The growing ecommerce market can be scary for newcomers. Some may not understand the concept of online sales while others fear that everything is progressing too fast. No one says that it’s an easy endeavor but it sure is lucrative and worthwhile for a number of reasons.

There are many things that you can do to scale a business and build a successful brand if you adopt ecommerce or even shift to ecommerce completely. Here are some of the benefits that you may not fully understand yet.

Take Advantage of Online Advertising

Driving traffic to your website has never been easier and harder at the same time. While the ecommerce market is highly competitive, there are many ways to advertise your products to a wider audience.

Social media advertising through platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter can help with customer acquisition and increase your sales. It’s one of the staples of ecommerce. And you don’t have to do much but set up a profile or business page and run automated ads to gain traction for your store.

Ecommerce platforms like Magento have seamless social media advertising features built-in. More awareness means more traffic, which in turn leads to more sales. While social media advertising may work for physical retail businesses too, its full potential comes to the forefront for digital stores.

Find New Ways to Monetize Your Website

Just because you’re selling your goods or services online, it doesn’t mean that you can’t do more. The beauty of ecommerce is that it’s easier to score multiple revenue streams.

For example, affiliate marketing is something that works in both the B2C and B2B spheres. As you operate your store and sell your own products, you can also recommend the goods and services of other businesses for a cut.

Any sales that convert from links accessed through your own ecommerce website would earn you a commission. Don’t think of it as promoting potential competitors either. You can always find complementary products to what you’re selling and cross-sell them to your customers, and you’re also helping your buyers to find everything they need in the process.

Promoting products outside your niche may also help to drive more traffic to your website, assuming that you make use of the right SEO tools and SEO content.

Manage Wholesale and Shipping Fulfillment

It was never easy to keep track of multiple orders spread across dozens of marketplaces, and multiple shipping companies only add to that.

But ecommerce may offer a great advantage in this area. Ecommerce platforms offer automated shipping software tools that handle order management, shipping, and other repetitive tasks that can be automated for your convenience.

Not only does this save time but it can also save money and reduce the chances of mistakes. How does it save money? Automated shipping can be configured to compare rates before sending out orders.

This means that you don’t have to qualify for special rates to find the best shipping company for both domestic and international orders. Ultimately, this can help to free up more resources for you that you can devote to other aspects of your company.

Be More Accessible to Your Customers

Ecommerce can give your brand a global presence. But there’s more to it than that. Another benefit of the growing ecommerce market is that you can target mobile users easier than ever.

Ecommerce platforms now allow you to customize and optimize your website for mobile users. That’s important and necessary seeing as they make up at least half of the shoppers in the developed world, the United States included.

Shopping on mobile devices is comfortable and can be done 24/7. That’s why customers prefer it and why more businesses are trying to get in on the action.

Mobile shopping offers another great benefit in the form of varied payment methods like Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Braintree, Stripe, Dwolla, and more. Some customers may prefer these to the traditional credit card payment, which can also be more secure for the merchants than processing international credit cards that don’t support the US verified address system.

Customers expect to find their favorite payment methods and it’s never been easier for you to accommodate their wishes.

Make Purchases Easier with Simplified Checkout Pages

For some buyers, finding the right products and loading up their shopping cart takes enough time as it is. It’s no wonder that no one appreciates lengthy checkout processes that ask for too much unnecessary information. It only makes the process feel intrusive as if standing in line at a retail store.

Ecommerce platforms offer simplified checkout pages where your customers can place an order and pay for it with just a few clicks. And it’s even easier for return customers who have created accounts and saved their address and payment information.

This is one of the things that you must take advantage of to keep customers happy and increase your customer retention. It’s often the repeat customers that bring in the bulk of any online store’s revenue. It’s the building blocks that help with a company’s growth, not to mention that it’s several times more economical to retain an existing customer than to attract a new customer.

Scale Your Business Without Hiring More Employees

With the almost unlimited reach of ecommerce, it’s never been easier to scale a business without having to hire more people.

Digital catalogs and automated pricing and marketing software allow you to add relevant products and services to your lineup without manual input. This means that you don’t have to hire more people to do inventory, set prices, or even advertise products.

Social media advertising, email marketing, and unlimited shelf space are among the best features of any ecommerce platform. Since many of the processes can be automated, either for free or at a minor cost, depending on the extensions and software used, hiring employees is not as relevant as a few years ago.

What this means is that you can increase your revenue and keep your operating costs down for higher net revenue and profit numbers.

Even If You Hire, You Can Hire Cheaper

There are still departments where you will need actual employees. Having a more global brand means that you need to be aware of the various taxation and customs requirements of different countries. You may also have to provide customer support in multiple languages. That’s on top of a larger shipping department.

However, the costs of hiring can be considerably lower. You can afford to hire people who live in different time zones. In some countries, the labor costs are much lower than others.

You can also save money on insurance, office space, and other perks if you hire virtual or remote employees. And since so many people prefer to work remotely these days, the ability to work from home can make your job offer more attractive without regard to the salary. You might be able to hire highly qualified people at a discount.

Grow Your Business Beyond What You Thought Possible

Physical retail stores are still very popular and make up more than 85% of retail sales in the United States as recently as the first quarter of 2020. Be that as it may, there’s a misconception regarding ecommerce and traditional commerce.

The two actually complement each other and adopting an ecommerce revenue stream for your brand is something that can only help rather than hurt your business. Adding to that are the exponential growth of ecommerce and the available ways to raise brand awareness and reach customers.