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E-Commerce: An Introductory Guide for Beginners

Beginning in the last third of the last century, the Internet gradually dominated our world, and human inventions flocked to it until we were finally able to facilitate one of the first human interactions in history. It is the process of trade. The ability to buy and sell products has become available to everyone with simple clicks on smart devices through electronic stores. To buy or sell as many products as you want, from groceries to giant machines, you can do it all through what we call e-commerce today.

Table of contents:

The birth of e-commerce

Types of e-commerce

Advantages of e-commerce

Steps to Getting Started in E-Commerce

Reasons why some stores fail

The birth of e-commerce

E-commerce simply refers to the transactions in which individuals and businesses sell or purchase products over the Internet. E-commerce companies began to emerge in the early nineties. In 1992, (Book Stacks Unlimited) was launched to become the first online marketplace for book trading, initially based on phone calls, then in 1994 it turned into a website. Just a year later, Jeff Bezos launched the famous Amazon store, and Pierre Omidyar followed him with the launch of (AuctionWeb), which is known today as eBay.

And only 3 years after the launch of these electronic stores, what we now know as PayPal, an electronic payment system, was considered a miracle that added the remaining link in the chain of the electronic purchase process, which is the remote payment process. Dozens of global websites and services were launched at the beginning of this century, which contributed to making e-commerce what it is today.

Expansion operations in the field of e-commerce are still going on, as hundreds of other websites and services have been launched that contribute to improving the trading and purchasing experience. Not to mention the developments that took place in the sites on the previous list, which contributed to making e-commerce one of the most growing areas in the world, with sales of more than 4 trillion dollars so far, and it is expected to exceed 5 trillion by 2022!

Types of e-commerce

E-commerce is divided into four main sections according to the relationship between the customer and the merchant, they can be classified as follows:

Business-to-consumer (B2C): It is the most widely used model in the world of e-commerce, as it is based on conducting business-to-consumer transactions. For example: When a buyer purchases a phone through an online store, this is a transaction between the company and the consumer.

From company to company (B2B): depends on the procedure of buying and selling between companies and each other, and transactions are often in the form of raw materials, equipment, or wholesale goods. For example, transactions that occur between a manufacturer and a wholesaler.

Consumer to Consumer (C2C): Very similar to the first model, but the interactions are between consumers and each other. Most of the major online stores offer the ability to do this now, so anyone can sign up for a seller account and view the products they want to sell on their account in the online store.

Consumer to Business (C2B): This is a traditional model in which a consumer typically provides a service to a business. For example: When your company purchases one of the electronic logo design services on the Khamsat website, then the corresponding model is (C2B).

As for the classification of e-commerce companies according to the supply of products and services, their types can be divided as follows:

Merchandise selling companies: The most popular type of online store, offering merchandise such as clothes, furniture, and food. That is, it depends on the sale of physical goods that are sent to the consumer upon purchase, and one of the most famous examples is the Amazon store.

Service Providers: They sell the services you want over the Internet. The most prominent example is the SaaS business model, in which software is sold as subscription services and plans to pay either annually or monthly.

Digital product companies: Digital products differ from physical goods. They can be an e-book, a computer program, or a training course. For example, Hub Academy provides a number of high-quality training courses specialized in programming, and these courses are digital products.

What are the advantages of e-commerce?

It is clear that there are several differences between e-commerce and traditional commerce, each of them takes a different form to perform the same task. For traditional trading, the customer has to go to the shop himself and pay for the goods of his choice. As for e-commerce, with one click you can buy products regardless of where they are located and where you are.

Each type of them has advantages and disadvantages, but with this e-commerce is now achieving unprecedented growth in annual sales percentages. It also keeps pace with development and keeps pace with technological changes; In an effort to provide an integrated experience for consumers in the simplest way, its most important features are as follows:

1. Speed ​​of purchase

E-commerce allows consumers to shop from anywhere and at any time, it is not necessary for the consumer to go to another city to buy certain products, with just a few clicks he can get the products he wants effortlessly!

In addition to the availability of a large number of products available to buyers. Previously, the buyer was not able to buy and sell products except locally made products, but now you can buy from all countries of the world, so the buyer will have a good range of products.

2. Ease of shopping

One of the advantages of e-commerce is its availability around the clock, unlike traditional stores that adhere to certain operating hours. Moreover, the consumer is no longer limited only to the stores around him, he can buy any product he wants even if he is on the other side of the world.

