How an E-commerce Store can boost sales for a Value-Added IT Reseller
The reason you’re here is that you are aware of how e-commerce has taken the world by a storm. Well, the storm is valued at a $4 trillion-dollar industry by 2020, and if you’re not in the whirlwind, you are losing out.
The IT reselling industry has been traditional, and in this dynamic market when everyone and their cats are online, the IT resellers have been slow to adapt. One of the biggest causes for this is the lack of an e-commerce platform suited to take on the various demands of an IT reselling business. IT reselling has unique demands which are not met by the more popular e-commerce platforms like Amazon for example. While it is great to have a presence on Amazon, it is not enough for an IT reseller. More on that later. Let us first focus on WHY you should have a presence online and how having an e-commerce store will boost not just your sales but the brand image as well.
The number one reason why EVERY business needs to be online is that that’s where the buyers are. It is a millennial world, and we need to adapt. More and more millennials are entering the professional world and are likely your buyers. They are accustomed to getting information, comparing products and services, and buying online. Automation is the keyword here not spreadsheets. If your product does not appear on their search page, guess what, you lose out. You may be offering great discounts and a price even cheaper than the product they buy online. But what use is great pricing if the users looking for the product do not find you?
Which brings us to the second point. An e-commerce store will not just help attract new customers via search engine visibility but also to retain your existing customers.
The chances that your competitors offer their customers the convenience of e-commerce are high. You want to retain your chunk of the pie, don’t you? And e-commerce is convenient, that is why it is such a global phenomenon. An e-commerce store will give your existing customers the advantage of shopping from their offices or homes at times convenient to them and not restricted to your business hours. An e-commerce store will give your customers the freedom to browse and choose your products independent of your availability or the need for you to send them a catalog via email. When your customers know that it is convenient to shop with you, they are less likely to switch vendors.
An e-commerce store also frees your sales representatives from unnecessary visits and lets them focus more on relationship building. On a sales call too, they are more self-reliant as they can easily show customers the products on the e-commerce store instead of relying on an in-house sales rep to send a quotation and lose time and maybe interest in the bargain.
I’ve just skimmed the surface here, there are many more benefits of an e-commerce store for the IT VAR. Read our article 10 Reasons why a Value-Added IT Reseller should have an E-commerce Store for more in depth information.
VARStreet has developed an e-commerce solution specifically for the IT and office supplies value-added resellers equipped with a ready aggregated product catalog of over 40 distributors in the US and Canada. Find out more here.
