Benefits & Examples

Increased Revenue

E-commerce is a wonderful additional sales channel and a great opportunity for your business to diversify revenue streams to include online sales. This increased revenue may come in the form of direct sales or through advertising fees from ads appearing within your community pages and revenue through new alliances and partnerships.

For instance, consider a small publisher of home renovations books who decides to implement an e-commerce solution on their website. Firstly it provides the publisher a new venue to sell their printed books and e-books, therefore increasing revenue. Then the publisher decides to publish some of their editorial content in the form of a blog. As its popularity grows, more and more visitors will arrive on the website to read the blog’s content. As traffic grows the publishing house may attract advertisers like Home Depot to advertise within those community pages increasing the revenue earned through the website even more.

Market Expansion

E-commerce enables businesses to sell their products and services to markets that were previously inaccessible therefore extending the name and brand awareness at a lower cost than the more traditional alternatives, such as expensive ad campaigns and opening new stores.

Wedding registries are a great example of companies using e-commerce to increase their market share. Individuals wishing to buy wedding gifts may search the registry and purchase a gift for the couple from anywhere in the world. This process does not require anyone to visit a physical store location, hence making the purchasing simple and easy. Everyone involved benefits from the e-commerce transaction in this case.

Access to your customer information

Companies may use e-commerce enabled websites as a powerful tool to gather information about their client’s buying patterns and preferences. SynNetSmart e-commerce solutions allow businesses to create detailed customer profile reports. Using these reports it is simpler to create tailor made special offers targeted to certain clients and improve customer service. These tools will allow you to build stronger relationships with your clients resulting in a key competitive advantage and increased customer loyalty.

A good example of such a setup would be a restaurant offering online ordering and reservations with driving directions. While accepting the reservation or the order, the system will capture the client’s name, time and date when the reservation was made, demographic information and customer feedback. The restaurant can then collect this data and use it as a tool for offline marketing campaigns and targeting advertising according to the types of patrons they receive.

Cost reduction

E-commerce will expand your sales efforts and streamline the information flow within your organization. This specific functionality will enable you to increase the effectiveness of your sales force and support personnel.

A chain of golf stores decide to implement e-commerce on their website to not only sell their products online but allow visitors to use the website to find the nearest store location. This system minimizes the calls received by in store personnel from clients wishing to find out more information about their products or directions, enabling them to spend more time on other more productive tasks.