The benefits of selling online
It’s no surprise that an online eCommerce mentor is waxing lyrical about the benefits of selling online, but in 2021, it’s a must that you have an online store presence if you want to truly make it as an entrepreneur. Here’s my top reasons for why you’ve got to go digital, stat.
No Stealing
Shoplifting is costing Aussie and New Zealand retailers $3.3 billion per year; a number that’s only rising as everyday thieves get quicker, more subtle and increasingly brazen in their efforts.
It’s an unfortunate reality of owning a physical store, and can be a huge sinkhole for profits. So, the main benefit of selling online is security.
No-one can break into your store in the dead of night, in front of your eyes, or when you’re taking a quick tea break to ransack your product range or steal all of your hard-earned cash.
Of course virtual scammers pose a risk, but thanks to the round-the-clock encryption safety of a reputable eCommerce platform, it’s a near impossibility. You can sleep soundly knowing you won’t have to account for theft eroding your revenue.
Open 24/7, From Your Laptop
Opening hours are a thing of the past when you move, or start an online retail store. No longer are you bound by opening hours, closing times, weather or construction work that might be hindering the amount of foot traffic you receive.
Your store literally never turns off, meaning you can access website visitors 24/7. Plus, if you open sales to multiple countries in different timezones, you have the potential for shoppers to buy from you all day, and all night long.
Taking away the responsibility for staff to man your store saves you HR time, precious dollars and doesn’t take away your ability to keep things looking schmick and shoppable, even when you’re technically staffless, because most online platforms have beautiful templates you can easily plug into and play.
Always dreamt of living, and loving, the laptop lifestyle too? Selling online means you’re not ever bound by geography. As long as you have somewhere to store, pick, pack and ship your orders, you’re free to run the show from wherever it’s warmest, the cocktails flow the freest and life is abundant of the easiest joy.
Market Effectively
When someone walks into your bricks-and-mortar store, you know nothing about them except that they have great taste in where they choose to shop.
Because of your ability to attribute website visitors to specific sources when selling online, you can get a really detailed understanding of how they found you, what they’ve been looking for that might match your product range and take them straight to where they’re most likely to buy.
One of the benefits of selling online is that you know how “warm” they are.
For example, we could attribute their arrival to a page of your site with the title “Buy Floral Print Kimonos Now” or “Buy Skull Kimono For Halloween”, because it has matched their recent search engine query.
This indicates that they’re hot - beyond just a general browser, and ready to buy. So you might skip the storytelling, overview of all products and take them straight to a landing page with a reminder that they get free shipping, a gift with purchase or guaranteed delivery before their event if bought then and there.
Plus, if you don’t manage to capture the sale, you can still follow them with pixels and retarget them. You can’t exactly go running down the street trying to stick a tracking device on your customers’ ankle with a physical store alone, unless a bit of prison time sounds fun.
Scale Quickly
The benefits of selling online often centre back to cost, because startup, shoestring budgets seldom allow for large leases, physical hanging and display equipment, expensive cash register equipment, electricity bills and building and contents insurance.
The equation is simple: when you have more money to spend on growing the business with efficient marketing, advertising and brand-building, the faster you’ll scale it.
With an online retail store, you can easily see what products sell the most, where the interest lies, and what consumer behaviours should inform where you spend your product research and development funds.
Of course, though, that’s only one part of the scaling equation: you’ve also got to know where to spend your money and how to use it for maximum growth. My upcoming webinar, 5 Big Mistakes People Make When They Launch Their Online Stores, will cover just that.
In this free webinar, I'll give you an inside look at my own online fashion business and how I scaled it from $30,00 to over a million dollars in revenue a year. People come off this webinar buzzing about what they’ve learnt (it’s really no-fluff) and ready to make some instant changes for more sales, growth and social media buzz.
SIGN UP HERE, I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU
Yours,
Jodie Minto xo
