E-commerce and Online Selling: Trends and Challenges
Introduction
In decades the escalation of global pandemics have been witnesse, each of which negatively affected business activities and economic growth. Covid-19 virus caused a 13,5% drop in China's industry production and a 20,5% decline in retail sales in the first two months of 2020 while the U.S's stock market lost trillions of dollars, leading to a negative wealth effect and lower GDP. According to Blockstock online selling is the process of selling goods, products or services via an internet or mobile app. Oppong claims that selling a particular product online isn't easy because it requires skill, time and effort whereby you also need to protect your business from any cyber threats to ensure that the sellers and customers data is protected. Due to this covid19 pandemic crisis had a sudden and wide-ranging effects on consumer behaviour, whereby the public health orders have forced many people to stay home, which is the reason that led to a surge in the internet usage. This is online selling essay which will reveal the topic in a nutshell.
Perceived Effectiveness of E-commerce Platforms (PEEP)
E-commerce has well advanced many firms or business owners to be more productive in the Internet Technology that allows them to directly sell products to customers through e-commerce platforms, that resulted in increase of sales.
As the e-commerce industry grows, these are the challenges retailers must contend with:
- Cybersecurity;
- Competition;
- Order fulfillment.
Cybersecurity
Consumers cannot physically feel the products when buying online, which leads to product uncertainty. The report also shows that online customer information is collected and tracked for data-driven marketing efforts but are insufficiently safeguarded. For example, security risk (e.g. personal information leakage) has been found to have a strong negative effects on online transactions. This is important because nowadays e-commerce platforms offer different online products and services from electronic devices to high-tech products,health and beauty to food, and fashion to sport and travel with a large volume of financial transactions. When a hotel room or flight ticket with online payments, they must give out their personal and bank account information that needs to be protected from leakage and fault behaviours or consumers will probably face with potential risks and dangers. Consequently, online safeguards are critical for personal and transaction data.
Competition Against the Marketplace
According to Hufford most marketplaces carry their own products for sale,one of the biggest competitors then is the platform itself. He also mentioned that this is a tough competitor to be up against because they have got access to data and resources which you as a seller you don't have an access.
Order Fulfillment
Not everything has to fall on the back of the small business owners. Even big companies could be inundated with more orders than those they have produced. ''Order fulfillment should be outsourced to a third-party fulfillment company whenever possible for increased efficiency,' 'Cook said.
Jillian Hufford who is a marketing analyst state that there are 2 risks of selling online using marketplace sites which:
- Low Profit Margins
Hufford said that “Low profit margin is one of the biggest culprits of a retailerâsuccess on a market place”. According to web retailer, around one-fifth of sellers operate on margins under 10% margins which also vary considerably across product categories, whilst for some sellers the risk of low profit margins is very real.
- Counterfeit Products
Hufford, according to him counterfeit products can be a serious problems for some sellers since there is also a competition through retailer's and to sellers.Thomas Oppong reveals that counterfeit products can result in costly implications whereby the business or the seller will be the one that loses out financially and could face negative reviews. For an example: If an e-Commerce platform sold the counterfeit version of the product to the customers instead of the real one.
Conclusion
Online sales of goods and services have a number of disadvantages, one of the most important of which is the impossibility of seeing the desired product in person. Nevertheless, online sales can be considered almost the best solution for getting out of the difficult situation created by the covid-19 pandemic.
