Move your business online – Introduction
For the last year, the COVID-19 pandemic changed our lifestyle, habits, consumer behavior, and the whole business environment. Retailers are affected to a large extent and many business owners are facing the question of how to keep their company alive and bring it back to where it was a year ago. Many more consumers shop mostly online these days. Also, most consumers are now placing their first orders online. All this leads many small and medium-sized companies to move their business from offline to online.
The lack of an active engagement in the business social networks as well as an active online store is limiting companies to reach potential buyers, as well as those who are making their first steps in online shopping. In this situation, the most natural reaction would be to turn to your competitors to meet their needs online where they’re feeling already confident enough of buying things without going outside. To prevent this from happening, you should create a strategy to move your offline store into the digital space.
Switching from offline to online shop is not always an easy task. Traditional offline practices are not perfect for online selling. So, you need to think about building a detailed digital strategy to get your current customers to join you online, and in addition to find ways to attract new ones.
To have everything you need to migrate your business to the digital space, we decided to create a series where we will guide you step by step on your way creating a successful online business.
We will address issues affecting both retailers and manufacturer. But before that, we will outline a few reasons why you need to move your business online.
- Discovering new potential customers
By 2020, about 1.6 million Bulgarian consumers shop online. That is a large audience that you could miss in the absence of an online store.
- The Internet affects almost all aspects of the business
In it, you can find information about competitors, products, prices, reviews. Even if you do not have a digital presence, your current customers could give their opinion in a forum, social media, etc., without you guessing.
- Shopping at any time
One of the main advantages of building an online business is that you can always be in the right place at the right time. Here’s what we mean by that. Online commerce provides consumers with the opportunity to shop at a time convenient to them. Here the business is a few clicks away, and they do not need to take the time to go to the mall, find you and buy your goods.
- You are not tied to the location
Offline trading often binds the owner to a specific location. Also, it needs huge investments to open multiple stores.
Fortunately, in the digital environment, this is not the case. By creating an online store, you provide the opportunity to sell to people all over the country, and by adding varieties to its language versions, you can enter new foreign markets.
- The Internet is the future
Looking at the new generations, their adaptation to the digital world is happening at an even earlier age. That builds entirely new behaviors and habits that they acquire, and businesses need to know about them and change according to their requirements.
Well, if you are already convinced that your entry into online commerce is necessary, then follow us on social networks or sign up for our email newsletter to be the first to learn about the new materials for the process. In this series of articles, you will find information about planning, choosing a platform for building an online store, logistics, marketing, business expansion.
