3 New Realities Shaping Online Business

This guide will help you to know about the latest online shopping trends and new realities shaping the online business landscape today for a better tomorrow.

E-commerce or online business is one of the most significant segments that has been experiencing a lot of changes recently. Modern online business is not for today but is essentially for tomorrow and beyond.

With so many changes, you as an online business site owner may be naturally worried and apprehensive about the future of ecommerce.

However, there is no reason to be apprehensive as the new realities are very promising and has already showing its huge potential for a positive impact and growth in the online business sector. There were several old problems that stalked the halls of ecommerce business such as:

• Where to sell
• Whom to sell
• How to harmonize acquisition with business profitability
• How to build an interactive audience, and of course
• How to beat the competition from Amazon and its likes.

All these problems pulled several online business owners back in the past. Gone are those days as now you can stay ahead of the curve which is critical to survive in this highly competitive setting.

It is not a very easy task to separate facts from fads and therefore you will need a guide as to how you can make the best use of the internet and make your online business grow steadily. So here are the newest realities that are shaping online business.

3 New Realities Shaping Online Business

#1. Data over Ego

It is true that you will need a large number of audiences to make your online business successful but that does not mean you will be present everywhere. “Data over Ego’ is the key to deal with the demanding, daunting and
often deceptive proliferation of channels:

• Social
• Marketplaces
• Brick and mortar and others.

Instead of being everywhere is a bit ruthless to select the right place to stay depending on these three basic factors:

• Where your customers are already
• Where you can add real value to them as well as your business and
• Where the Return On Ad Spend or ROAS is the strongest.

To determine these, the data holds the key. This will help you to make sure that you are not driven by the naturally existing ego factor that typically exists in retail business, especially online business.

You will feel great if you have different stores at different places but that is not the way for any DTC or Direct To Consumer brand to look into it. Instead you should be more data driven.

#2. Online and Offline

It is believed that when a store is opened, it does not only build customer in an offline channel but also builds the same in an online channel as well.

Therefore, the retail location will drive both offline as well as online sales. Here is what it means:

• Online refers to the understanding of the source of your visitors. It also means that
  you will need to know what they do after arriving from a specific location. This is the process called attribution. For this you will need to prioritize profitability of your business by using useful tools like Google Analytics and preferably couple it with Google Data Studio. This will result in better and more ecommerce conversions as well as assisted conversions. It will also help you to leverage the “Multi-Channel Funnels” or the “Sales by traffic referrer” reports.

• Offline on the other hand refers to tracking the fulfillment patterns so that you can come to know about the cities, regions, and even the neighborhoods where the orders are being sent and detect the ones that can be termed as the most fertile grounds. Here you will need to make sure that you monitor online sales during as well as after physical the events in your owned storefronts. This is an important step that will help you to gauge the actual impact on your local revenue. This means in other words that you should not consider multi-channel, Omni-channel, and online to offline strategies as separate but rather set your highlights on providing the best customer experience that may be evidenced and substantiated by the numbers.

This is the practice followed by all successful and popular online sites whether it is designed to sell products or services such as Libertylending.com and others.

Each of these strategies will demand to be understood at once so that it brings in lots of native buying options to the customers who are spending a lot of time in multi-channel ecommerce sites as well as balance those touch points through Omni-channel retailing.

This will ensure better results and more sales as well as help you to focus more on the referrals and micro-influencers by using Instagram and email as the primary channels.

When you follow this practice you will notice that you can enjoy several other benefits and experience the following:

• You will find that it is easy to revamp your referral programs
• It is also very easy to amass a magnanimous amount of “reps”
• This will also increase your sales from the referrals by and astonishing 300% one year
  after the other and
• It will also lift the average order value by over 11% if not more.

The long and short of the story is that it is not about being ‘all’ but it is essentially about being relevant and more remarkable where it matters the most and truly.

#3. Look for the Trends

Though email has and still reigns supreme as far as marketing is concerned, you will also have to take a look at the possibilities of e-commerce automation that will help you to improve the business bottom line.

Some of the next generation tech trends to follow are:

• AI based machine learning
• IoT
• Augmented reality
• Block chain and
• Drones.

These are all proven tech trends that will increase web traffic and sales.

To sum up, you must be on a constant lookout on the online shopping trends that matter naturally for all online businesses. Make sure that you personalized product recommendations as well as conduct onsite search
increasingly for marketing.

Author Bio:

Daniel Ng is a freelance writer who has been writing for various blogs. He has previously covered an extensive range of topics in her posts, including business debt consolidation, Finance, E-commerce and start-ups.