eCommerce vs Traditional Commerce: Should You Have Both?

When you’re running a business in today’s fast-paced consumer landscape, you may be thinking about adding an eCommerce option to your brick-and-mortar business. The truth is, you can easily have both, and doing so is a great way to boost your revenue and grow your business.

To help you compare and contrast, we’ve laid out how both eCommerce and traditional commerce can help your business thrive.

Traditional Commerce

Traditional commerce involves any business exchange that takes place face-to-face located in a physical store space. With traditional commerce, consumers have the option to come in personally to buy your products and services. Some of the most important characteristics of traditional commerce include providing more personalized service and giving the customer a chance to use all five senses before making a purchase. By interacting with consumers in these ways, you’re better able to form stronger relationships with them, which will help you achieve the ultimate goal of creating long-term customer loyalty.

While having a storefront is a great way to provide personalized service, it carries some hefty costs. In traditional commerce, the brick-and-mortar location cost is generally very high whether you’re renting or buying the space. Once you obtain your space, you also need to hire staff for sales, accounts, and management. As a retailer, you’ll also need to maintain stock of the products provided due to which a huge amount of money remains blocked in business.

Your store has to be located centrally so that the customers can visit easily. Traditional showrooms run for a limited time like from morning to evening and from Monday to Saturday only. Besides the high overhead costs, there is also a limitation on potential expansion in the future.

eCommerce & Online Shopping

We now live in a world where many consumers use the internet on a daily basis. In fact, the growth of eCommerce has taken off with a recent boost of 25% growth in March 2020. Thousands of businesses rely on eCommerce to scale their companies, decrease costs, and increase convenience for their customers.

You can attract a larger audience of customers by providing an eCommerce option, and this can lead to increased sales for your business. With eCommerce, consumers can buy from your site whether they’re on their computers, tablets, or smartphones—from anywhere that has an internet connection.

That being said, running an eCommerce store also has its drawbacks. For starters, the online shopping landscape is incredibly competitive, and acquiring new customers has become increasingly expensive.

What’s more, the rate of product returns online is much higher compared to physical retail stores. Industry data shows that around 30% of all online purchases are returned, compared to 8.89% when purchased offline.

But regardless of how you feel about eCommerce and traditional commerce, you must strongly consider having a presence on both channels. Modern consumers typically use multiple devices and platforms to shop. It’s fairly common for a customer to research a product online then end up purchasing it in-store. And in some cases, shoppers prefer buying products through an eCommerce site then picking it up at a physical location.

Because of the prevalence of connected commerce, having both a physical and digital storefront will enable you to stay competitive.

How e-Commerce & Traditional Commerce Can Work Together

By combining eCommerce and traditional commerce shopping options, you’ll be able to expand your revenue stream while also providing customers with the convenience of being able to buy their favorite products from your business wherever they may be.

So how exactly can you run a business that thrives both in the physical and digital realm?

The first step is to ensure that your online and offline storefronts are tightly connected. Depending on your platform this could mean one of two things:

1. Integrating your point-of-sale system with your online shopping cart.

eCommerce solutions like Shopify and BigCommerce can connect to POS systems like Clover so that sales and inventory data flows smoothly from one system to the next.

This means that when someone purchases an item online, your in-store inventory will be updated so you don’t end up selling something that’s not actually available.

2. Using an all-in-one system. Some solution providers offer both online and offline systems.

Shopify, for example, has its own POS system. With this setup, you’re only using one vendor for your POS and online shopping cart, so there’s no need to integrate different systems.

The right decision depends on your technology needs and setup. If you’re happy with your eCommerce platform, then ask if they have a native online selling solution or see if you can connect the software to another POS platform.No matter which option you choose, there is one more component that you need to successfully do business online and offline.

We’re referring to your payments platform. Whether you’re transacting in-store or through an online portal, you need to be able to accept payments with ease. As such, you need a payments platform that works both online and offline and can enable you to accept multiple payment methods.

This is where Stax comes in. Our all-in-one payments platform has got you covered on all fronts, including:

• Brick-and-mortar. Stax works with a wide range of credit card terminals and POS systems so you can keep the checkout line moving and serve shoppers in-store.
• eCommerce. Stax integrates with multiple payment gateways to power your eCommerce store. You can also leverage our one-click shopping cart to process online orders instantly.

In short, the Stax Platform puts your entire payment experience into one easy-to-use location. Along with statements, deposit reports, and PCI compliance, each online payment you process will be accessible and accounted for within your dashboard.

With Stax, you never have to worry about having different merchant processing systems for traditional commerce and eCommerce.

Stax offers various merchant processing services, so you can find the best solution for your business. Our subscriptions offer your business the most risk-free merchant processing services at the most affordable price. Fill out the form below to see how much you could be saving!