What is an eCommerce website?
It is a digital shop, also called e-storefront or e-store, which simplifies and quickens selling and purchasing of goods. Like an offline store, people come, buy, pay off and get physical deliveries of products. The only difference is to experience the virtual shop where online payment option is a plus.
Simply put, the shop over the internet offers a great customer experience from placing an order product while being in the comfort zone to delivery. With an ecommerce platform development, it costs nothing.
The merchant or owner of the website also maximizes:
- aggregate quantity of transactions
- an average order value
- reach and shoppers experience
- brand loyalty, customer retention & audience engagement.
- scope for discovering sales-oriented or conversion based SEO strategies
How does an eCommerce website work?
Layout Ensures Interaction
These all functions occur through an interface, which is a web template. The potential buyers visit there, does shopping or window shopping via social networks and search engines.
Codes are Soul
An eCommerce website is a complete shop, where selling and purchasing happen in a series of steps. Everything smoothly runs on coding, which is defined in the backend of the website. The codes work as a navigator that exchanges the request of shoppers with the automated response.
As there is a ton of data according to categories of products, their dimensions and how-to tutorials in the video or image form, the codes dynamically process any request for a specific web page correctly.
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Agile Backend Manage the Flow
It has a database for processing online requests and a series of forms, payment gateway and SSL certificate. Shipping details, inventory management, customer management, customer support, cart, signup/in or sign out and recommendation systems are there defined in a logical manner using codes.
Signup/ in/Out
With these options, the visitors subscribe to products or services, which automatically collect the data related to customer journey on the website. With this information, the shopper clicks for cart to fill it up with desired products and then, moves to pay for them through different payout options.
This processing leads to order placement, which typically gets completed with an estimated shipping time, a unique transaction number, postal tracking number etc..
Compliance & Policies Regulate
As far as the privacy is concerned, SSL certificate encrypts all transferred information, which includes sensitive personal information of users.
Besides, there are certain rules and regulations that need to be complied with like PCI compliance to ensure that the incoming information won’t be stored unless there is an exceptional case.
Marketing Strategies Let Traffic Come In
In addition, the SEO strategy is also integrated to make it visible and excellent user experience delivering over the internet. However, the content marketing, backlinks and digital marketing are fundamentally required for it.
Even, social networks are integrated to let the online traffic come in from Facebook, Twitter or any other network, which is there.
Order Up
The information on orders gets stored inside and a message is automatically routed to users, inventory system, merchant and incorporated shipping companies.
What benefits do you have with it?
Benefits for Customers
There are lots of benefits that the eCommerce website comes with. Here is the roundup of these all:
- The reach of your market expands. Even, you can target global customers together with local ones.
- The overall payout on goods, services and shipping, etc is less than that of a brick and mortar shop.
- For transactions, you can have them done immediately and securely, as they would be encrypted.
- The distribution cycle goes on quickly, as the automated systems update orders or related details in no time. So, the connected services providers face little to minimal challenges in processing it.
- The customer experience turns better and faster, as the order fulfillment is quick.
- You can have better & insightful data for future sales forecasting through analysis.
- Targets can be razor-focused to refine CX with recommendations, remarketing and marketing based on age, demographics, interests, etc.
Benefits for merchant
The digital shopping platform can be designed and developed, integrating all of these services that benefit merchants:
- Retailing- It is concerned with selling directly to an end-level consumer without intermediary involvement.
- Wholesale- Retailers can connect with wholesaler to buy products in bulk directly.
- Dropshipping- It is related to supply chain, which ships the products directly to the consumer while helping in managing inventory, order fulfillment, and other logistics.
- Crowdfunding- Consumers, most of time, send in advance of an anticipated product coming to market, which helps to raise startup capital, leverage buying power and reduce product costs, etc.
- Subscription- Repurposing for products or services can be done automatically by prompting customers via promotional messages or emails until the subscriber chooses to cancel or alter their subscription level.
- Digital Products- The merchant gets an option to sell virtual products or services like music, movies, audio and video files, templates, software, etc.
- Services- Online services can be arranged digitally, such as hiring an Uber driver or booking a movie ticket.
What disadvantages does it bring?
There are a few disadvantages that you can face while running an e-storefront.
- Your customers can’t always see and touch which they can do in real life stores before purchasing. To some extent, it adversely affects customer experience.
- The prospective customers can be only those who know about how to buy online. There might be a massive population that could be your customer. Having zero knowledge about online buying can keep that population away.
- You cannot offer as personal shopping experiences as the physical store does.
- Online cybercrimes are a big threat that can be a reason of scope for fraud, data privacy issues, etc.
What options do you have with eCommerce websites?
E-stores are not only for retailers who deal in B2C business. There are some more options that you can have through an eCommerce website development. Here are these:
- B2B (business to business)
- B2C (business to consumer)
- C2C (consumer to consumer)
- C2B (consumer to business)
- B2A (business to public administrations)
- C2A (consumer to public administrations)
There are many popular eCommerce platforms that can help one to have it in no time and with no technical experience. Here are a few examples:
- Magento
- Shopify
- WooCommerce (a WordPress plugin)
Summary
An eCommerce website works with a great combination of codified backend & frontend that are designed and developed to integrate shipping, inventory, logistics, shopping experience and customer journey together with security & payment compliance. All of these things work systematically in a virtual shop.
