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Even if you haven’t heard about it, which we highly doubt, you’ve already participated in e-commerce. Whether you sold your old couch on Craigslist or bought a new fresh pair of Nikes from that one cool website, you played your part in the big world of e-commerce. There are a lot of reasons why you should know more about e-commerce and we are here to tell you all about it. Grab your favorite drink of choice and let’s dive in, shall we?

What is E-Commerce?

Electronic commerce or internet commerce, also known as e-commerce, involves companies and individuals that sell or buy goods over the internet. Today nearly every imaginable service or product is available through e-commerce transactions. From airplane tickets and housing to groceries and books, the world wide web provides it all. The term e-business often pops up too but it shouldn’t be mistaken or used as a synonym for e-commerce. E-business describes all aspects of running an online business(legal, accounting, storage, transportation, packaging, etc.), whereas e-commerce specifically refers to the transaction of goods and services online.

Why is E-Commerce so popular?

People traded goods way before the age of the Internet, now it’s just way easier to do it. Anyone with a phone, a bank account, and an internet connection can go on Amazon and buy/sell whatever they want. It’s THAT easy. The very first documented online transaction occurred in 1994 and since then e-commerce evolved into a digital giant. According to research made by Insider Intelligence, global e-commerce site sales will reach over $1.67 trillion in 2022. To put that number in perspective, with that amount of money you can almost buy each citizen of Uruguay a $500,000 Lamborghini. With technology slowly advancing its way more and more in our lives, buying or selling stuff online will become easier. Apart from products, e-commerce has empowered individuals who work as independent freelancers to better position themselves online and to scale their business more conveniently. Traditional brick-and-mortar stores also adopted e-commerce as a way to keep up with the competition. The hybrid model of providing goods both online and in-store helps many small and big businesses to increase their profit and to offer more services to keep their existing clients and possibly attract new ones.

Benefits and Downsides of E-Commerce

As with everything that exists e-commerce comes with its advantages and disadvantages. We listed a few to try and give you a better perspective.

Advantages:

24/7

When most brick-and-mortar stores lay down for a rest at night, e-commerce doesn’t need to sleep and it’s there for you 24/7. You suddenly realized at 2 a.m that you need a new pair of shoes to match your outfit for the wedding tomorrow, grabbed your phone, and hopped on Amazon to order three pairs of Converse sneakers because they were on sale and all of them arrived the next day before noon? It’s hypothetical but you can do that if you wanted to.

A-Z

Many e-commerce stores offer a much wider variety of products in their online shops. Unlike their physical counterparts, where you are constricted by space, you can fit pretty much everything you want in your e-commerce store. Also, many online stores offer goods that can’t be bought elsewhere. Exclusivity is a classic.

Location, location, location

Nowadays geolocation isn’t a big issue. Almost every e-commerce store offers international shipping, which then expands your market by a lot. Yes, there are costs to shipping items anywhere but if the product is good, people wouldn’t mind paying them. Also, they might not have access to that product in their country, so the only way to buy it is to order internationally. And with how popular remote work has become over the years, providing online services globally isn’t an issue at all too. Sky’s the limit as they say.

Reduced cost

You don’t need a small loan of a million dollars to get your e-commerce store up and running. Yes, you do need to set up an online store and possibly also need to figure out a warehouse and maybe a manufacturing site, but you don’t need a physical storefront, which will require you to pay rent, insurance, maintenance, staff, etc.

Disadvantages:

Delivery times

Sucks to wait for that novel to arrive. It also sucks when the delivery gets messed up and you have to wait a week more. The downside of e-commerce is that you have to wait for your product to arrive. Maybe you can just go to the local store and buy that board game, for your niece’s birthday, which you know she’ll adore. But if you have to order it online, make sure it will arrive on time for her birthday, otherwise, you’ll be crowned worst-uncle-in-the-universe and that is not good.