Also, online stores provide some features that are not available in traditional stores. One of the most important is the feature of searching for products through the search bar and quick eye browsing for products on the same page, which saves the consumer the effort and trouble of searching for products in traditional stores.

3. Low costs and scalability

Establishing an online store does not require the entrepreneur to rent a place to display products or spend huge amounts of money on preparing it, but he can launch his online store at the lowest costs in the fastest time, due to his lower financial requirements compared to traditional stores. Expansion operations do not require the establishment of new branches in other places, but it has become possible for companies to make expansion leaps to distant geographic areas.

Online stores are not linked to a single geographical location but can be visited from anywhere in the world, which means the ease of digital spread. Thanks to the spread of e-marketing and the spread of social media, expanding the market share has become easier. This makes e-commerce cost-effective in setting up, operating, and expanding.

It is clear that e-commerce is superior to traditional commerce in many respects, from saving time, effort, and costs, to providing other advantages, such as: providing discount coupons and providing better offers, and we do not forget the response of e-commerce projects to inbound marketing mechanisms. Which represents most of the modern trends of marketers.

How do you get started in e-commerce?

Create an online store

In order to build a successful online store, you have to go through a great deal of learning and experience. Achieving a quick profit is just an illusion. Successful people participate in e-commerce by following a clear business map that helps them enter the world of e-commerce and make a profit from it. Here are some tips to help you:

1. Study the feasibility of your e-commerce project

The feasibility study is an essential step when starting any project. Projects are not built on intuition, but on research and gathering the necessary information about the project. By doing a good feasibility study, you can; Know the feasibility of your project and the percentage of market acceptance of the project idea, and study the material and technical aspects.

There are dozens of competing stores abroad, and in order to set up an online store and get a share of the market, you must determine the points that distinguish you from those stores, do you have the fastest delivery service? How about making your customer service better than your competition? Think about the loyalty programs that you can add to your customers, and try as much as possible to find several axes that distinguish them from your competitors to enhance your presence in front of the eyes of customers and be able to attract them to you.

2. Adopt a suitable business model

E-commerce has different business models, and to know which one is right for you, you need to know what services you can provide. For example, you can go to the wholesale form if you own a warehouse. Thus, the types of e-commerce models vary depending on what capabilities you have.

If you want to build a successful business, you must first build a unique brand, to do this you must choose assets for the brand that are interconnected with the personality of your online store, first choose the name and then start designing the visual identity of the store. You can use professional logo design services on the Fiverr platform.

3. Choose suitable products

The last thing you should think about when building an online store is trying to display a lot of categories and products thinking that they will generate more profits, so what will motivate the customer to buy from you instead of heading to major stores such as Souq and Amazon? The answer to the previous question lies in defining a specific category of products, distinguishing them, and making sure that there is fair competition, as the absence of competition may mean that there is no market at all!

Now, after you have determined the business model, comes the stage of choosing the market and the products that will be offered on the online store, and to do it correctly, look for the best-selling products in other stores, there is no proof of the success of a particular product more than the presence of actual sales for it. If you manufacture or own your own products, you can go to potential customers and start collecting opinions about your products to know which products are most suitable to display on the online store.

4. Calculate the costs of setting up an online store

The costs of setting up online stores vary depending on the plan and business model, but ultimately it depends on your budget, so you need to calculate the costs of setting up first before jumping into the operation that has other costs. The average costs of setting up an online store in 2020 range from $1,000 to $3,000.

To know the exact budget required, calculate the costs of the feasibility study and visual identity design. Domain and hosting costs for your store for a year, and don't forget to make sure you get an SSL certificate and add its costs if your hosting plan and domain don't include professional email and security tools. In addition to including the costs of the programmer responsible for creating the online store, the costs of the content writer and digital marketer for your store.

5. Create an online store not compatible with mobile

Society is moving more and more toward the use of mobile phones than the use of computers. This is especially true when creating an online store, if you want to avoid this
the problem, you can hire a programmer to make the store responsive to mobile devices, and then you will get more visits and a better experience.

Although the previous list includes the most important points of failure of electronic stores, the reasons for their failure may be due to many other factors such as administrative failure, lack of product quality, lack of information, exaggeration in prices, lack of good marketing, and other reasons related to the method of operation and method of administration.