What exactly is e-commerce?

In addition to the advantages of not being limited by time and space and reducing costs, the change of consumer habits has also become a necessary trend for the development of e-commerce. So how to operate e-commerce?

However, I often share information about "how to run e-commerce" and "trends of e-commerce" through articles, but I find that I haven't really written a question-like article to introduce "what is e-commerce" to everyone? ", so this "e-commerce" supplementary post was born! This article will go from shallow to deep, starting from the most basic part to explain what e-commerce is, why e-commerce is a marketing channel with great business opportunities in the Internet age, and tell you from the beginning how to start your e-commerce business .

This article will be divided into three parts, namely "what is e-commerce", "why choose e-commerce", and "how to operate e-commerce".

What is E-commerce?

If you search for e-commerce on Wikipedia, it will tell you that the full name of e-commerce is e-commerce, which refers to transactions or service activities in the form of Internet or electronic transactions. Compared with traditional sales industries, e-commerce is electronic , Network sales form.

The so-called digitalization or networking actually means that compared with physical stores, when operating e-commerce, you have more data to refer to, and use this as the basis for your next marketing strategy. These data not only include sales, but also include the click-through rate of e-commerce websites, the exposure of advertisements, the number of people staying on the website, etc. Therefore, compared with traditional stores, which can only calculate the number of visitors and sales, e-commerce can obtain data actually more complete.

So why is this data important? Because he reflects the psychology of consumers in more detail.

Marketing can be said to be a series of psychological warfare processes. Therefore, if consumers are the target of the strategy, the more understanding and grasp of the other party's psychological state, thoughts, and even actions, the better.

Because e-commerce can capture these data more accurately, when a person can understand the connotation behind these data and know how to operate to make these data more optimized, he basically has the ability to become a successful e-commerce company. The ability of seventy.

Why choose e-commerce?

Are traditional brick-and-mortar stores bad? Why is everyone admiring e-commerce now? E-commerce has the following advantages, which cannot be matched by physical stores.

1. Space is no longer limited

The physical store itself has geographical and space limitations. Even if a store is the best, if it wants to expand its business, it has to expand its sales scope by opening branches. But e-commerce doesn't have this problem.

2. Orders can be placed 365 days a year

In addition to space, e-commerce also has less time constraints than physical stores. There is no longer a problem of opening and closing stores. As long as there is an Internet, consumers can place orders and shop at any time, and stores can make money at any time.

3. Significant cost reduction

Whether it is the rent of the physical store or the labor cost of visiting the store, it will be a great consumption for the store owner. Therefore, e-commerce is especially suitable for entrepreneurs who do not have a strong store opening fund. Compared with opening a physical store, the threshold for opening an e-commerce store is much lower.

4. Consumer Habits

In recent years, due to the development of e-commerce, consumers have become more and more accustomed to the "online shopping" model, and their trust and dependence on e-commerce shopping have also increased. E-commerce sales figures are breaking new highs every year. Let us compare the data of physical stores and e-commerce. As far as Taiwan is concerned, as early as 2017, the data report provided by the market research organization eMarketer predicted that the overall retail industry in Taiwan will only have an annual growth rate of less than 1% from 2018 to 2022, but e-commerce can be achieved in Among them, an annual growth rate of nearly 7% is maintained. However, in fact, due to the outbreak of the global epidemic in 2020, this figure may still underestimate the development of e-commerce in Taiwan.

Generally speaking, under normal circumstances, for operators, e-commerce is actually a more favorable choice than physical stores. Moreover, as far as the current trend is concerned, the development of e-commerce will only get better and better, so if you want to start a business, e-commerce is definitely a path worth trying.