Tool Box
Issue No. 49 - October/November 2009
How to embrace e-business
by Chris Gebhardt
Today’s buyers are heavily e-dependent. Convergence – the integration of TV with the Internet in a digital era - makes everyone more relaxed about online shopping. Don’t doubt the relevance of being e-literate or e-comfortable today.
Many smart businesses use the Internet to establish a reputation for delivering value to clients, who in turn hang out to check their website daily. Great information websites build up a loyal customer base. The customer gets great money-saving or life-enriching information, while the business gets more business. A great website creates a win-win situation for buyer and seller.
Five reasons to embrace e-business
e-businesses make it easier to buy. A secret of maximising sales is to make it as easy as possible for customers to buy from you. That means giving them every possible purchasing and payment option.
Make money in your sleep. Time-poor consumers shop at midnight as well as midday, so your 24/7
web shop could capture sales you didn’t know you were missing.
Cut your cost of sales. Web sales are typically self-service, so your customers do the work of creating the order, generating an invoice, even updating your customer database, simply by filling out a web form. With no customer service staff and no overtime to pay, you can ramp up your sales without ramping up your costs, increasing your overall profitability.
Work your niche. Some of the most successful small businesses carve out a market niche where they don’t compete on price alone. The downside is that your potential customer base is limited, but the Internet can help you take a specialised product to more customers in Australia and around the world, cost-effectively.
Streamline your systems – and your cash flow. Having created an online shop you can use it to feed information into your back-end systems, automating things like stock control and customer database management. When customers pay you online with a...
