When you want to sell something, you open a store. When you want to sell something online, you open an online store. This is how people have been thinking about selling online for the past couple decades. To some extent, this makes sense. However, the Internet offers far more possibilities than opening an online store. The way customers interact with merchants is changing drastically because of WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, AI chatbots, and QR codes. There are no boundaries to where shopping takes place today.
In order to stay ahead of the ever-evolving number of sales channels, brands and retailers are connecting their online stores to these channels. Even so, the online store remains their center of operations. In reality, it is just one of those channels and should be treated as such.
Using a sales channel as your business engine is fundamentally wrong. Products are at the core of your business, not websites. It's what customers want. In the end, all you need is a way to get your products in front of customers and an easy way to get and fulfill orders remotely. Everything else is marketing.
In the days before the Internet, you could only do that in person. In the age of the Internet, customers and merchants are no longer in the same room, but the concept remains the same. You should think about selling online this way. The first step is to sell, not to build a website.
Just sell it. I wish I were Nike to use this as my company headline.
If you're a small merchant, you shouldn't create a Shopify store to start your business online. It might be easy and cost-effective to create an online store, but if you don't have the right skills and marketing budget, you won't sell anything. As a result, you will abandon online sales altogether. I've heard this story so many times.
If you own a large online business, there's a good chance you're unsatisfied with what you have; otherwise we wouldn't see so many replatforming projects. However, redesigning your website is just an expensive way to improve one of your sales channels. The one that won't even probably be the most important a few years from now.
Regardless of whether your business is small or large, it's time to review your sales strategy from the ground up. Forget the assumption that selling online requires an ecommerce site. This is simply inaccurate. Instead, explore alternative ways to sell your products without the need of a website. Offer your customers a more personalized shopping experience by bringing your products to them rather than bringing them to your online store. By doing this, you can build a stronger foundation for your business and unlock untapped revenue streams as you evolve your digital strategy.