What is the Ideal Path for Launching your Ecommerce Store?

The number of digital buyers is at 1.92 billion. By now it’s not a matter of whether or not you should take your brick and mortar business online or not? 

It’s a matter of how and what you will be facing? 

The ideal path is a platform that offers the chance to launch your e-store affordably with low to medium competition and organized order management.

In this article, we are going to tackle 3 main topics that will help you decide the better route between launching your own e-store or choosing a platform that serves multiple Ecommerce businesses.

The three main topics are: 

1- Budget

2- Competition

3- Managing orders 

The Budget 

Launching an Ecommerce business could be very expensive if done wrong! 

Start with planning and setting your budget and here are the main pillars to consider when setting said budget: 

1- eCommerce service provider 

2- Domain and hosting providers

3- Marketing 

4- Shipping expenses

Ideally, you would want to launch your e-store in an affordable manner since you own a small or medium-sized business you are naturally careful with spending your capital. 

Also, you should think about whether or not you are inclined to give your Ecommerce service provider a commission of your profit per order or not.  

2- Competition:

One thing that I’m sure you are considering is the level of competition your company is ready to face if your company is holding nothing back and giving the consumers specs and features or services that they haven’t seen yet then your competition level can go higher, however if your business serves certain busy criteria then you would want to avoid high competition from large businesses not because you can’t take them yet but because they are already established and won the public’s trust.

The choice goes to you in the end when reviewing your market research and assessing your competition 

Ideally: you would want an Ecommerce platform that you would face as little competition as possible to guarantee that your customer isn’t distracted or starts purchasing from your competition whom you share the platform with.

3- Orders Management 

Having a full display of your orders gathered in a single place in your admin panel is a must if you want to have smooth management, and it’s one of the features that you can easily neglect or forget about it, assuming that it’s provided. It’s not always provided and it’s a hassle you don’t want to get into with any Ecommerce provider you are going to choose 

Speaking of Ecommerce providers, there are known paths that you can launch your store on:

1- E-Retailers as Amazon’s product in the middle east: Souq

2- social media

3- Website storefront

4- Mobile Application

Each of these paths are different from each other and what could work for you might not work for other businesses.

1- Ecommerce platforms: 

Whether you are showing your products or have a shop on the platform, this path is probably the most familiar and used by millions of sellers, according to Oberlo Amazon currently has 2.5 million sellers. This entails how strong the platform is but it’s also an indication of fierce competition. 

2. Social Media

Social media over the years and still to this day is the chosen Ecommerce platform by numerous small businesses who want to have an online presence for their brand but avoid the cost and effort of owning a website at the same time. With social media platforms such as Facebook proposing it’s new Ecommerce platform and Payment Gateway of Facebook Pay.
However, it was clear from the start that scaling a business on a social media platform wasn’t going to be easy. 

3. Websites

In this day and age, websites are the go-to solution for brick and mortar stores to go online with their businesses through, especially with the rise of the Ecommerce market lately due to the virus and social distancing regulations which gave way to a surge in the online retailing industry, one that is going to keep on rising. With various Ecommerce website platforms out there the choices are endless and you as a business owner are bound to find exactly what you need.

The downfall of this is that what you need might be out of your budget or requires some technical knowledge from your end, so it’s advisable to keep looking for your perfect solution. 

4. Mobile Applications

Ecommerce mobile applications have seen a steady increase in their revenue along the years but the surge and attention they are receiving in this period is substantial, which forced large scale brands to direct their focus and resources on launching mobile apps that provide a store-like shopping experience for their customers, to keep them coming back for more. 

Moreover, launching a mobile app which rises up to the task isn’t affordable with some app developing companies requiring a starting quote of $5000, and for small and medium sized businesses this is a huge chunk of their capital, therefore some businesses considered turning their websites to applications to find a way to decrease the cost while still being available for their customers. 

Let’s cross-compare the 4 paths we discussed above with the 3 pillars we mentioned earlier on so that you can start to find the perfect Ecommerce path for your business.

To conclude this article it’s clear that the ideal path is a platform that offers the chance to launch your e-store affordably with low to medium competition and organised order management.

From the comparison we did you can clearly pick and choose the platform/s that would suit your Ecommerce store the best.