Innovation is something that has set humans apart from other living things. It’s our ability to innovate and reiterate things we previously held, seeking improvements on our ways of life that we have established ourselves in a position where we stand today. All the luxuries, convenience, and advancement are the result of us questioning how things can be better done and then seeking a logical answer to that. Today we have many advanced tools and technologies in every aspect of our lives that we don’t even consider the innovative quest involved in presenting them to us in their contemporary forms. However, if we try to look into these advancements we can realize the very purpose of their existence and then utilize them with our existing and ever-increasing knowledge to leverage them at our best and even innovate further.
One such technology that is of particular interest is a child of the internet – eCommerce. While the internet itself has amazed us in numerous ways and benefits society in many unprecedented ways, this domain of internet which we can eCommerce deserves its own appreciation. Today, in this article, we’ll discuss how eCommerce has enhanced the potential for many business models with its capabilities. Let’s see some of these business areas and how they have found a catalyst in the eCommerce.
Subscription-based business model and eCommerce
Routine is something that binds us to daily habits and many businesses realize this. Just as with anything with the routine, we utilize many things repeatedly in frequent intervals. Building a routine has always been a way of our life preventing us from chaos and presenting our life in an orderly fashion, giving us greater means of leading an efficient lifestyle. Subscription-based businesses have their foundation in this very idea of us leading our lives in routine and our desire to carry out these routine tasks efficiently.
Why eCommerce has enhanced the functioning of a subscription business is that its abilities align with the nature of human desire that these businesses aim to provide – the capability to carry out routine tasks seamlessly. Let’s see how eCommerce has made this possible.
Automated payments:
Many subscription businesses require making payments over regular intervals and missing any payment could result in inconvenience, both for the business and the customer. Ecommerce payment system enables customers to make payments automatically when they become due resulting in an uninterrupted service for the customer.
Digital environment:
Many subscription businesses offer numerous choices to customers and since the internet is a great medium to present content it makes it easier for the business to present their products and for customers to interact and select those products online without the need to visit the business physically. For example, now people can stream their favorite movie on streaming platforms choosing the movie from the library of movies offered by the business. Previously, such a business would need to go to the nearest movie rental subscription store and rent the physical disc of the movie.
Platform-based business model
Ecommerce, like the internet as a whole, has made us realize the true potential of building networks and utilizing them. In the world of business, demand and supply go together, the supply needs to meet the demand. While sometimes there is both demand and supply, the business doesn’t take place because the seller doesn’t know where the demand is and the buyer doesn’t know the opposite. Ecommerce has sorted this by helping peer-to-peer and peer-to-business leverage the power of eCommerce and fulfill this very need of them. Let’s see how the eCommerce has made this possible
More accessible
One great benefit of the eCommerce platform is its ability to reach. Ecommerce platforms are accessible to people from all places, thereby building a global network of people offering and customers willing to buy those offers. Instead of local peer-to-peer or business-to-peer platforms with limited scope, eCommerce expands the horizon of such business platforms transcending the constraints of physical boundaries and limitations. This ability of eCommerce to enable sellers to reach more customers and the customer to have more options has motivated and drawn more people toward such business models in the online domain and generating more of them.
Accountability and Social validation:
When it comes to this business model one thing that concerns customers is trusting the seller. On many occasions, they’re dealing with someone who just like them is a single person, rather than a company or an established business where there is a proper customer care department and a proper business hierarchy to hold accountable, and thus the onus of trusting with the services and product offered remains on the customers. What if the service or products aren’t satisfactory? What if the person offering the service is a fraud? This and many other questions present hesitation to customers. However, when these business models are incorporated into an eCommerce platform, the level of accountability increases. Sellers are bound to follow the policies of the platform and are regularly checked for compliance.
Furthermore, the very nature of these platforms demands a credible and satisfactory profile of the seller based on customers' reviews, ratings, and compliance with rules to successfully function for sellers on these platforms. All of this increases the level of accountability and enhances the confidence of customers playing a significant part in enhancing the acceptance of these business models widely.
Conclusion
Internet and eCommerce have opened great opportunities for us and it’s upto us to realize and benefit from them. While many of our activities find their roots way past the advent of internet and its tools, many of these have benefited greatly and found their landscape changed completely owing to the incorporation of internet use in our society. These business model mentioned in this article and many other has leverage the capabilities of eCommerce and the internet benefiting both the customers and businesses in many ways.
If you’re looking to step into eCommerce domain then the x2xeCommerce can help you set up an eCommerce store and integrate it with your existing business solutions to help you realize a unified business management system. An example of a business solution by x2x is the x2xEcommerce RMH-Shopify Integration Solution. Reach out to the x2xeCommerce team for any query or a free demo.