The Benefits of Ecommerce for Merchants

Many of today’s builders’ merchants understand the benefits that technology can bring to their businesses and actively look for new ways to utilise it to meet their business goals.

A successful ecommerce operation can hold many benefits for builders’ merchants - and these days, it’s less complicated than you might think to get your online store up and running.

The Benefits of Ecommerce

From your perspective as a consumer, it’s clear that online shopping holds many benefits - but how do these translate to benefits for the merchant?

• Open 24/7. There are no online opening hours. Visitors can place orders outside of the 9-5 window, increasing your customer base to those who can’t always visit your shop when it’s open. You also don’t need to pay staff to cover these extra hours.
• More ‘impulse purchases’. It’s far easier for ecommerce customers to make a quick purchase through your site than it is for them to make the x-minute drive to your shop. Without the need to travel to visit your store, you’re more likely to receive more smaller orders, as online customers make impulse purchases.
• Larger market. Your market now extends beyond your local area, and to the rest of the country (and perhaps beyond). With the right marketing and pricing strategies, you can secure far more orders than you’d ever manage in-store.
• More options for customers. Increasingly, customers want more ways to research products and place orders. Some of your customers will prefer to do this online. Give them that option.
• Get more data. Your ecommerce website can help you collect data on how customers found your website, as well as their buying habits. This data can be extremely valuable when making business decisions.

Managing stock

One of the biggest hurdles for merchants operating ecommerce stores is stock management. Manually adding all your products to your ecommerce site sounds exhausting. And then there’s the matter of keeping stock levels up to date. If you don’t do it frequently, ecommerce customers could order items that you don’t expect to restock for weeks.

Thankfully, if you’re using an EPOS and stock management system like Trader, there’s a solution. Trader can integrate with your ecommerce store so that products, prices and product descriptions are automatically uploaded onto the system.

The same goes for stock levels, too. Trader keeps track of all transactions both online and in-store, and periodically updates online stock levels to reflect availability.

Summary

The huge benefits of ecommerce are easier to access than you might expect. Automated product uploads and stock updates significantly reduce the time required to maintain an online store, so that every merchant is able to try out ecommerce for themselves.

For more tips on how to use Trader to unlock ecommerce for your merchant, speak to your account manager or contact our sales team.