Hisham Sarwar
E-commerce is on a rise and one would not be surprised if there are many rags to rich success stories linked to the e-commerce business in 2021. The answer is the COVID-19 pandemic. After all, the world’s richest man is Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, the world’s largest e-commerce business with an economic footprint all over the globe.
The COVID pandemic has dramatically shifted e-commerce in the year 2020. E-commerce has seen a huge 129% year-over-year growth in the U.S and Canadian shores. This accounts for a massive 146% growth in internet retail orders. Many brick and mortar stores have now gone online to survive the pandemic but still, there’s a huge window for many more stores to establish their online stores.
U.S. e-commerce sales are projected at $709.78 billion in 2020. This is equivalent to 14.5% of total U.S. retail sales.
From a consumer point of view, buying behavior has shifted too as people are forced to shop online, some doing this for the very first time in their life. Because of this behavior acceleration, many more businesses are stepping up and establishing their e-commerce business and hoping to succeed.
Existing e-commerce players are expanding by exploring more avenues of online sales. It is expected that by the end of the year 2020, global e-commerce sales will reach $4.2 trillion, Shopify e-commerce reports.
You can make money by establishing an e-commerce business or offering a service as an e-commerce website developer. Let’s take a look at the opportunities for both avenues.
Huge opportunity for new business:
If there is one thing the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us that’s the importance of e-commerce business. If you are a struggling retail business or a new small business aspiring to step up the game in 2021, establishing an online store is exactly what the doctors ordered.
There are many ways to do an e-Commerce business. You can create a Shopify or a WordPress website, you can create a store on Facebook and Instagram, you can also use the power of Facebook posts to upload videos and pictures of your products and services and advertise that post to your targeted audience.
Establishing a website is by far the most effective way of setting up and scale your online business. By integrating different payment gateways to accept money online, you are a touch distance away from presenting your store to the world and grow your business.
By creating a Facebook page and connecting it with Instagram’s business profile, not only you can create your brand awareness but you can also make good sales on Facebook-owned platforms.
Who would deny the importance of doing business on WhatsApp?. This is another way of reaching out to your targeted audience by creating groups inside WhatsApp and presenting your best offers to the members of the group.
The high growth of e-commerce sales in 2020 promises huge opportunities for new and existing E-Commerce businesses 2021. By harnessing the power of social media marketing, online stores can reach out to hundreds of thousands of potential customers, generate leads and sales that could result in the growth of your business.
Huge opportunity for e-Commerce website developers:
E-commerce is not only going to help online stores make more sales but from website developers’ point of view, there’s more eCommerce freelance work requirement than ever before ever since pandemic surfaced up all over the world in early March 2020.
As a freelancer, you are probably offering your services in one of the best times of history. Everybody wants to establish an eCommerce business, as a website developer, graphic designer, or social media marketing expert, you can get a huge amount of outsourcing, freelance work from different marketplaces such as Guru, Upwork, Fiverr, Peopleperhour, and freelancer.com.
