysitter as well. Online shopping saves you all that cost. It takes away all your worry and provides you with the needed products right at your doorstep.

Access to profound product knowledge:

In a retail store, you can ask about a product or two from the sales personnel and then naturally you feel guilty about asking for too much information. The employee may or may not have all the information you require. During online shopping you have access to a pool of product knowledge that is authentic and available all the time. You can make your purchase decision based on the required knowledge.

Comparison shopping:

When you have e-commerce application instant access to all the product knowledge during the shopping process, you can compare products, prices, features, deals and the like. Few websites or applications actually offer you to compare across different vendors and shop accordingly.

Avail discounts or bargains:

e-commerce application discount offer on your favorite bedsheets store but you are unable to visit due to personal commitments. What are you supposed to do? How would you choose your favorite designs personally and not miss the limited time discount offer? The answer is: through online shopping. You can also avail discounts at various stores online at the same time. This may be difficult when it comes to visiting physical stores.

Locate products easily:

Imagine going to a big box retailer with a grocery list in your hand. It is a hassle to find all the required products. It consumes a great deal of time and energy to do so. In online stores, there are search features and filters that help you to find the required products easily.

Safety:

During pandemic, it has become very dangerous to go to the stores to shop. You’re at risk to take the virus back home. In such circumstances, customers find it safe and convenient to shop through E-commerce websites.

E-commerce growth trend:

With technological development, E-commerce is growing its roots and shoots day by day. A picture is worth a thousand words and it stands true for the chart below from Statistica. The online shopping trend has always been ascending but it has spiked up exponentially in 2020. The reason is obvious: Covid 19. Due to the risk of Coronavirus, people are preferring to stay in the bounds of their homes and order the needful online. This has resulted in a business opportunity that the new ventures are thriving upon. According to eMarketer’s 2021 global e-commerce report, the percentage growth in worldwide retail E-commerce sales growth is 27.6%. Many experts believe that the online shopping trend is not going to fall back even after the pandemic subsides.