Your customers are already online, where are you?

Hello there! Stop. Breathe. Slow Down. We are all in this together. Today I would like to talk about the untouched inventory lying in your warehouse, waiting to reach a shelf in your shop and get noticed by a potential consumer and finally being sold.

But before we directly dive in, relax and briefly think of yourself as a consumer. Think about any product that you want right now, visualise it, and think about how important it is to you to go and get it. You have the store/shop in mind, you’ve thought about the time to go, the outfit to wear, the people you want to go along with and when it’s time, you take the first step out, walk towards your car, you start your car and as your ears fill with the sounds of your car revving, you look ahead and see a couple of people walking around!! What happened? Did you forget something?

Yes my dear, you forgot your wallet!! No? What’s that again? Yes, you are right, you forgot about the pandemic. You forgot about Covid. I can only hope you did not forget your mask and sanitizer. But the question is, would you really risk your life to go and shop right now? I assume the answer is, No.

This is the case for everyone. Each one of us wants to be safe and knows that going out in crowded places is not the right thing to do. But this has impacted all kinds of businesses, right from the sabzi store to the expensive tech store or a mega shopping mall. Everyone is shutting doors on their consumers. Don’t they care about making profits? The simple answer is, YES; they do. And the solution – the World Wide Web.

Be it small businesses or big industry giants, everyone knows that it would be irresponsible to step out and crowd up during this pandemic and hence these businesses are now making maximum efforts to set shop online.

As consumers, most of us have been shopping online for a good amount of time, some because of laziness, some because of demophobia and others merely due to convenience. But with the pandemic around, people are not spoilt for choice anymore and even the ones who swore by only buying at the mall or the store are now looking at a mall or a store on a screen right now, be it a mobile or a laptop screen, or any screen for that matter. The question is, are you on one of those screens today?

A recent vcita survey, a company that offers small business management software, found 33% of SMBs offering online services for the very first time during the pandemic.

Building a business means building a relationship with consumers. To build trust and more importantly to keep the connectivity with consumers strong; is the key to growth. With a website, you can further strengthen this connectivity by making it easy for customers to stay in the know at all times. Your website will be the interface between you and your consumers. It’ll be like you never left them even during a pandemic. Businesses fear getting disconnected from their customers, especially because there’s blood and sweat that goes into building trust and a loyal consumer base. Rebuilding a business after it takes a fall is never easy, and a true businessman knows this.

Online presence has become a new norm already for almost everything these days, as people are almost always carrying a mobile phone with them and what better way to reach a consumer that is spending hours at home now due to the pandemic? Customers now prefer to visit a website to find out about products and services, instead of visiting a shop, or now-a-days even doctors have established an online presence to connect with patients. The percentage of online appointments, be it for doctors or businesses, has shooted up exponentially since the pandemic began. Be it internal business meets, or client meets, you no longer require to push the pedal and go anywhere, because now, there are apps for conducting these meets! This has evidently eased the way of doing business, by reducing costs to a company. Everyone is grabbing their positions in the online marketplace at a faster rate because they know that consumers are getting habituated to using the web for almost everything these days, and imagine being available for them the next time they search for something that you as a business provide. It’s a Match!

Wouldn’t you like it if you could make use of all the technology available to us today to set up your shop online? Think about all the inventory lying in your warehouse again.

Oh… I gotta go now, I just got a notification from my local sabzi and fruit wala. His virtual shop is going live in a few minutes. Gotta pick some apples to keep the doctors away!