We all know that in more mature markets such as the United States and Japan, e-commerce is the sales channel with the most growth in recent years and the main engine of future commerce. However, how much does this reality apply in less developed markets, such as Colombia or Mexico? Is it worth investing in e-commerce, instead of expanding through more traditional channels? Will people buy my product online?
These are questions that both CEOs and Marketing Directors ask when defining their growth strategies. The fear generated by this new business model is understandable: for many it is easier and less disconcerting to invest in physical stores than to get involved in an unknown project. But is that the wisest decision for your business? Definitely not. Not thinking of e-commerce as a key sales channel in markets like Colombia and Mexico is a strategic mistake.
There are endless reasons to set up an online store instead of opening another physical store, but we highlight in this article the six most important ones:
1. The Scope of an E-Commerce Nationwide
Having an online sales channel allows CEOs or CMOs to have a much broader national reach with that store than they could with a physical store.
Obviously, it depends on the product; some, like vegetables, are much more local than others. But in general, a physical store has an impact area of only a dozen blocks around, while an online store has no geographical limits: from Leticia to Riohacha in Colombia and Ciudad Hidalgo to Tijuana in Mexico, an online store allows selling in cities where there is no physical presence or where building it would not be worth it.
2. The Scope of an E-Commerce at an International Level
Many of the companies in are seeing external markets such as Peru, Ecuador and the United States as attractive possibilities for growth. Our Travis Scott Astroworld Merch is an e-commerce channel and it’s allowed you to take a step in increasing this reach. There are black sip clients, for example, who are trying to reach the Latin colony in the United States and through the e-commerce channel it is possible to supply that market more easily and efficiently than with an expensive investment in physical stores.
3. Deep Knowledge of the Client
In traditional retail, a manager can only have information about what the customer bought. There is no way to know, and especially not exactly or in detail, what products you were about to buy, what product you did not buy because there was no size in your size, or what product or promotion caught your interest. The beauty of digital is that everything can be measured. You can have, through a good implementation of web analytics, a universe of data on the entire purchase cycle of a customer.
In e-commerce, not only sales are known: You have access to metrics that show which marketing channels are working best, from which parts of the country (or the world) the traffic is coming, which category or product is the most viewed, which products were about to be bought but were abandoned in the shopping cart. It is possible to know not only which are the best sellers of a brand, but which products have the potential to be best sellers.
Additionally, e-commerce allows a capacity for experimentation that cannot be had in a physical store. By having results of any action in real time in digital, you can launch a promotion with several iterations (at the level of photography, color, etc.) and test which of all the versions is working better simultaneously and at low cost.
4. The Ability to Assemble the Entire Portfolio of Products
Many of the problem’s retailers have today is the price of the real estate. Finding a good physical location today is expensive and for retailers it is one of the big pains. Location, location, location say that is what works in retail, but it is increasingly difficult to access these strategic places.
In e-commerce, on the other hand, it is easy to display a complete portfolio of products in a format that would cost a lot of money in a physical store. The marginal cost of setting up one more product in e-commerce is practically zero, while the probability of that product being sold is much more increased. With this, you can test more product categories, reach more customer profiles, and at little cost, sell more.
5. Scalability
Once a brand invests in setting up an e-commerce channel, the channel is much more cost-efficient than scaling a network of physical stores. As a brand grows its online sales a lot, it can invest fewer resources in capital and labor proportional to what it would cost to manage that growth in offline channels.
6. Become Familiar with the Product
This we believe is one of the most important points. E-commerce is a channel that is growing rapidly even in countries like Colombia and Mexico, and as we mentioned earlier, it is the channel with the highest growth in more mature economies.
Being able to start familiarizing yourself with the channel that shows the most sales potential in the future creates a competitive advantage over the market, and the sooner it is done, the better than you should contact Kanye west concert merch. There is no important brand in Colombia or Mexico that in a few months, or a few years, will not have its online store. Therefore, becoming familiar with something that is going to happen soon is important.