No touching

For better or for worse you still can’t physically touch and try products when you’re buying them online. This might be a deal-breaker for some people. Have you ever bought a shirt that is your size but the material doesn’t feel nice? Or those shoes which are your size but aren’t fitting well? Yes, you do have an option to return your shipment free of cost but that just doesn’t alleviate the frustration.

Hi, how are you?

Traditional stores have personnel who are there to help you anytime you have troubles with your purchase and often make the shopping experience more pleasant. E-commerce doesn’t have the same option. Yes, you could have 24/7 customer support, and chatbots but they can’t replace the warm greetings and even the warmer smile of a store assistant, and the “Hi, welcome to _______ how are you today?”, can they?

Don’t pull the plug

If God forbid your website crashes for any reason (and there are a lot of reasons why it can crash), your business will be out of order until the e-commerce storefront is back. Bugs also occur often and clients have issues with their orders, deliveries, etc. You can offer discounts and hope to compensate your customers but it’s not good when that happens often. Technology, while awesome, can sometimes be unreliable and when things go south you can just wait and hope that your e-store will be up and running as soon as possible.

Types of E-Commerce

Depending on the goods, services, and organization of an e-commerce company, a business can choose to operate in several ways. Here are the more popular ones.

Business to Consumer (B2C)

When a business sells a product or a service to an individual (e.g. You buy a hat from an online store)

Business to Business (B2B)

When a business sells a product or a service to another business (e.g. A company sells software-as-a-service for another company to use)

Consumer to Consumer (C2C)

When an individual sells a product or a service to another individual (e.g. You buy a used book on Amazon from another person)

Consumer to Business (C2B)

When an individual sells a product or a service to a company (e.g. A graphic designer creates a logo for a small business)

Bottom Line

E-commerce is just part of running an e-business. If you want to sell your products or services online, you need to do your research thoroughly. Chances are that whatever you sell, the competition will be brutal and you need to figure out how to discern from it. It’s easy to set up an e-commerce store but it’s extremely difficult to turn it into a successful business. We don’t want to be discouraging. There are plenty of tools, platforms, groups, and resources that can help you to start selling goods online. There’s plenty of fish in the sea of e-commerce and there’s enough space in the limitless ocean for your boat too. So go for it.

With technology constantly changing and evolving and with how close it is intertwined with how businesses carry themselves, naturally, it is changing and evolving businesses as well. It’s not a matter of why, but when and how a business should undergo a partial or a full digital overhaul. Managing and meeting newer and more demanding customer expectations and competing successfully with other businesses are two out of many reasons to engage with digital solutions and transition smoothly into the new business world, where being a fully digital enterprise is a necessity, rather than a commodity.

What is Digital Transformation

Simply put it’s the deployment, adaptation, and usage of new digital technologies to fully transform and/or evolve how a business conducts its operations on every level. The benefits are ranging from increased efficiency and productivity to unlocking new and better value for customers and shareholders. There are numerous ways of introducing digital solutions to enhance your business and there isn’t a step-by-step guide on how to do it simply because every business is unique and requires a different approach from the previous one. Let’s say you deploy a cloud computing solution to improve customer experience or use AI to boost your CRM and make even more informative decisions by analyzing your customer’s behavior in depth. The main purpose of any digital transformation is to better the processes of an enterprise. Staying competitive is getting harder and harder nowadays and if a business isn’t transforming and evolving its ways, it’s falling behind everyone else.

Apart from customer expectations, other examples of prime drivers of digital transformation are new technologies that make new kinds of information and capabilities accessible. Mobile devices, social media, IoT, and Cloud computing are a few culprits out of many, who are responsible for driving digital transformation.

Practically any digital technology can play a part in an organization’s digital transformation strategy, but there are a few technologies that play a more central role than others, and possibly will play an even more important one in the future.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies can enable a computer or a machine to mimic the human mind’s capabilities. It learns from examples and when combined with automation it can make wonders.

Blockchain is a distributed, permanent record of electronic transactions. It provides total transaction transparency to those who require it and is inaccessible to those that don’t.

