You may have heard of the eCommerce business model as a company owner or operator. eCommerce means that you run a company using an app, website, or both. You sell products or services online.
eCommerce is unlike selling items through brick-and-mortar store locations. Nothing says you can’t do both, and some companies do. However, more and more businesses keep going to a strictly eCommerce business model as the 21st century progresses.
We’ll discuss why you might want to switch to a purely eCommerce business model in the following article. Some compelling reasons exist, and you should know about them before you make this critical decision.
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More People Want Products Delivered to Them Than Ever
If you want to go to an online selling model, you’ll probably run into some eCommerce terminology you need to know. For instance, you might hear about the customer experience. Customer experience means how your customer or potential customer interacts with your store location, website, or app.
In 2022, more customers want to order a product and get you to deliver it to them. Think about sites like Amazon. It has grown into an international juggernaut using this technique.
Even sites like Target, Walmart, and similar big box stores have gone to this model. They might still have store locations, but they know they can only stay competitive with sites like Amazon if they do at-home delivery in addition to maintaining brick-and-mortar stores.
eCommerce delivers convenience and makes sense for many individuals and families. That’s one major reason you should think about eliminating your store locations and going with online sales exclusively.
You Can Operate from One Centralized Location
If you don’t have any brick-and-mortar stores, you don’t need to worry about stocking and running them. You don’t have to set up deliveries when they run out of products.
Instead, you can operate from a single location. You might make your products right there on the factory floor. You can ship them from the same place.
That simplifies your business model. If you run all your product creation, shipping, and returns in the same locale, that streamlines your company’s operations.
Your Employees Never Have Face-to-Face Customer Interactions
You’ve probably seen videos on YouTube or elsewhere on social media that show customers and employees having inappropriate interactions. Maybe the customer starts it, or perhaps the employee does. In either case, these altercations result in bad publicity for your company.
You want to avoid that bad publicity, and you can do that if your employees never meet your customers face to face. Instead, they can fill orders through your warehouse without encountering the person who ordered the products. No in-person interactions often work to your company’s advantage in that respect.
You still need workers who can answer phones and talk to irate customers every once in a while. Other customers might try to reach out through live chat.
Your workers can probably keep their cool during these conversations, though. Customers will never test their patience by yelling in a worker’s face or doing something equally inflammatory.
You Can Produce and Sell More Products
If you don’t own any brick-and-mortar store locations, you don’t have to pay any property taxes on them. You also don’t have to pay to rent those locales. Instead, you can use the money you save to develop more products through your R and D department.
You can use the money you’d have to pay for building purchases or rental to launch new ad campaigns if you’d prefer that. You will have more cash available to allocate anywhere you feel your company needs it most, and just about any business owner should appreciate that.
You Don’t Have to Worry About as Many Locations
If you have many brick-and-mortar store locations, you might have to deal with problems that can arise at any one of them. For instance, maybe someone breaks into one of your stores or vandalizes one. Perhaps a flood, fire, or earthquake damages one of your stores.
If you have no brick-and-mortar stores, that’s not possible. If you have a single location from which you manufacture products, ship them, and handle returns, there’s less chance anything will happen to it.
You can make sure to operate your company from a site where natural disasters don’t frequently occur. Also, check out How to Fix Pandora Session Timed Out Error?
You can have guards and security measures to ensure there’s no theft or other issues as well. With many brick-and-mortar stores, you might spread your resources too thin.