There are probably hundreds of companies in your town that may be like yours; each one offering the same exact product or service as you have. If in the past you’ve been lucky enough to have attained a certain level of success and recognition in your community, chances are that you’re very pleased with your position among them. However, with the world of marketing changing so rapidly in recent years it may place you in an incredibly vulnerable position.
As the way the world trades continues to evolve more and more, businesses are considering making the shift from brick and mortar facilities to e-commerce. Even successful businesses like yours have seen the need to adapt to the art of trading goods online. If you’re considering making such a shift then you might want to get a better understanding of what e-commerce is. According to Business News Daily,
Though purchasing items online is a major facet, e-commerce is more than that. This type of commerce can be useful at the enterprise level as well. E-commerce is not just on the Web.
According to Internet experts, there are at least four different categories of e-commerce that we all should understand before starting this type of service.
Business to Business
Contents
This type supports businesses trading with one another – for example, manufacturers selling to their distributors or wholesalers selling to retailers. This type of service is crucial to the survival of any business; they depend not only on your company providing them with the products they need but they rely on this service to keep their businesses up and running. They will demand fast delivery times and simplicity when buying online.
Business to Customer
Business to customer is the picture that everyone envisions when they think of e-commerce. This is selling to the general public through electronic shopping carts, without any human interaction. There are some very popular business to customer sites that many people use on a regular basis. It was on this platform that e-commerce got its start.
Consumer to Business
With consumer to business, the individual can upload a personal project online and companies interested could bid on the job. This is a great platform for many freelance workers who are not associated with any particular business. Artists, writers, musicians, and other forms of creative arts have thrived on this type of service making it very popular in today’s business world.
Consumer to Consumer
With this type of e-commerce, consumers use online classifieds for various forums to buy and sell their personal goods. The old fashioned way of the used car sale or a garage sale has gone electronic with this particular method of electronic trading. Whether you have one item to sell or a garage full of them, you can use e-commerce to inform, make the transaction and even arrange the delivery without ever seeing your customers face-to-face.
Your Strategy
Depending on who you are engaging with in e-commerce you need to have a strategy. Any business that is looking at taking their practice online needs to have a game plan to implement when they are venturing into this unfamiliar territory. From setting your first goals to the final delivery of your transaction, each phase needs to be thought out very clearly so that your switch to the electronic world will be manageable and successful. Making this type of switch is not just a fad the world is going through but it represents the future of doing business. As explained by IML,
Many traditional methods of purchasing things are becoming obsolete because of the convenience and speed of online transactions…. Even established retailers that have sold their products in the same way for decades have had to offer their products online to compete with emerging retail sites.
The Internet is quickly becoming a major business thoroughfare in the world and will continue to grow and influence everyone more and more in the future.