Whether you are running a small business in town or you provide catering services,your business needs to get online,most of the users can get to access you even when you are sleeping or doing other chores,here are the main reasons to have a website:
1. Improves Your Company Image
This alone should be enough reason to get your business a website. It’s an extremely important factor considering that without a website, blog, or online presence prospective clients could begin to wonder how serious you are about business. Today, companies of all sizes and industries are establishing a successful online presence.
If you don’t have an online presence (a professional one) then you can’t expect your prospects to take you seriously and you will lose business to competitors that do have an effective online presenc2. 24/7 AvailabilityWhile some fast food restaurants, grocery stores, and gas stations manage 24-hour service, it is impossible for most businesses. That is, without the internet. A key benefit to having an ecommerce website, is that your clients and prospects can read about your products and place orders at anytime. On regular business days or holidays. Imagine what being open 3-4 times longer could do for your business.
3. Better Customer Support
The internet allows you to answer questions and solve customer problems—all without taking any of your time. Create a video, a product spec sheet or a FAQ (frequently asked question) section once, and you can direct clients to that information for years. Not only does it save you time, but you’ll be providing better service. Your clients and prospects are looking for specific information, such as:
With an online presence you can give them just the information that they are looking for, and just when they are looking for it. This means less phone calls with technical questions and more sales.
4. Very Low Start-up Costs
Starting out online means very low startup costs. You have no buildings to construct, no vehicles to buy and few (if any) staff to hire. Simply build your site and start selling. If you are already selling offline then the transition can be very smooth. You continue selling the same products that you know and have a good supply of. Putting your company online simply gives you a new source of customers.
5. The Internet Was Made for Business
The beauty of the internet is that your prospective client(s) can literally be just one click away from your online store. Through the internet you can now educate, instruct and solve clients problems. You can accept orders and payments and receive them directly to your inbox.
6. Live / Work from Anywhere
As long as you have a solid internet connection you can live virtually anywhere while you conduct your online business. Many people live in one continent, have their hosting on another and their warehouse on yet another. The world has gotten very small and you can take advantage of this. You could even move to the Caribbean or South America, enjoying a low cost of living, while doing business online.
With few exceptions the internet reduces your need to “be” somewhere. Live where you want to, and let your business adapt to your lifestyle instead of the other way around. There are some notable exceptions, like landscapers, surgeons and home painters who must be in a specific location to perform their work.
7. Reduce Operation Costs
Just one single task can make a significant difference in cost savings. For example, receiving orders online reduces the need for customer service staff. With comprehensive sales and product information online, you’ll simply receive purchase orders and payments via email or into your database. Staff numbers can be reduced, thus office space and related office expenses.
Making use of various online service providers you can now take all aspects of your business online, such as purchasing, billing, order fulfillment and shipping. Other functions can include pre-emptive customer service—such as answering client questions via a FAQ section or a customer forum.
8. Target the Global Market
With your brick and mortar business, you are limited to the amount of individuals who can visit you at any given time, let alone find you. With a good website, you can literally have thousands, even tens of thousands (even millions) of people visiting your online store at once. Imagine the potential for your company, if you could expose your products and services to a potentially unlimited number of interested people.
Being able to have thousands of visitors and actually having them are two different things. The success of an online business depends on the same thing as any off-line business: marketing. Learn how to increase blog traffic. Content marketing is a great way to increase traffic to your site / online store. Social media can be a powerful and inexpensive (free) way to drive qualified prospects to your site.
9. Increase Company Responsiveness
The internet allows you to deliver your proposal, purchase order, order confirmation quickly in many cases instantly to your clients. Online stores will process orders and confirm them to the client. In the olden days, purchase orders were called in, mailed or dropped off. Depending on the workload of the sales staff, it could have taken hours, or even days to process the order. With a competent online store application, you can automatically track inventory, sales numbers, outstanding orders – everything.
Faster response time means happier clients and less administrative work for you.
The other Very important thing why you should have a website is
10.Emails.
Your clients will have more trust in you if your emails are coming from your company domain name,what do I mean by your company domain name,this means if you have a company by the name mycompany and you purchase a domain name called mycompany.com.This means you will create emails using your domain name e.g [email protected],In this way your clients will have more trust in whom they are dealing with.
Also third party email providers requires that you have a domain in order to use their services.Examples of third party applications include:-gmail,zoho e.t.c.
