What does e-commerce actually mean?

I am not sure about you, but when I first heard that my company is implementing e-commerce, I was well overexcited! Maybe it was because my previous job was to place 50% of orders on the website and 50% in the old-fashioned way – over the phone and there was not much time to think about the technicalities. It was a small family business, not investing much in any infrastructure or staff training as what they had was enough for them. But I wanted something more… I wasn’t sure, what that was but I always knew, that some potential that I was subconsiously aware of was not to be wasted. So the new employer with the whole e-commerce business being implemented was of a great step forward!

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E-commerce / ecommerce/ ecomm / webshop / online ordering platform etc.

All of these essentially mean the same – the customer can have access to your products / services around the clock globally! E-commerce is a platform, that enables buying and selling the goods electronically, most of the time also transferring money to execute those transactions. This is the simplest definition. So it can be your best employee, working hard for you 24/7, 365 (maybe apart from the days when the maintenance / updates / patching / upgrade is required – that is the time when it is on holiday or going through some essential recovery 🙂 ). But like any other employees, it requires your attention from time to time, a bit of TLC, marketing, rebranding to keep up with your digital portfolio and it has to be user friendly so people do not escape from it before they even had a chance to discover and fall in love with what you can offer them.

You might think – there are so many webshops, e-commerce has become so popular that there is not a chance that someone will actually decide to shop with me. Firstly – Amazon, eBay etc. are well recognized and cover almost the whole world with their distribution network. But remember – it all started with a concept, same as yours. And someone believed that it may work and make people’s lives easier so they decided to make a start.

And so can you!

Secondly – it all starts with little steps. Imagine, that your hairdresser had once decided not to set up the business they are running – such a loss it would be, you would have to find another one! But luckily your one has actually made that one decision and now you can benefit from that (I actually cannot wait to see my again when the covid-19 lockdown is eased and hope you are missing your one too!!! 🙂 ). So if people don’t shop with you, they will but with someone else, but they will shop for sure! So now you know that this should never be your excuse to start off and let the world find you.

And there are tools that can be used to enable this. And there are products, that can work for you.

In the next post I will explain in simple words what the difference is between dropshipping and stocking items. I cannot wait and hope you cannot wait too!

Thank you for popping in, but it is the time for you to log off and enjoy your offline life now! Online is pretty awesome, but hey! Offline is even better!

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Excuse my little joke 🙂 but if you still have a bit of free time, you can spend it to familiarize with my previous posts (just saying). See you soon!

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