Merchants Are Becoming E-tailers
E-tailers are merely retailers who use the internet to offer their goods/services to their consumers, instead of real shops. There are two types of e-tailer, one classification where e-commerce is the only operation carried out by the business; examples of such organisations include E-Bay, Amazon, and Dell.
The other type includes e-commerce as part of their total marketing strategy, whilst still having a physical, `traditionals` tore, whereby consumers can still enter and buy the good/service. Examples of this type of e-tailer are Dixons, Tesco and WH Smith.
Those companies who run simply as ecommerce stores are able to attain greater earnings margins, due to their set up and functional costs being much lower than that of a conventional shop. They do not need to pay any lease on a building– whilst they still often need to pay for their Webhosting, the cost is much less, there are no included rates for such overheads as water, electricity, gas, and so on.
Labour costs are substantially less, where someone might reasonably run a website, plan goods and answer enquiries through email; this is not likely to be the case where a full time store is included.
On top of these rate differences, an online store can be viewed/accessed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from only one area. Consumers in China, for instance, can purchase 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 actual shop!
It is ending up being important for retailers to have at least some kind of internet based gain access to, whether this is a website where goods/services can really be bought, or purely educational, so consumers can preview items and gather info on the shop in general (for example, their nearest retailer or company phone number/contact details) prior to they go to.
E-tailers must recognize that it is not enough to merely have an aesthetically pleasing web site, which is full of product information along with fantastic pictures and detailed item evaluations; this is all well and good, however useless without enough understanding of Online search engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in order to target the required traffic towards the website.
Even something as basic as a proper domain name can have a big difference on the variety of individuals visiting your website– they must be kept small and succinct, ideally without a hyphen, as people tend to forget these and this might lead to them being sent straight to your competitor! Word of mouth advertising is valuable, so by utilizing an address that sounds exactly how it is spelt can work marvels for spreading out positive information.
SEO and SEM practices alter frequently, and there is no warranty that any specific methods will work. The very best way to ensure a good ranking on the online search engine is to employ an `specialist` like Digital Cornerstone to work full-time at increasing the possibilities of traffic being directed to your site. Whilst lots of web designers may declare to be skilled at SEO, there a reasonably couple of workers presently in the UK with any real in depth understanding of the subject, so it is worthwhile investing the additional time/money on making sure your company is well represented within the online search engine rankings, and chasing after that all important # 1 area.