E-commerce is the future of sales: is your business ready?

Consumer and business purchase patterns have been shifting to online buying for some time now, with a growing expectation that anything available in a physical store should be available on a digital one, too. Online grocery sales worldwide, for example, grew 22% in 2019; and Adobe Analytics found e-commerce sales to be up 55%, year-on-year, for the first seven months of this year.

This trend has only been accelerated by Covid-19, where physical distancing has reinforced online purchasing behaviours, offering retailers more opportunities, and creating a more urgent need, to reach a wider audience than before. 

Still, many organisations have not yet fully adopted digital technology in their go-to-market strategies. According to “Remote Working in SA 2020”, a study conducted by World Wide Worx, only 37% of the companies surveyed indicated being digitally ready with digital transformation strategies in place. There is still a long way to go before realising complete digital transformation for the entire business landscape.

The pandemic, however, has made the need for this transformation even more essential, especially for businesses that want to scale up their operations. One case in point is the franchise market.

According to the Franchise Association of SA (Fasa), the franchise sector represents about 14 different business sectors. Fasa’s 2019 survey said the sector contributed R734bn (about 13.9%) to the country’s GDP, including more than 800 franchise systems with 48,000 outlets, employing close to a million people. Many franchises have set up their own platforms to improve response times, supply and demand levels, and customer queries.

While this plugs a gap in the short term, businesses need something much more scalable as they grow, which is why Dimension Data launched Commerce Cloud QuickStart.  

“Commerce Cloud Quickstart is a ready-to-use, out-of-the-box e-commerce platform that allows you to showcase all of your products, manage payment and inventory, automate shipping, logistics and communication with delivery all in one. It also comes with built-in search and SEO functionality to reach customers and generate sales,” says Tony Nugent, retail principal practice and solution head. 

By providing an efficient, cost-effective and scalable way of working, one that integrates across devices for a unified customer experience, Commerce Cloud Quickstart helps businesses remain agile and relevant to the ways their own customers want to engage with them.

For more information on Dimension Data’s Commerce Cloud Quickstart, click here.

This article was paid for by Dimension Data.