Your Small Business And Ecommerce

If you run a small business, odds are you have considered eCommerce in some capacity – and if you haven’t considered it, you at least have heard of it, right? Cyberspace is quickly becoming the premier location to sell goods, having successfully replaced brick and mortar stores in a variety of fields (the death of the record store comes to mind) and a large portion of it has to do with technology advancing and the ability to sell items online becoming both easier and effective at reaching wider audiences, especially with the suite of advertising options that become available to you when you open an eCommerce site.

WHERE SHOULD I INVEST MY TIME AND ENERGY?

A significant portion of small business (your peers, in other words) also have positive things to say about these continuous changes in how the world shops. Specifically, we’re looking at the focus on social media – with a survey revealing that 51% of small businesses believing that social advertising is what will be most responsible for growth over the course of the year – search engine optimization came in at a close 46.28% and email marketing at 40.27% This indicates a very real awareness of the strength of tried and true advertising platform. Moreover, this same survey lists those previous percentages as the primary means an eCommerce site will generate revenue, which further underscores that the idea that online marketplaces are less the end all be all, and advertising your own website is a much strong prospect. Interestingly, Amazon made up 19% and eBay made up 15.22% – though these numbers are small in comparison, they are wholly attributed to a single entity, which makes the platforms incredibly lucrative pursuits.

LET’S NOT FORGET ONLINE MARKETPLACES

Don’t write off online marketplaces though – a survey of small business owners showed that they are very much aware that such spaces are still key to generating revenue and moving product, with 73% of owners professing an interest in using places like Amazon and eBay to sell their product. A full 80% saw social advertising as a major means to generate revenue, and a whopping 5% of those survey claimed Facebook and Instagram would be the movers and shakers for growth. Furthermore, the continued penetration of smartphones into the population continues to drive the mobile market higher and higher, with so much traffic flowing through portable screens that not only has the gaze of major and minor retailers alike fallen upon the platform that those that implement payment services like Amazon Pay or Apply pay reported up to 80% of their online orders coming from such services.

For further information and elaboration on these exciting statistics, BigCommerce has a handy infographic they’ve been kind enough to let us chop up and offer to you, and you can read on here. NewLeaf would also like to provide a friendly reminder that we can help get all of this marketing set up for you, quickly and painlessly. For further information, read up more on the marketing services we offer here.