Electronic commerce, which is commonly written as eCommerce, refers to the trading or facilitating of trading in products or services using computer networks, such as the Internet.
eCommerce relies on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, electronic data interchange (EDI), supply chain management, online transaction processing, Internet marketing, inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems.
Whether you are brand new to the eCommerce business or you are an experienced seller online, Shopify can certainly help you make more money, create more effective eCommerce stores and overall, be a better online seller. Let’s review some of the things discussed in this book.
If you have an online store, one of the things that you’re going to look forward to every year (more than usual even) is the holiday season. Holiday sales are always higher than other times of the year, for nearly every niche out there, and some companies even make the majority of their revenue for the entire year during the holiday season. You can take advantage of this shopping boom if you are prepared and set to go, and luckily, the fact that you have a Shopify store allows you to get ahead of much of the competition.
One of the ways that you can improve your earnings from your website, and potentially gain a lot of social media followers and future buyers, is to get in on trends that are just starting. This is a very viable strategy, even for the smallest eCommerce website, because if you can get your post in front of all of the other people jumping on a trend, your traffic could be at the level of a viral post or video. You could go from a steady 10,000 visits per month to millions of visitors in just one day, just by jumping on a current trend and most importantly – recognizing it will become a trend before anyone else does.
One of the things that you’re going to have to do if you want your store to succeed is use social media to promote your business and communicate with your customers. These days, a business without a social media connection is as dead-in-the-water as a company in the 1970’s or 1980’s would have been without a telephone. Social media is just one of the earmarks of a professional company and it is one of the best ways to advertise, offer customer support and let customers know that there are real people behind your organization.
There are many different types of products that you can sell in your Shopify store. While there have been people that have made a success with a very general product niche such as ‘sporting goods’ the majority of people cannot compete in a market saturated by big name brick-and-mortar companies that have been years (and millions of dollars) building their online presence. Most notably, Amazon is a company that pretty much blows everyone else out of the water on everything from electronics to clothing to just about every odd and end that you can imagine. Luckily, Amazon is so big that they are unable to offer one thing: niche expertise. That’s where your most viable marketing chances are.
