In essence, electronic commerce or E-Commerce traffic is just the buying and selling of goods and services using the Internet when you shop online. The term is often used to label all of a vendor’s efforts in selling products directly to consumers. It starts when a potential customer discovers a product and continues with the purchase, use, and customer loyalty.
Data fuels the most successful e-commerce operations, leveraging best practices like email marketing, audience segmentation, and marketing automation. For example, following up with a customer selling online after putting an item in the online shopping cart but has not finished the transaction can significantly increase your chance of making the sale.
What is E-Commerce Traffic?
Most people think of E-Commerce as the sale or purchase of a physical product online. But this also includes the sale and purchase of non-physical goods, such as services or digital effects. We refer to when a company sells online.
Some E-Commerce retailers sell exclusively online. For example, let’s say an entrepreneur creates a company that sells high-end pet products. Before the Internet, he would have two options: sell his merchandise through his store or sell it to national pet supply stores. Today, business owners have a third option: E-Commerce. They can sell their products through their website, a third-party site, or both.
The lines of E-Commerce and traditional retail sometimes overlap. When a customer buys with their smartphone while in a physical store browsing their physical products, it isn’t easy to classify the experience as one or the other.
Advantages and Disadvantages of E-Commerce Traffic
The main advantages of electronic commerce compared to a traditional business are:
- Access to a global market to expand the target of your online store and get more customers.
- Great potential to scale the business and expand the range of products and services without the need for a significant investment.
- Reducing the costs and expenses involved in managing an online store, both in terms of infrastructure and personnel, is another of the main characteristics of electronic commerce.
However, undertaking in the world of electronic commerce also has a series of disadvantages or risks:
- There is great competition, especially from the great online commerce giants and well-known international brands that open their online stores.
- Security issues are usually caused by cyber-attacks that expose customer data and affect trust in the online store.
- The profitability threshold takes time to arrive. Generally, you have to make a significant investment in marketing at the beginning so that e-commerce obtains visibility.
Types of E-Commerce According to your Business Model
Online store with own products. The online store works similarly to physical stores since they manage their stock of products, but they operate exclusively on the Internet.
Dropshipping: This type of e-commerce is only responsible for taking orders from customers, invoicing them and passing them on to the wholesaler, who is the one who stores the merchandise and sends it to the final customer.
Marketplace: It is a store of stores, a web platform where different sellers offer their products and pay the owner a commission for each sale, like Amazon.
Membership: This type of e-commerce seeks recurring sales through a periodic subscription model by systematically sending products to its customers or allowing access to its content, as in the case of Spotify.
Services: Digital commerce does not exclusively sell physical products. 79% of online shoppers buy services and 43% digital content. Services e-commerce sells consulting or training products, such as Coursera.
Affiliation: Although it is not traditional e-commerce since the purchase process is not carried out directly on the website, it is an engaging online business model due to its low costs. It is limited to referring customers to another online store in exchange for a commission for each sale.
Traffic Sources of E-Commerce Traffic
Regardless of the tool used to measure it, traffic often defines differently depending on its source or origin. In general, the following traffic sources are differentiated:
1. Direct Traffic
These are visits from users who access our site by directly typing the URL in the browser. It is usually understood that they are people who know our store or brand or who have received the impact from a channel that does not include a link, such as a television spot.
2. Referred Traffic
These are visits to our domain through a link on a third party’s website. The traffic comes to us from a blog that mentions our product, a directory, a forum, a social network…
3. Search traffic
These are the visits that find any of our pages using a search engine such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. At this point, it is essential to distinguish between the two main ways of attracting search engine traffic:
SEO traffic or organic traffic: it is the one that produces through natural positioning. It is often said that it is “free”, but in reality, it is a significant investment of time (which translates into money) in optimizing the page and obtaining authorization.
PPC traffic: these are the visits that occur through the insertion of advertisements in search engine advertising platforms, such as Google Adwords. It is also prevalent to refer to PPC as SEM, although the term is a bit imprecise since SEO would also fall into Search Engine Marketing.
4. Campaigns
These are visits from actions controlled by our marketing team and conveniently labelled to trace their origin. These are usually email marketing campaigns, banners and other similar alternatives. This last one can be the vaguest of the sources. For that reason, we leave you this link so you can clarify the concept.
Traffic is significant in any online business because it is the base from which conversions generate. Without traffic, there are no sales, so it is crucial to know how to attract it. Here are the best strategies to attract traffic to your online store and your brand blog. In addition, you must know where the users are in 2016 to capture them adequately and learn how other online stores have done it to increase their traffic by 1400% in just one year.
What are E-Commerce Business Models?
E-Commerce business can function as a digital group of a retail giant or a physical store. It can also a person who sells handicrafts from home through sales platforms.
Of course, there is a wide variety between those extremes. E-Commerce models vary widely and include many types of sales. Here are the different types of E-Commerce companies:
B2B
B2B E-Commerce refers to when a company buys goods or services online from another company. Some examples include a restaurant purchasing an ice machine or a law firm purchasing accounting E-commerce traffic software. Business software such as customer association management (CRM) stages and payment processing companies are also careful B2B. B2B online sales tend to be more complex than other forms of E-Commerce, relying on large catalogues of complex products to sell.
Business to Consumer (B2C)
B2C online retailing occurs when consumers purchase an item over the internet. Although B2C E-Commerce appears more prominent, it represents only about half the size of the global B2B market.
E-Commerce Traffic Trends
According to SEMrush, spikes expect in November and December as consumers flock to online stores for promotions like Black Friday and the winter holidays. Still, the recent pandemic has caused some unexpected changes in the e-commerce landscape.
Traffic growth remained constant during the pandemic months (March-June 2020), averaging 36% across all eCommerce categories. In addition to general retailers such as Amazon, Walmart and eBay, the three types of Home & Garden, Food, Sports and Outdoors are the ones that show the most significant growth in traffic during this time, with a year-on-year rate of between 40 and 50%. fifty%.
Conclusion
It would not be an exaggeration to say that we have all made some purchases online during two and a half periods. After all, with the proliferation of the World Wide Web, the Internet, E-commerce traffic and the technologies accompanying these advances, shopping online has become a piece of cake.
Whether through your mobile phone, computer, laptop or tablet. E-Commerce has become a household name, and there is a good reason for it. Allow people to shop in comfort 24/7: no more opening and closing hours like those in traditional physical stores.