CHAPTER 1. IS ONLINE BUSINESS RIGHT CHOICE?

It’s needless to explain why Online Business is the Right Choice. However, I would like to emphasize upon some points here.

TREND

In order to analyze and identify the right choice, the first thing that comes in mind is what the trend in that segment is. The chart below shows and we all are well aware  that E-commerce,  Digital Marketing, Online Purchase;  whatever we name,  has been growing consistently and will keep growing in future at a much higher rate.

The fact is ecommerce is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. E-commerce provides enormous benefits (List provided below) to all the stakeholders and that’s the reason for this huge success.

BENEFITS TO CONSUMERS

1. Convenience - we can buy anything sitting at our homes anytime. Open 24x7.
2. Price – E-commerce has allowed consumers to save a lot of money on these purchases. 
3. Products Variety - Consumers can get good variety of the products to choose from. Products of all the available colors, sizes, dimensions are displayed at e-commerce sites. This makes the consumer easy to pick/choose product according to his/her wish.
4. Easy payment options – People can pay of their purchases at ecommerce sites through various payment modes like internet banking, credit card, debit card, cheques and even cash on delivery. Hence consumer has option to choose the payment method of his choice based on his convenience.
5. Easy Returns Policy – Many Ecommerce sites have policies like “30 day free Returns” which enable consumers to return the product if they are not satisfied with it.

The benefits of ecommerce sites are endless and they have changed the way how people shop in the world.

BENEFITS TO THE RETAILERS

Ecommerce benefits are much larger to Retailers than consumers.

1. Much Bigger Marketplace – Entire world is your client now. Consumer can search retailer online.
2. Decreasing cost of inventory Management
3. Keep Eye on Consumer’s Buying Habit
4. Happy Consumers Sell  your products by sharing on social media(Low adv cost)
5. Selling Products across the world
6. Stay open 24*7/365 days
7. Economy - Now, Organizations don’t have to invest their money in the physical store, insurance or infrastructure as all you need is a wonderful idea, unique products and well-designed website to reach your precious customers and to sell your products and services.
8. Can offer huge information to consumers
9. Ability of Multi-Site
10. Scalability - With effective ecommerce solution, organizations grow and scale easily to meet market demand as well as customer requirements by introducing different sales channels and reaching market segments.
11. Analytics - Organizations can easily calculate and evaluate sales effectiveness, customer effectiveness, marketing campaigns, product mix, customer engagement and more.

Hope the above information gives you a better understanding on the Online Industry.

POTENTIAL OF ONLINE BUSINESS

Before I go further, I would like to share a few recent success stories that will give a clear picture and the BIG potential of Online Industry.

• Uber- the world's largest taxi company owns no vehicles.
• Xiaomi - 4th largest smartphone maker (12B Revenue) owns no physical store.
• Facebook - the world's most popular media creates no content.
• Alibaba - the most valuable retailer has no inventory.
• Airbnb - the world's largest accommodation provider owns no real estate
• Whatsapp - with 3 Billion messages a day does not own servers.

The reason of sharing the above success stories is to explain that Ecommerce based business model have low startup capital cost but provide faster success. All the above companies are less than 10 years old. I am sure you will all agree to the fact that the traditional way of the business would take more than double the time to reach this level of success.

I hope by now, it would be  crystal clear  that the Online Business is the RIGHT Choice that can sustain  in today’s business world.