4 Advantages To Investing In An E-Commerce Solution

At Canadian POS Corporation, we love to hear when Canadian businesses are doing well. The stronger our national economy is, the better it is for all business owners. However, no matter how great your business is doing, it could always be doing better, couldn’t it? This is a prevailing feeling amongst most entrepreneurs. This is especially true for those who don’t sell their goods online. You see, there are many advantages to investing in an e-commerce solution.

Here are just four of them:

1. You stand to make more money. At the end of the day, this is what all business owners want, isn’t it? If your merchandise is selling well in your store, why wouldn’t it be successful in moving online? In fact, research has shown that e-commerce sales actually grow faster online than they do at brick-and-mortar stores. So says Armando Roggio on PracticalEcommerce.com, who cites a comScore study to prove his point.

“E-commerce sales for retail goods are growing faster than offline sales for brick-and-mortar stores,” he writes, noting that comScore reported that even during “continued economic uncertainty, 2012 was a strong year for retail ecommerce. Throughout the year, growth rates versus the prior year were in the mid-teens to outpace growth at brick-and-mortar retail by a factor of approximately 4x.”

2. You avoid the fees associated with other online stores. A lot of people sell their goods online, but don’t necessarily have an online store of their own. They use resources such as eBay and Amazon, which are widely popular, but come with price tags to use. As Ben Kabin points out on Entrepreneur.com, “Amazon, eBay, Etsy and other similar marketplaces make their money off of fees, often around 15 percent, generated by each transaction. That money might be better off funding some expansion of your business and not on fees.”

3. It helps you to establish a loyal customer base. Having an online store allows you to do more than simply sell your products. It enables you to attain very valuable information about the people who buy from you. You can then create marketing campaigns surrounding your most popular items and target them in areas where the majority of your sales are made. Your online store will actually teach you a lot about your own business and the people who support it.

“As your business matures, you’ll discover whether your buyers need customized functionality that platforms like eBay and Amazon don’t offer,” says Kabin, “As your volumes increase, you may also require a more streamlined system to collect valuable customer information such as an email addresses, order history or shopping cart abandonment. This data is crucial to building a customer retention strategy – and essential to the long game.”

4. Investing in an e-commerce solution is easy! “E-commerce entrepreneurs today can actually have an attractive, well-stocked, and successfully-marketed store up and running in a month or two with a relatively small investment,” writes Roggio. At Canadian POS Corporation, we couldn’t agree more. The e-commerce solution that we offer our customers really makes life easy.

It enables you to easily and securely accept and process all credit cards – Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express – from your website. Secure real-time transaction processing and advanced risk management tools will protect your online business from fraud, and because you’ll have a direct connection to our powerful and reliable processing network, you can eliminate the costs and complexities of dealing with a third-party gateway provider.

For more information, call Canadian POS Corporation at 1-877-748-2884 or email us at info@localhost.