E-commerce is one of many methods that can help to streamline you business. Besides the traditional shopping cart approach, e-commerce can help to monazite your business in a few ways.
1) Sell your products online
A good place to start is by taking advantage of websites such as Amazon.com or ebay.ca stores to sell your products and services easily and cost-effectively, without even having to go through the trouble or expense of setting up your own e-commerce site. Consumers nowadays are making a lot of their purchases online. Whether they are shopping for cosmetics or cars; people are using a variety of e-commerce sites to buy goods. The mobile e-commerce industry has been seeing a period of rapid growth, so much so that it is expected that by 2015, it will be a 119 billion dollar industry. With more than 14 mobile apps for all kinds of devices including iPhones and BlackBerries, eBay is now ranked first place for consumers to browse and shop directly from their cellphones.
2) Send invoices – and get paid – electronically
Ever wanted to get paid faster, save paper, and eliminate your mailing costs. Well now you can do all three by using an online invoicing service like FreshBooks.com or Zoho.com to send your clients invoices and accept credit card payments electronically. Not only do these web based applications allow you to auto-bill and easily place charges on your customer’s credit cards, but they’ll even follow up with overdue accounts by sending them late payment reminders. Additionally, you can grant access to your clients so that they could easily view their account and transaction histories online without compromising any of your time and energy. Furthermore, with such programs mentioned above, you can also set up your employee scheduling, assign them to different projects, and even time and monitor their performance right from your computer screen.
3) Become an affiliate
Do you ever mention books, goods, or other products on your blog? If you do, then you can be making money from it. The way this works is that anytime, someone reads about a brand or a product on your blog and decides to purchase it, you would get a percentage of that sale from the company who owns those goods/services. Making an extra sum of cash can be as easy as that! Do what you do best and write reviews, blogs and promote your affiliate’s products in order to increase your monthly cash flow. For instance, Amazon’s Associates Compensation Program offers “industry leading conversion rates and competitive advertising fee rates” which give webmaster greater opportunities to make money. The best part about these programs is that most often, your monthly earnings can be limitless, it just depends on you.
4) Holding an event? Have people register online
If you’re holding an event have people RSVP online through a service such as eventbrite.com. This online event management and ticketing service will track your event’s registrations, issue tickets and collect payment on your behalf. They do all this in return for a small fee per ticket sold.
5) Monetize your blog
If you’re putting time and effort into your blog and have a growing traffic, then it’s time for you to turn your blog into a profitable business. Google AdSense is your key to monetizing your blog once you have it up and running. What this web based application does, is it allows you to enroll into a program which enables text, image, and video ads to be displayed on your blog site. These ads, which are controlled and distributed by Google itself, can generate revenue for you depending on the size and type of the traffic you’re bringing to the advertised companies. Simply put, the more readers you have coming to your blog, the more chances there are that they will browse and click through the ads that you have displayed.
How do you plan to use e-commerce to streamline your business?