Throughout history, buying and selling stuff has been carried through different types of channels. In today’s life though, a new way of conducting business has emerged: E-commerce. The process of buying and selling products and services through the Internet is simply called e-commerce.

With a simple online search, people can find whatever they’re looking for all from the comfort of their homes. We have seen how e-commerce helped people get what they wanted during the pandemic, and in a way, it saved a lot of businesses from going broke. Therefore, E-commerce has a lot of benefits for both customers and businesses.

Different types of e-commerce

• B2C-Business to Consumer: In this model, a sale transaction happens between a business and a consumer. For example, buying an Apple product from their website.
• B2B-Business to Business: When a business sells products or services to another business. For example, Intel selling its CPUs to companies like Apple and Dell or other companies is considered B2B.
• C2B-Consumer to Business: when an individual directly sells products or services to a company. Freelancers working for companies can be a good example here. Also, we can categorize influencers that work to promote a brand as C2B.
• C2C-Consumer to Consumer: when a person sells products or services to another person. For example, people listing their stuff on eBay is considered C2C.

Advantages of e-commerce for consumers

Probably the best thing about e-commerce is that customers don’t need to leave their homes to buy what they want. But there are obviously a lot more merits to it than just that. In the following few paragraphs, we are going to shed light on some of the juicy benefits of e-commerce.

Variety of choices

E-commerce gives you the power to choose the product you want to buy from any online store around the world. You’re not forced to buy whatever you find in a convenience store around where you live. The whole world is at your disposal. You can choose from a variety of products, and since it’s an online store, you can get all the quantity you want. But sometimes you need to wait for a few days if the product is out of stock, and that’s understandable.

Customers also can enjoy the freedom of browsing without stressing about annoying looks you’d normally get from shopkeepers.

Effortless and comfortable

With e-commerce, customers can order whatever they want from the comfort of their home or office without having to move a muscle. It is precisely one of the main reasons e-commerce is so popular. People can get things done fast with a few clicks and get back to their lives without spending so much time going out shopping. Not to mention not all of us has the option or the ability to go out shopping, so e-commerce made it possible for those who have certain limitations to enjoy shopping as well.

Saves money

Since everything is done online in e-commerce and there’s no need for an actual shopkeeper to drag you along and give you boring details you might already know about, buying stuff online can be cheaper. So essentially, shopping online can save you money and sometimes even bring you rewards.

Save time

Time is money. And with e-commerce, people can save a lot of time. This, in return, will enable them to spend that time elsewhere and be more productive. Nowadays, we can buy almost anything online, and the stores are open 24/7. It is estimated that it only takes about 15 minutes to shop online, so imagine how convenient e-commerce is, especially for those who work long hours and can’t afford to spend hours buying groceries.

Provides detailed information about products

The Internet is the main platform that e-commerce runs on. So whenever you want to purchase something that you don’t have sufficient information about, you can read about it online and find out. Countless websites offer comparisons between several products, or you could read comments about your particular product until you come up with your decision.

Advantages of e-commerce for a business

If we want to be honest, business owners actually benefit from e-commerce a lot more than customers do. It lowers their costs and offers cheaper marketing, a wide range of new customers, and so much more. In the following paragraphs, we will shed some light on some of them.

Lowers the costs

E-commerce helped many businesses save money and cut down on costs. There are a lot of investments put into any physical shop. Rent, maintenance, stock, workforce and an array of other services that need cash. If your business can’t pay back the money you spent with interest, then there’s no ROI (return on investment).

On the other hand, with e-commerce stores, you don’t have to pay for most of the regular expenses like physical stores. It presents small businesses with a great opportunity to use platforms like Shopify to create their e-commerce website. All you need to do is to customize it to suit your target audience.

Online stores also don’t require many staff members. So that’s another valuable benefit for business owners. At first, you can run your business all by yourself, but when you need help, you can always hire someone to work for you. Since it’s an online job, they can help you run the job entirely remotely from anywhere in the world.

E-commerce uses Affordable Marketing

Marketing for an online store is done on the Internet. And that means you don’t need to print catalogues, hand flyers or pay for billboards. The only space you need to advertise on is online. There are a lot of affordable ways that you can utilize to show your products that will cost a lot more in the physical world. You can make videos, post pictures on social media, write articles, create infographics, pay for Google ads and a lot more to get your product out there in front of the world to see.

Attracts new customers

About 87% of people who are surfing the Internet, reviewing different products, and comparing prices are all your potential customers. They are not bound to a physical store’s geographical limitations, so your location is not that important. You can literally sell worldwide and reach new customers every day and go beyond your local market.

Conclusion

Of course, e-commerce has many advantages both for the customer and the business, but those above-mentioned advantages are the most prominent ones. With e-commerce, we can save both time and money while choosing what we want from an array of different choices. E-commerce also enables us to make wise thorough decisions before finalizing a purchase.