One of the most major benefits of having your E-commerce store is the opportunity to directly market to visitors and customers. Unlike markets, where people who buy your products become marketplace customers, selling directly to consumers on your website enables you to collect their contact information.
Convenience Has a Price
- It just takes one seller to create a cheaper counterfeit or copycat product to steal the top seller status you fought so hard to get.
- Even worse, there’s nothing you can do if they accuse you of being a copycat and have your shop shut down.
- This is partly because buyers who use these popular sales channels are shopping for the best deal, not for your brand’s items It’s impossible to build consumers.
- People and engaging with them are at the heart of the business. Long-term partnerships are very hard to develop without a direct connection to your clients.
Customers you earn over time with corporations like Amazon and Booking.com, for example, aren’t yours. They are, instead, clients of the markets you utilize. Those same firms that are helping you profit today might steal your company in the future by creating their line of items or shutting down your account at any time. It may seem unjust, but they are quite within their rights to do so.
On Amazon, it’s almost hard to build a loyal client base since you don’t even have access to your customers’ email addresses or pre-purchase browsing history as a seller. You’re giving up a lot for the advantages of being able to list your items fast and gaining rapid exposure to a large audience.
It’s a horrible irony, to say the least
Small firms have few choices for long-term growth if they don’t have client information to bring into their feedback loop.
Before I go any further, let me be clear: I’m not here to urge you to delete all of your listings from Amazon or other marketplaces, and I’m not here to suggest that these firms are terrible there are advantages to both sides. However, as your firm expands, these advantages may begin to dwindle.
You presumably already know what I’m talking about if you sell via third-party sales channels. All I’m saying is that if you haven’t diversified your income sources, or, more crucially, if you haven’t put up a shop that is linked to your website a direct sales channel now is the moment.
The 7 Advantages of Owning an Online Store
- Customer communication that is direct and individualized
- Customer information email, browsing/purchase history is completely accessible
- Resolution of disputes in a shorter time
- Business choices, processes, goods, and services that are optimized
- 100% of your sales money is yours to keep instead of splitting it with third parties
- Resilience in the face of imitated businesses and goods
- Complete control over your company (you set the rules)
It’s important to note that developing a direct sales channel has its own set of problems. You will have to perform your sales and marketing since you will not have a multibillion-dollar corporation to assist you. It takes a lot of work, but the payoff is immense.
If your company is expanding and you want to keep that momentum going for the next 5 to 10 years, it’s critical that you future-proof it by developing a channel that links you directly with your consumers.
How does your long-term sales strategy look? What steps are you doing to prepare for the digital commerce era? Do you have all of your eggs in a single basket? Do you have complete ownership and control over your company’s operations? These are some things to think about.
Opportunities for marketing
Every seller understands how difficult and expensive it is to acquire new clients. Working with repeat clients is a lot less difficult. You can get a lot of new clients via marketplaces, but you have almost no way of converting them into repeat customers.
On the other hand, when someone buys anything straight from your website, you have all the cards. You know what they purchased, when they bought it, what else they were or would be interested in, how much money they spent, and, most crucially, how to get in touch with them.
All of this information is a fantastic source of marketing campaign ideas and methods. You can’t even begin to deploy cart abandonment procedures or multichannel marketing without it.
More confidence in the product
Customers are constantly doing their homework. Especially if the item’s pricing is outside of their ‘impulsive’ price range. If customers come across your goods on Amazon or eBay and it doesn’t have enough ratings, what should they do? They could go online to hunt for additional information to persuade them to buy. This is the point at which you have the chance to wow the consumer with your website.
Why?
- If you’re still debating whether or not to start a direct sales channel for your company, I beg you to consider why you do what you do. What is the basis of your entrepreneurial drive? Let me make an educated guess.
- You created your own company because you wanted to be free of an oppressive set of regulations and pursue your passion. You become an entrepreneur to be in charge of your destiny, to be able to look back with pleasure and pride after many years and say, I built something amazing out of nothing.
- So, before you go back to work, take a moment to stand back and evaluate if your company has the proper foundations in place. A direct sales channel won’t ensure your company’s success, but it will certainly increase your chances.
