The Rise of Online Business – What Do You Need to Know?

Online business remains a huge and fast-growing market in the UK, while the pace of the transition from off to online shopping has undoubtedly been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.

For example, ecommerce sales in the UK recorded 46.5% year-on-year (YoY) growth through 2020, while this was followed up by further expansion of 20.5% during the following year. During this time, cumulative ecommerce sales in the UK soared to £185.22 billion, while this market’s share of the overall retail market grew from 21.8% to a whopping 37.5%.

But what are the other factors behind this growth, and how can you leverage this growth and create a viable business or income stream? Let’s get into it!

What are the Factors That Contribute to the Growth of Ecommerce?

The trend for ecommerce has become increasingly prominent through the digital age, in line with continual improvements in online technology and changing customer behaviour.

The exponential growth of mobile Internet penetration rates (which peaked at 72% in 2020) and ecommerce has also accelerated this trend, with customers increasingly inclined to browse, research and ultimately buy products online.

These factors remain prevalent to this day, but once again, there can be no doubt that the Covid-19 pandemic was the accelerant to the kindling of technological innovation. Certainly, the coronavirus triggered a huge surge in ecommerce and accelerated digital transformation, both on these shores and across the globe.

From a global perspective, the ecommerce market’s share of retail trade rose from 14% to 17% in 2020, while this number has since increased further.

What are the Benefits of Online Businesses?

Quite aside from your ability to target a growing audience through an ecommerce presence, creating an online presence offers numerous benefits to brands. These include:

 

• Gain Credibility: By building a website and broader online presence, you can gain considerable credibility among your target audience. You can build on this further by developing a functional and reliable site that opens and loads particularly quickly.

 

 

• Compete Directly With Your Rivals: If you’re a product-oriented business, you can rest-assured that your competitors will be active online. Creating an ecommerce platform therefore lets you compete directly with your rivals, and potentially strive to carve out a viable market share.

 

 

• Expand Your Brand: By expanding online, you can create an extension of your brand identity, while driving both increased awareness and recall among new customers. Just remember the importance of consistency here, as your brand’s visual identity and colour palettes must remain the same across all channels (both on and offline).

 

How Else Can You Make Money Online?

Of course, the World Wide Web is a vast and constantly expanding space, and one that offers multiple ways of earning outside of ecommerce. Here are some ideas to keep in mind:

• Dropshipping: If you want to sell online without the need to create an independent ecommerce store or website, you may want to consider the practice of dropshipping. This requires you to identify in-demand products and buy these in bulk at wholesale prices, before selling these at a retail price point and having them shipped directly to customers. You’ll realise the difference between these two prices as your profit, and the margins can be exceptional here.

 

• Forex or CFD Trading: You can also profit as a financial market trader online, with forex and CFD trading offering a speculative option to all comers. These derivative products allow you to speculate and profit from price movements without owning the underlying financial instrument, enabling you to make money in a depreciating market and access inflated leverage.

 

 

• Create and Sell NFTs: NFTs are ‘non-fungible tokens’, which are digital and minted assets that can be exchanged with like-minded alternatives. This space already has a market cap of more than €40 billion, while you can mint your own NFT from scratch as a unique and profitable showcase for your creative skills. You’ll need to learn the basics first, of course, but this can be incredibly rewarding in the digital age.