Five Ways to Take Your Small Business into E-Commerce

Whether you own a startup or run a small business, intensifying competition and little technical knowledge can prevent you to leverage the benefits of a thriving eCommerce domain. If you want to sell products online, you had to start with purchasing a domain name, find a host, and develop an eCommerce website. This is not all. You need to either set up accounts with various third-party providers to integrate secure payment gateways into your website or take help from an eCommerce development company. 

If all these sound clumsy, you need to opt for easier ways to get an eCommerce store for your small business. Thanks to advancing technology, you can have an online presence by investing some amount in any of the most popular eCommerce web development platforms. These feature-rich and future-ready frameworks are designed to meet diverse requirements of an eCommerce domain while assisting small businesses to withstand increasing competition. Let’s have a look at these frameworks. 

But before digging deep into these frameworks, let’s understand the key benefits of eCommerce for SMBs. 

There are approximately 12-24 million eCommerce websites across the world, and more are being created every day. However, less than 1 million of these sites can sell more than $1000/year, so small businesses have a lot of room for growth. As per the BigCommerce survey, the eCommerce industry is growing 23% on a Y-o-Y basis, however, about 45% of small businesses in the US have no website to date. 

A seamlessly-performing eCommerce website can help small businesses in multiple ways. 

This is the most important benefit to small businesses. As compared to running a brick-and-mortar shop, an online store needs less money, because it eliminates the requirement of purchasing premises or renting a shop. If you want to buy a shop in a posh area to appeal to a target audience, the cost may increase significantly. Also, an online store can assist you to save big on various expenses including inventory management, payment processes, and delivery processes. An eCommerce website can automate the entire process from ordering to delivery to reduce operational costs.

 

Physical or brick-and-mortar stores have limitations including particular geography and localization. But, an online store with a rich user experience can enable you to attract a huge audience across the world. What’s more, you cannot keep your physical store open on a 24/7 basis whereas an eCommerce website remains open every time for your customers. This round-the-clock availability and universal presence can dramatically increase sales. Even if you run a small or mid-size business, an eCommerce website can assist you to earn higher revenue over the period. 

Customer acquisition holds a key to success for startups and small to mid-sized businesses. An online retail store attracts more buyers who are searching online for products and services. As a result, you can convert your customers into loyal ones and increase sales significantly. What’s more, an online store can help you boost brand awareness which is essential for your small business. All you need to take help from an eCommerce web development company that can develop pages for search engine crawlers. This is one of the best and most effective ways to attract the target audience from all over the world. With consistent SEO efforts, you can get recurring monthly traffic that can be converted into sales. 

With accurate customer buying analytics and other real-time reports, you can actionable insights in real-time and make the right decision based on these insights. What’s more, various reports can assist you to improve customer services and offer a better experience to your customers online. You can understand the customer’s buying patterns and know their interests to promote your products online. Small businesses can tailor their offering and provide a customized experience to retain their customers based on this data.  

An online store can provide small businesses a huge scope for expansion and running marketing campaigns. You can make the entire world your target audience. As a small business owner, you need not depend on the local people if you have an online presence through a website. Your eCommerce website is the most powerful online representative that can assist you to build a brand and spread awareness about your products to more people. It results in a high ROI (Return on Investment) over the period. 

Let’s dig deep into the top five eCommerce frameworks that can assist you to boost your business online effectively. 

It is almost an all-in-one eCommerce framework with a lot of impressive features. Some of the noteworthy features of Magento include layered browsing for your product catalog for filtering search and SEO-friendliness. You can hire Magento developers to customize your online store’s design in line with your business model. However, you need to go for Magento Enterprise Edition (Magento EE) to leverage all the benefits of this robust framework. Magento Community is free with limited features. The cost of Magento EE is based on revenue. 

This is one of the most popular frameworks for those who want to set up and run an online store. It offers templates or custom-designed themes for your eCommerce store and you can get everything ranging from a domain name to a shopping cart with secure payment methods using this framework. Though the platform does not charge any setup fees, you need to pay $29 a month with an online credit card rate of 2.9% plus 30 cents online for a basic plan. The framework has no product limit so that you can showcase as many products as you want. 

It is a big name in the eCommerce domain. As a turnkey eCommerce solution, it offers useful features including marketing tools, SEO, and product reviews. What’s more, Bigcommerce can easily and quickly integrate with third-party applications like QuickBooks, MailChimp, Facebook, and the like. The most basic Silver Plan costs $34.95 a month or $31.45 a month for a yearly subscription. Bigcommerce Payments, a secure built-in payment method, costs a 2.9% USD transaction rate with a 30 cents per transaction charge.  

This is an eCommerce plugin developed and maintained by WordPress. It is useful for creating an eCommerce website for your small business. A fully customizable business website with features identical to a WordPress site can be developed using WooCommerce. You can make it easy for people or prospective customers to see all the products and purchase them in a user-friendly WooCommercee store.  

It is considered one of the most cost-effective eCommerce platforms that can drive valuable results for startups and small businesses. As a small business owner, you can opt for its standard plan because it has aall the necessary features to meet your business needs. You can have many themes to choose from with 24/7 support and easy-to-use customization options to make an eCommerce website that suits your business. The framework offers drag-and-drop features for building an eCommerce website. 

Whether you own a startup or a small business, you just cannot deny having an online presence. It not only enables you to reach a huge audience worldwide but also puts your business in line with other established brands. Experts have realized the benefits of eCommerce for small businesses and hailed a customer-friendly website as the best strategy for them. It is always better to make an early start for having a feature-rich website using any of the popular eCommerce web development frameworks.