One of the lesser known, and possibly more important, business applications for ecommerce is that it can be easily customized and adapt to you buisness needs. However, due in part to the popularity and success of online businesses such as the Amazons of the world, ecommerce has been typecasted as a shopping cart based online store.
Even after internet speeds dramatically improved, paving the way for companies like Netflix and Hulu to directly stream video into a person’s house, the most popular payment model is still based off the shopping cart method. Type in a credit card and then we’ll deliver your product right to you even if it’s just a video stream.
The problem with this approach is there are many businesses – due to their niche or unique nature – who cannot take advantage of the shopping cart approach. For some, selling online isn’t worth the hassle, cost of installation, and/or time sink spent operating an online store. However, there is still one business application for ecommerce many businesses can take advantage of.
Go Behind The Scenes
What most of us see when using a e-commerce platform is only the tip of the digital iceberg, underneath any product page lies: an inventory management system, credit card processing tools, invoicing capabilities, multiple currency converters, syncing to accounting softwares, and that’s not counting special features like bulk discounts, geolocation, or digital distribution. In front of all those features is the shopping cart.
Instead of trying to build you business around a shopping cart, just take the individual bits of an ecommerce platform and customize them to your specific business needs.
- Automatic Invoicing: Instead of manually creating an invoice, your website can easily be outfitted to automatically send invoices off to your clients.
- Credit Card Processing: A credit card processing system can be integrated into your website. All your clients would have to do is log in and pay their outstanding bill.
- Syncing With Accounting Software: If you do integrate a credit card processing or even an invoicing system into your website it can easily be integrated with accounting softwares like Quickbooks.
Those are just a few possible examples of the business applications for ecommerce. The important thing to remember is that the best business application for ecommerce to make sure that the platform is the sum of its parts not just a shopping cart icon. If one aspect is useful to your organization, but the rest deadweight, with any customizable ecommerce platform you can just cut out the fat.
If you have any ideas for other possible ecommerce applications please leave a comment. If you are curious about some of the real world applications we have done with ecommerce please contact us to request a set of case studies.