Merchants Are Ending Up Being E-tailers
E-tailers are merely merchants who utilize the web to offer their goods/services to their consumers, rather than real stores. There are two types of e-tailer, one category whereby e-commerce is the only operation carried out by the business; examples of such organisations consist of E-Bay, Amazon, and Dell.
The other type consists of e-commerce as part of their total marketing method, whilst still having a physical, `traditionals` tore, whereby consumers can still go in and purchase the good/service. Examples of this kind of e-tailer are Dixons, Tesco and WH Smith.
Those companies who operate simply as ecommerce shops have the ability to accomplish higher earnings margins, due to their set up and operational costs being much lower than that of a standard store. They do not need to pay any rent on a structure– whilst they still typically have to pay for their Web Hosting, the cost is much less, there are no added rates for such overheads as water, electrical power, gas, and so on.
Labour expenses are considerably less, where someone could reasonably run a website, bundle items and respond to enquiries via email; this is unlikely to be the case where a full time store is included.
On top of these rate differences, an online shop can be viewed/accessed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from only one place. Buyers in China, for instance, can buy items at the touch of a button from a UK based e-tailer, but would have a hard time to make the 10,000 mile big salami to go to the real store!
It is becoming important for sellers to have at least some kind of web based access, whether this is a website where goods/services can in fact be purchased, or simply educational, so clients can preview items and gather information on the shop in general (for example, their nearby merchant or company phone number/contact details) before they go to.
E-tailers need to understand that it is inadequate to simply have an aesthetically pleasing website, which has plenty of product info together with great images and detailed product reviews; this is all well and good, however ineffective without adequate knowledge of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Seo (SEO) in order to target the essential traffic towards the website.
Even something as easy as a proper domain name can have a huge difference on the variety of individuals visiting your site– they need to be kept little and concise, ideally without a hyphen, as people tend to forget these and this might cause them being sent out straight to your competitor! Word of mouth advertising is priceless, so by using an address that sounds exactly how it is spelt can work wonders for spreading out favorable details.
SEO and SEM practices change routinely, and there is no warranty that any specific methods will work. The best way to guarantee a good ranking on the search engines is to use an `expert` like Digital Cornerstone to work full time at increasing the possibilities of traffic being directed to your website. Whilst numerous web designers may claim to be proficient at SEO, there a relatively couple of workers currently in the UK with any real in depth knowledge of the topic, so it is worthwhile spending the extra time/money on ensuring your company is well represented within the online search engine rankings, and going after that all important # 1 area.