Ecommerce

Ecommerce, in its most common meaning, is a virtual store that sells from a website. More broadly, e-commerce is a buying and selling system that uses the Internet as a means to make sales, as well as to maintain close contact with its customers.

In fact, the evolution of e-commerce has led to the fact that e-commerce sales are not only closed through its website, an e-commerce also uses social networks and applications for mobile devices, either as direct sales or as a source to include the target audience in a sales funnel.

1. Advantages of e-commerce

From the seller’s point of view, if we compare traditional sales through loccal stores versus e-commerce, sales through e-commerce offer several advantages, such as:

• Reduced costs.
• It allows you to reach a wider audience (global market).
• It provides autonomy and flexible hours.
• The investment required to open a business is lower.
• It makes it easy to have thousands of references accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• You can make fast changes as your business grows.
• You can segment your customers in just a few clicks.
• You can send them automated email marketing campaigns.

2. Ecommerce models

Depending on your business model, you can find the following types of e-commerce:

– With its own products. In this case, it is an online store that works in a very similar way to a local store, managing its stock of products, but selling exclusively online.

– Membership. This type of e-commerce is based on recurring sales through a periodic subscription model, an example of which is Spotify.

– Dropshipping. This type of e-commerce only takes care of taking notes of orders and invoicing them, after which it delegates the logistics task to the wholesaler who is the one who delivers the order to the end customer.

– Marketplace. In this case, it is a store with a web platform where different sellers offer their products and give a commission for each sale to the owner, an example of this is Amazon.

– Services. These are service-based e-commerce sites that sell products such as consulting or training, meaning they don’t sell physical products. An example of this would be Coursera.

3. Types de ecommerce

E-commerce sites can be classified based on the market or clientele they target. The most common are the following:

Business to Consumer (B2C)

This is the most common type, where the sale of products and services is done directly between a company and the consumer (end customer).

Business to Business (B2B)

These are companies that create products and services that they in turn sell to other companies.

Business to Government (B2G)

In this model, companies conduct their business operations with governments and public institutions through the use of the Internet.

Consumer to Business (C2B)

This business model is one in which the end user or consumer creates a product or service that is used to complete a business process and gain competitive advantage.

Consumer to Consumer (C2C)

It is the business model that facilitates trade between individuals, that is, one person sells or provides services to another person.