With the rapid growth of eCommerce, businesses are always looking for ways to improve the customer experience and increase sales. One emerging trend that has gained traction is Connective eCommerce. This article will explore Connective eCommerce and why it might be the future of online shopping.
What is Connective eCommerce?
Connective eCommerce refers to a business model aimed at enabling newbies to create and manage all-inclusive eCommerce businesses with minimal effort. The business model promotes solutions to tackling the main risk areas of setting up and managing an online retail store. These risk areas include web development, product promotion, and inventory fulfillment. The goal is to make it easier for new retailers to start their journey in the eCommerce world without putting in extra time, money, and manpower.
How Connective Ecommerce Works
1. Eshop website
The first step in selling online is building a website. Hiring a web development and design team can be hugely expensive for a new business. That’s why service providers, including Soft Surge, Shopify, and Squarespace provide relatively cheap customizable e-shop templates. These templates make it easy for anybody to publish a ready-to-use online storefront catered to their business. Ecommerce websites can be ready to publish from anywhere between one day and one week, depending on the level of customization needed.
2. Dropshipping
Dropshipping is a method of e-commerce that does not require having a physical inventory. Your main task is performing market research on which products are currently the most in-demand and finding suppliers. To start a dropshipping business, you can partner with third-party suppliers, such as Printify or AliExpress, that ship the product directly to your customers. Most e-shop platforms have direct integrations with their suppliers, meaning that owners of dropshipping businesses don’t have to lift a finger once a customer places an order. Dropshipping is a good business because a third-party supplier takes care of product fulfillment, and the dropshipper makes a profit from the markup price they list it for.
3. Social media promotion
Once your storefront and product are good to go, it’s time to start attracting customers. The most effective and cheap way to promote products is through organic social media promotion. Social media is a strange and wonderful tool for marketing. If you follow the right trends and get through to your target market, it has the potential to attract mounds of organic traffic for free. This means experimenting with creating content on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, etc., that encourages people to buy your products.
Advantages and Risks of Using Connective Ecommerce
Pros:
- It’s cheap yet efficient
- It’s easy and quick to set up
- No need to buy, make, or ship physical inventory yourself
- You can choose and test-sell a variety of popular products
Cons:
- It’s easy to be outrun by competitors with larger budgets
- You have to find creative solutions to last long-term in competitive markets
- You must rely on third-party companies and suppliers for product deliveries, product quality, stock levels, and wholesale price points
Is Connective Ecommerce Right for You?
To summarize, connective e-commerce is a business model that relies on accessible, cheap, and simple methods to build an online retail business. It uses methods including outsourcing the storefront website and the product itself, and then using social media to market organically. If you’re looking for a cheap way to start an online store with only a computer and an internet connection, the connective e-commerce business model may be right for you. However, if your business is already in the stages of expansion and brand image building, it may be wiser, in the long run, to start relying less on third-party providers and start investing in custom in-house solutions.
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