4 Essentials of E-commerce

The discovery of the internet revolutionised mankind. Forging a link globally, it brought incredible and unprecedented changes in many aspects of our lives.

For the first time in human history, people could communicate with and receive feedback from others millions of miles away in seconds. Previously reliant on mails which took days, even weeks and was often cumbersome for long distance communications, the ability to distill this to a real time process via the internet, to now communicate "digitally", represented an advancement of the highest levels.

Business wise, all we had prior to the advent of the internet was the "brick and mortar" businesses. As a business owner, you were limited to doing business physically. Customers had to personally visit your ships or offices to transact with you. You weren't visible or able to transact with someone in another state or country. You were constrained by space and distance.

The internet blew these constraints out of the water. Now a business owner can advertise and conduct business with customers halfway around the world in automatic fashion. Persuasion, receiving payment and delivery of products or services would all take place without "active" interferences from humans. Obviously, this was a vast improvement in business.

E-commerce, short for electronic commerce entails any kind of business transaction that takes place online.

The potential of e-commerce is limitless. But getting your e-commerce business up and successfully running requires certain steps and decisions from you.

In this article, we are going to examine 4 essentials of e-commerce - important tasks you’ll face when researching, launching, and growing a profitable ecommerce business.

1. The Product: Though e-commerce doesn't demand you have a physical store to do business, you still have to do business and business involves the exchange of products or values for payment. So obviously, one of the essentials of e-commerce is deciding what your products will be.

You want to identify the needs of the market through research before deciding on what your product or services will be. This ensures that you give your business the best chances at achieving success.

2. Pricing: With your product or service available, you are also to determine its price. This is the amount you charge your potential customers in return for delivering said products or services.

Obviously, you want to set a price that is both profitable for you and affordable for your customers. You also want the price to be commensurate with the value that the customer will derive from your products or services.

For the affiliate, this means selecting the businesses that pay the most commissions per sale you generate from your efforts.

3. Promotion: Promotion entails all efforts aimed at advertising and getting the word out about your business, products and services. "Traffic" is the term used and refers to all visitors to your business websites or blogs.

Just like an offline business will want to be located on a high street or busy district to ensure the most visibility for their business, an e-commerce business will also have to take steps to market itself. Though the internet offers a global audience to all e-commerce businesses, competition is still present.

These promotional efforts could be made in a variety of ways some of which include:

Search Engine Optimisation(SEO): This involves tweaking your sites or blogs to get higher rankings on search engines. Since search engines are the default tool used by customers to search for solutions and products, you want your sites to be ranked as high as possible on these engines to improve the chances of its display when searches are made.

Paid advertising: Where you pay other businesses, influencers or websites to advertise your businesses. This in itself can be done in a number of ways ranging from email blasts to facebook ads to pay per view.

Article writing: where you regularly contribute content and articles to highly trafficked article directories in a bid to attract interest to your sites

Among others.

Essential to e-commerce success, its importance can not be underestimated.

4. Placement: This refers to how your e-commerce business delivers its product or service to its customers. It refers to how the business makes its products or services accessible to customers after they've placed their orders.

Placement is directly linked to the nature of your product. Your product may vary but are mainly available in four forms:

Physical Products: which are hard, tangible products. The placement of products of this nature entails that you ship to customers after receiving their orders

Digital Products: which are not hard objects requiring shipping but can be delivered digitally or across the web. These could be e-books, online courses etc.

Services: Your e-commerce business could also be service based where you are not delivering any actual products physically or otherwise but offering services instead. Services could range from consulting knowledge in several fields to programming skills. The placement of services entails some form of communication previously agreed upon. If it's a consulting service, what media are you employing to communicate advice? Email? Skype? etc.

Affiliates: Your e-commerce business can also be completely built around promoting the products or services of other businesses for a commission on each sale you generate. In this case, the placement of the product or service lies with the real product owner or service provider and not the affiliate.

Starting an e-commerce business really is feasible for anyone. With the above mentioned essentials in place, you can easily build, launch and grow your ecommerce business to successful levels.