Internet of Things (IoT) is objects and devices equipped with sensors so that they can collect and later transmit data over the internet. Simply put, IoT is where technology meets the physical world. The information gathered is transformed into automation and decisions

 with the help of big data analytics applications and AI.

How does Digital Transformation begin and end? 

Transformation means change and every change begins with a shift in mindset. Old thinking rarely works well against new challenges. As we said before the question isn’t if a business needs to adopt digital and rather when and how should it reform digitally. Evolution starts when an environment begins to be more demanding and survival is about meeting and exceeding those demands. But evolution doesn’t have an endpoint. Therefore digital transformation should be thought of as a continual adaptation to a constantly changing environment, rather than as a one-time solution to a problem surrounding your business operations. For organizations that means a constant search to improve the end-user experience through on-demand training, using cloud computing, leveraging artificial intelligence, and more. In any case, starting a digital transformation journey requires a new mindset. Two concepts related to digital transformation are digitization and digitalization.

Digitization vs. Digitalization vs Digital Transformation

To clear some confusion revolving around those three terms we are going to give a short definition for each.

Digitization is the process of converting information and data from analog to digital. For example, scan a photo and store it on your hard drive.

Digitalization is the use of digital technologies to improve business processes and projects. For example, to help employees learn new software or tool to help with performing day-to-day tasks. Digitalization is a part of digital transformation.

Digital transformation goes beyond day-to-day operations and projects. It affects the entire organization and it can drive employee innovation and trigger company growth at a fundamental level.

Possibilities of Digital Transformation

Before COVID-19 digital transformation was largely occupied with only improving customer experience. Needless to say, we all know how everything changed after the pandemic hit. The need for digital transformation became more apparent and took a centerpiece in organizations from almost all industries. At the beginning of the pandemic, change happened every day. To meet those new rules, CEO’s learned that they have to quickly adapt new digital solutions to keep everything afloat. Now, every business that wants to grow and be successful has to invest in tech. Leaders adopted an innovative mindset and started to focus on harnessing, utilizing, and reinvesting in key digital technologies, which sooner rather than later convert into positive outcomes. The benefits are increased revenue and growth, and most importantly – to stay ahead of the curve and adopt the role of the disrupter, instead of being disrupted.

Final thoughts

Different types of digital transformation trends rise and fall in popularity as technology changes. Trying to keep up with those trends is a decent way of navigating through your digital transformation journey. Paying close attention can prepare you for the inevitable changes in your industry. As of today, digital transformation trends all tie back to creating a better customer and employee experience. Some people think that digital transformation will someday replace them, but automation, although being a part of it, doesn’t equate to digital transformation. Great digital transformation complements human work – AI, RPA, 5G, mobile development, and personalized user experiences are your friends, not your enemies.

Younger generations consume information in a completely different way than older ones. Gen X, Y, and Z are prime examples. With the advancement of technology communication between businesses and customers is completely transformed. To meet the more demanding customer expectations, organizations look for ways to improve customer experience and implement solutions into their business strategy, to retain existing customers and potentially charm more. What’s a possible solution which can tackle those issues you might ask? Well, an omnichannel solution is a viable option and in this article, we are going to try our best to introduce you to it. As always, grab your favorite drink of choice, and let’s dive in.

What’s an omnichannel solution?

An omnichannel solution strives to fulfill the customers’ needs at every touchpoint and provide a seamless experience across all channels, no matter how a potential buyer chooses to interact. To provide an outstanding customer experience, companies must be aware of every step through the customer journey – discovery, research, purchase, support, customer service, and returns, to build trust and an ongoing relationship. The main point of an omnichannel solution is to meet customers wherever they are and to provide exceptional service at every touchpoint. 

When customer experience is a key competitive point, an implemented omnichannel solution will boost you ahead of your competitors. Let’s say you have a brick-and-mortar store, an online store, and a few social media channels. An omnichannel solution acts like a glue between all of the aforementioned channels and makes sure that they work in a cohesive state. A bad example of a non-existing or badly configured omnichannel solution is when a customer is interested in a product that you advertised on your Instagram profile, and then buys it but after that gets the same advertisement of the same product on another channel, like Facebook. A good example using the same premise would be if Instead ads of for the same product, they get ads that offer accessories for their new purchase or suggest them to join a group where other people are using the same product and share their experience with it.

