Sparky Sprocket's bike shop pulled in $500,000.00 in sales this year. "A pretty good year," says Sparky.
Here's how United WebWorks blew Sparky's mind and funded a college education for Sparky, jr.
No added salespeople, no new product lines or price wars with the shop down the street. Just a simple way for customers to order and pay for bikes and equipment online from their sofas.
According to sources like Emarketer and Forrester Research, Inc., e-commerce is growing at about 9 percent per year. What if the Sprocket bike shop figured out how to ride this wave? Let's do the math with Mr. Sprocket:
With the addition of an ecommerce module on his improved, SEO-optimized website, Sparky sees a 9% increase in sales next year. $500,000 becomes $545,000. The year after, $545,000 becomes $594,000. Even after hiring some part time help to handle shipping, Sparky is rolling in profits. After 4 years, the old shop is raking in over $700,000.00 per year.
What's it worth to increase your business's profits like this? United WebWorks has been growing businesses through ecommerce Savannah GA services for a long time, and we'd love to share some ideas with you. Your return on investment will surprise you!
Ecommerce has been around long enough to have developed a myriad of adaptations. If you can't build your own site (which is most of us!) you can rely on a trusted vendor like United WebWorks to take care of every detail. Coding, design, hosting, server maintenance, security… we'll provide all of that and more. We can even set it up so you can constantly update your catalogs, inventory, orders or any other data yourself.
There are other bare-bones approaches that rely more on you or your staff to assemble the puzzle pieces on your own. These require a lot more initial setup work and expertise in selling online. Shopify, Goodsie, or Jumpseller are good places to start.
Prices range upward from $10 a month for the simplest and smallest. Many companies see the wisdom of starting small and growing into a more suitable service over time. Consider the ROI for starting small (including the work time it takes to do it yourself) versus investing in a firm that can grow with you.
Paypal is a great place to begin. It's well-known, secure and easy to set up. There aren't any signup fees or monthly charges, but the seller's fees can add up quickly: a 2.9 % fee on the sales price and a per-transaction fee of $.30.
Putting your customer's convenience first means giving them choices on how to pay, Paypal is OK, but we really want the ease of using a credit card, right? Use a merchant account established through your individual card companies to offer this option. Fees can vary, usually from 25 to 50 cents per transaction plus a percentage of the selling price. Watch out for annual or monthly fees too.
You won't last long in e-commerce if your present customer service is limited to one-at-a-time discussions with each customer, answering questions by phone, and managing file cabinets full of paper invoices. If you have more than one person handling customer service, be ready for a rising tide of questions that apparently only you can answer.
Gain the advantage by going with an e-commerce vendor that includes CRM tools. For an added fee, major ecommerce providers give you a lot of help with this. A good CRM system allows you to document issues, optimize and build protocols for how you interact with customers - all in one location so everyone enters and uses the exact same information. It also allows you to track inventory, purchases, pending orders and more in real time.
Makes you wonder what businesses will be like in 20 years, when today's plugged-in kids are shopping adults for whom actually going into a store to buy something is… weird! And e-commerce experts Sprocket and Son will be doing just fine.