The impact of retailing online has been significantly large. As far back as in 2008, a retailer’s sales were increased by 20% just from online purchases (Charlesworth, 2013). It has been noted that the percentage has climbed even higher in the past couple of years. It is anticipated that it will climb even higher in the years to come. This high impact on retailing online is due to the fact that retailers are able to reach hundreds (sometimes thousands) of customers across the web and the availability of many more products than most traditional (physical store) retailers can offer in one place. It’s also because products online are more convenient for users as they don’t have to physically go get the product (Vannier, 2013). It can just be mailed to them. Also, online retailers seem to have the advantage of cheaper prices. The availability of many products, along with cheaper prices, allows internet retailing to have a huge impact.
So online shopping has many perks over the traditional store. It’s no wonder why the impact of retailing online has become a very important consideration. If a retailer doesn’t chose to sell his goods online, he will only have customers that will come into the physical location of the store. He would miss out on hundreds of customers which would boost his sales. Of course, there are disadvantages of retailing online, such as people would no longer be getting exercise while shopping, and they couldn’t physically window shop (unless the retailer also has a physical store). But there is no doubt, that retailing online has had an important impact on retail sales.
Some practical and good steps that are a great idea to follow to evaluate your business’s future with online sales is (Morris, 2015):
- Review your content and which pages get the most traffic. Are there any particular pages that get the most sales? Are there any pages that get lower sales? Take note of pages people take less time to look at (ones they exit out of quickly).
- Check into the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy that you have in place. Are there any particular keywords your users use the most while searching the website? Identify any problem or need phases.
- What is your social strategy? Is it working? Which social media campaigns are bringing in the most traffic and revenue?
- What is your mobile optimization? Are your users able to access your website through their mobile devises, navigate through it and purchase your goods easily?
- Review the pay-per-click campaign performance you have in place. Check any keywords that are being used. Are there better keywords that will give you leverage? What campaigns lead users to your site more? What campaigns generate the highest revenue?
Probably one of the most likely problem areas of a business’s enterprise content management infrastructure is that money is often lost due to inefficiencies in content use and creation. If there is no reliable and consistent access to a company’s assets, it can’t function optimally (Stewart, 2012). It’s vital to a company’s success to get control of their content. However, they sometimes just don’t know how to go about doing it. More often than not, the platform is blamed, when in fact, most of the time, that is not the issue (Stewart, 2012). The real issue is usually the content itself and the processes and practices in its lifecycle.
A lot of issues stem from the fact that most organizations just don’t know how unstructured their content really is, and how unmanaged it is. The issue with this is that users will distribute, create and store their own content based on their needs. They crate information that they can’t find. Sometimes the IT department just creates more storage to accommodate this, and didn’t address the real issue.
There are a few steps one could take to prevent this issue from happening. You can determine the appropriate form of content management, and review and define requirements. Evaluating your current content state is a definite right move. You should establish ECM governance and the environment of content management. Finally, you should perform ongoing content enhancement and hygiene.
References
Charlesworth, A. (2013). Online Retailing. Retrieved May 23, 2016, from http://www.alancharlesworth.eu/alans-musings/online-retailing.html
Morris, S. (2015). 5 Steps to Evaluating Your Content Strategy and Increasing Product Page Conversions. Retrieved May 25, 2016, from https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/content-strategy-evaluation/
Stewart, D. (2012). The Real Problem with ECM (hint: It isn’t the platform). Retrieved May 25, 2016, from http://blogs.gartner.com/darin-stewart/2012/05/04/the-real-problem-with-ecm-hint-it-isnt-the-platform/
Vannier, P. (2013). How the Internet is Affecting Retail - Permanently. Retrieved May 23, 2015, from http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://insights.wired.com/profiles/blogs/how-the-internet-is-affecting-retail-permanently