An omnichannel framework consists of three core elements:

Storage of data:

Omnichannel experiences collect all valuable information of a customer – past and present interactions and purchases and the gigantic amount of information obtained by website cookies, social media activities, IoT, email lists, etc. 

Automation:

The aforementioned data is then used to automatically recommend products, provide customer service, manage inventory, generate marketing content, and more, and all that in real-time.

Communication:

A fluid, continuous two-way interaction between customers and businesses is conducted via all of the available channels to further the collection of more accurate data and check and improve through feedback the automated processes, which then also improve.

Benefits of omnichannel solutions?

How does an omnichannel solution affect a business? Well, it’s hard to point out every single benefit, so we are just going to list a few. The main takeaway is that an omnichannel solution that is implemented intelligently and combined with an omnichannel strategy will inevitably lead to an increase in customer satisfaction, and a happy customer equals a happy company.

01: Increased customer loyalty – pretty self-explanatory, a company using an omnichannel solution retains more of its customers, because they receive a better experience

02: Price doesn’t matter – 01 leads to 02. If a customer has a good experience with your brand, they are willing to pay more for the brand’s products/services, rather than going for a cheaper option from their competitor

03: “Your inventory is full” – a stagnant inventory hinders your storage capabilities and risks it not getting sold. A perk of an omnichannel system is that stock data is shared across all channels. That can help with managing your inventory and reduce the possibility of it staying static

04: $$$ – as we mentioned before, investing in improving your customer experience can have a big impact on revenue and an omnichannel system is a good way to make your buyers happier

05: Cross-sell opportunities – an omnichannel system provides access to all customers’ data. Companies often take advantage of that and send texts, push notifications, and direct mail to recommend complementary items and/or upgrades. A prime example of that is the “click & collect” option, where customers buy something online and then pick it up from a store, which is in a convenient location for them. This approach saves them money on delivery costs and opens the possibility for them to buy something else in-store.

Omnichannel vs. Multichannel

We covered what an omnichannel is about, but what does a multichannel strategy mean? As the name suggests, it also uses several channels with which customers can interact and perform the same actions. Unlike omnichannel though, those channels are independent of one another and there is little to no data integration or crossover between them. 

The biggest difference between both is that multichannel strategies are channel-focused. This means that it’s easier to determine which channels perform better than others, regarding various metrics. On the other hand, omnichannel is customer-focused. It puts the customer in control of how they interact with the brand. This provides them with more options and lets them figure out the best and most beneficial way to communicate with the business.

Closing lines

Implementing an omnichannel strategy is a great way to take better care of your customers and tackle other issues which slow your growth and curb your company’s success. Remaining relevant in the digital and technological era becomes harder and harder every day. Even if a company already has an omnichannel solution up and running, it shouldn’t stop developing its products and services and improving its overall capabilities. Success is a journey and adapting along the way is essential.

Have you just heard of a weird acronym and wandered into this article? Lucky you, we will do our best to explain this trendy technology to you. Voice over Internet Protocol or VoIP is a contemporary calling solution that allows you to phone other people through the power of the internet, rather than the traditional way of using landlines. Thanks to cloud technology VoIP offers new opportunities which offer flexible and scalable solutions for the various needs of today’s businesses. Ready to dive in? Let’s do it.

What is VoIP exactly and how does it work?

Briefly and simply put VoIP is the alternative option to your local telecom. It provides the same service – allowing you to make calls – with the small difference that you use an internet connection to achieve it. This little tweak makes VoIP enticing to both consumers and businesses, as it provides features that aren’t supported by your common phone service. Such features can include recording your calls, custom caller ID, voicemail to email, and many more. It is also used as a tool to unify internal communications for organizations.

