With the help of an e-commerce website, there are many processes that can be automated to save your time, effort & money.
In other words, when you hire a website developer to create your website don’t consider your e-commerce store as just a normal website. It can really become one of your colleagues and help you to automate some of your important business processes. 
In this blog post, we are going to
#1 Round-the-clock availability
One of the major advantages of running an e-commerce business is that your website is available 24 X 7 for your customers.
In other words, your customers can browse and buy products from you anytime they wish to.
Running a local brick-n-mortar shop can never provide you with such an advantage because when you run a local shop, you do need to follow certain opening hours and days depending upon your area of operations.
#2 Affordable marketing
Unlike traditional marketing for local retail shops where you are required to spend a fortune, having an e-commerce website gives you the benefit of running online marketing campaigns that are targeted, measurable yet affordable.
With the help of some of the below online marketing activities, you can get targeted traffic to your online store at an affordable cost:
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- SEM (search engine marketing)
- SMO (social media marketing such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
- Email marketing
#3 Ability to scale-up
When you run a brick-n-mortal business in your local area, expanding your business may require a lot of investment and overhead expenses of either running another shop or expanding the size of your existing shop.
But in the case of an e-commerce business, you can easily set up a new website at an affordable cost or you can expand your existing e-commerce store by incorporating new features. All this can be done at a comparatively lower cost.
All you need to do is, hire a web developer to add new features to your website.
#4 No overhead expenses
This is perhaps one of the major reasons why modern businessmen are switching over to e-commerce business.
Running a local physical store does require some overhead expenses that you may need to pay every month. These expenses could be in the form of monthly rental, manpower salaries, electricity charges, and other running expenses.
While in the case of an eCommerce website, you don’t have to bother about these running expenses at all.
All that you need to pay in order to build & maintain your e-commerce store is below:
- Nominal website hosting charges (less than $150 per annum).
- Nominal website domain (less than $50 per annum).
- Website development charges (one-time).
- Website maintenance charges (less than \$100 per month).
If you are a startup or a small business with a low budget, you can also consider hiring website developers in India who can help you to build a fully-functional online store at an affordable cost.
#5 Easy maintenance
Here comes another benefit of running an e-commerce website vs a local brick-n-mortal business. When you run an e-commerce business, you don’t have to manage sales, invoices, etc. manually. The backend of your e-commerce store takes care of everything on its own.
So, here are some of the important jobs that an e-commerce backend do for you in order to save your time & effort:
- Instant invoice generation for your customers and your records.
- Instant shipping label printing.
- Instant inventory update.
- Instant reporting, as and when required.
- Instant adding, editing, and deleting of products (stock management) on your store.
Recommended post: 8 Major reasons for you to maintain your eCommerce website
