Traditionally, sales went through the roof during Black Friday, but now that the shopping streets are empty due to the Corona crisis, it had to happen online. The need for a good webshop and e-commerce strategy has shaken entrepreneurs quite a bit, as appears from a recent article by Emerce. What is the best bet during economically bad times? We list 3 important opportunities for e-commerce.
According to a recent study in Belgium, 70% of traders who have started selling online for the first time since corona do not see the online webshop as the most important sales channel in the future. Moreover, they have often even put together something that is not future-proof. A missed opportunity, says Ann Verhetsel in the study:
“The entrepreneurs must now benefit from the efforts made and professionalize their online channel.”
We see a huge boost in online buying behavior by consumers, fueled by the lockdowns in which more people are at home. That is why it is opportune to invest in your online sales channels now.
Jaime Windt, Account Director at NextChapter eCommerce, adds: “Now that the doors are no longer blocked in the stores, we see that entrepreneurs in the Netherlands who use our e-commerce platform are investing more in their online activities. We see a significant increase from 20% to 60% in investments in their e-commerce platform compared to last year. Entrepreneurs invest in new features to improve the webshop and increase the order conversions and the order amount. But they now also dare to take steps to expand the number of sales channels in addition to their own webshop and connect directly from their NextChapter system to marketplaces such as Bol.com, Amazon and Zalando.”
Your own range on your webshop sometimes also has its limits. That is why it is interesting to deepen and broaden your range with a longtail offer. You can do this by connecting drop shipment partners to your webshop. To be able to handle this well, your e-commerce platform must be optimally set up to provide the expected service and user experience to your customers.
For example, your webshop must be able to handle stock from different stock locations (your own locations or those of your drop shipment partner), have a good order management system that can allocate the orders correctly and a PIM module to import and edit large amounts of article data. enrich it into perfect product information for your webshop. Jaime: “If you have those processes in order, you can take your product offering and e-commerce proposition to the next level, serve more customers and grow faster.”
A global pandemic has forced entrepreneurs to move even faster with market demand. If you want to respond smartly to this, you ensure that your e-commerce activities become scalable and that you explore new business models. For example, more and more entrepreneurs are uniting as collectives so that they can compete with large marketplaces such as bol.com and Amazon. Business sellers are improving their B2B proposition and expanding into D2C sales. And (r)etailers unite online and offline commerce through an integrated e-commerce platform. Think ahead and implement a multichannel e-commerce strategy, in which you integrate online and offline and invest in a scalable technology that connects new sales channels.
“Entrepreneurs who pursue a multichannel growth strategy with a solid technical foundation have a much greater chance of coming out of the Corona crisis stronger.”
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