A VoIP service converts a user’s voice from audio to digital data, then transfers that data through the internet and sends it to your address of choice. If the person receiving the call uses a regular phone, the digital data is converted back to an audio signal. That’s it. That’s all there’s to it.

VoIP Phones vs Standard Phones

The main difference between VoIP phones and regular landline phones is that the latter is hardwired into a physical location. A VoIP phone on the other hand can make or receive calls from basically wherever, as long as you have a sturdy internet connection. The other difference is that traditional phones use physical wiring to transfer the signal, whereas VoIP uses the internet. A huge list of pros and cons can be made but without boring you too much we will share just a few that we think matter most. VoIP is much easier to set up, is way more cost-efficient, can still work in case of a power outage (reroute to another number to voicemail), provides a wide variety of free valuable features, and keeps a stable, high-quality call connection as long as you fuel it with a 100 Kbps.

We don’t live in a perfect world so VoIP services come with a few disadvantages. The biggest one, which we already mentioned a few times, is you need a very strong and reliable internet connection for the service to perform at its best. Another challenge is called “dropping” due to using hardware, software, and cloud components from varying vendors. For instance, some vendors provide network hardware, IP phones, and a cloud platform which helps a lot with these kinds of issues.

Types of VoIP Phones

There are a few types each suited best for a different scenario. To achieve a complete and successful VoIP deployment we suggest using the right type for your needs.

Desktop VoIP Phones

The standard-looking phone in a conference room is wired with an Ethernet cable. It provides all of the basic features you would expect from a phone.

USB Phones

This type plugs in directly into a computer or other device using the USB jack. This type works in conjunction with a softphone application such as Skype.

Wireless IP Phones

They come with a built-in Wi-Fi transceiver unit that can connect to an access point (e.g router). This allows you to move freely around your home and/or office while on a call.

Softphones

They are software applications that you can install on your device, allowing you to complete audio and/or video calls. They are very affordable.

Video Phones

An IP phone with a camera. The past few years proved them to be very valuable as a substitute for face-to-face meetings. A great and affordable way to keep in touch and see someone regardless of location.

Conference Phones

They take on the same purpose as their analog ancestors. They are typically used in large offices and conference rooms where numerous people join.

Why use VoIP services if you’re a business?

With hybrid work becoming more and more popular and acceptable, companies need efficient tools to harness and improve internal communication and collaboration. Having multiple services and platforms for communication purposes is an unnecessary complication for employees. It slows down workflows, impedes collaboration, and makes information flow more difficult internally.

VoIP isn’t rocket science and employees are onboarded without any difficulties. This technology benefits teams and businesses by improving collaboration. By using a seamless communication system employees can shoot quick messages, share their screens, and exchange documents as if they were working in the same room. The user-friendly and easy-to-manage helps the user with the process.

Furthermore, as a cloud solution VoIP calls can be comfortably scaled and adjusted to any business needs. Need more phone lines? No problem. Need to plug in extra devices? Easy. A whole new external remote team is added to a project. No biggie. Also, there is built-in security. Cloud security protocols offer protection to sensitive data. Last but not least VoIP services offer a smooth user experience. Whether you are an employee or a customer, the whole calling experience is painless. You can manage phone lines and enable business phones to ring on any device Users can easily switch from audio to video, record and transcribe calls, and hold/transfer calls while also being able to answer a colleague’s line. Ultimately VoIP makes employees perform better, which leads to companies performing better and in the end, everybody is happy and jolly. 

For up-to-date businesses that welcome and provide hybrid work is paramount to obtain a unified communication solution that offers a smooth and easy user experience. This is where cloud calling and VoIP services shine the brightest. When communicating through this technology, location becomes irrelevant, and collaboration becomes streamlined. In this era of remote work, this is especially important. Pick a VoIP solution tailored for your needs and make sure to choose the best provider to make the transition effortless and seamless. talkt is an omnichannel solution that provies VoIP services at a reasonable cost and can streamline and automate many of your internal workflows, to make sure your employees stay in touch with the most important tasks.