All the online businesses have seen major growth in the pandemic. If you have yet not taken your business online, you sure are missing out a lot of potential customers. Keep reading to know why it is extremely important in today’s time and age to take your business online.
E- commerce has been one of the fastest growing industries in our country. As per the latest PwC report, the Indian e-commerce industry will surpass $100 billion by 2022. The increased usage of smartphones, the wider and cost effective availability of internet and increasing online mode of payments and other online facilities are the reasons which has led to the boom in this industry.
Sooner or later, all the businesses will have to take their businesses online or adopt a hybrid model of business, where the customers can shop both online and through stores.
During the pandemic, as all the stores were closed down for several months, people had to switch to online shopping mode. To be precise, 86% Indians have switched to online mode of shopping owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is necessary for the businesses to go online given the current scenario.
Selling online can indirectly help to increase your offline sales. Many customers still prefer to shop offline and as per the report by RAI and Litmus World, though 75% of the consumers preferred to shop online during the festive season this year but 66% of them were ready to shop from standalone stores and 37% agreed to shop from malls. This shows that many customers still feel more comfortable to shop offline owing to its own advantages.
Therefore, by having an online store and working on digital marketing strategies, your business can get closer to leads during the discovery phase. Having a strong online presence will impact your offline sales too.
Your offline store is opened for fixed hours during the day while the online stores are open to customers 24/7, which makes them more accessible and convenient to shop from. You can also be available to your customers at any required time by setting your store online.
It saves them time, rules out the restrictions of geography and time.
You can even go global with your business once you take it online.
You can even use your online store as your marketing instrument. Use SEO (search engine optimization), e-mail marketing and other digital marketing techniques to rank higher in search pages to further widen your reach.
Any such strategies cannot be implemented for offline set up of stores.
With offline actual stores, come many additional operational expenditures like salary for staff, rent and more. If one wants to expand his/her business, considering all these charges and many more will require a huge amount of investment. Instead, if one plans on doing this online, it would save a lot of cost while reaching to a wider range of audience, practically the whole world.
To sum up, looking at the current scenarios and observing the consumer behavior recently, it is a smart move for all the business owners to take their business online to be at par with their competitors and let their businesses reach new heights.
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