A Year of Clicks and Mortar

When the internet keeps moving forward and advancing, your business needs to advance as well - you need to not be seen to be standing still.  Companies which do not own or operate an online business as well as a physical business, are losing out on sales and additional profits.

Reaching your target market in your own area is one thing, but having a website allows you to reach your target market far more broadly.  If you can sell your product or service to anyone, anywhere, why limit it to just your physical location?

2011 has demonstrated just this.  In the last year Greenleaf has had numerous enquiries about ecommerce websites, and high street retailers especially understand that simple bricks and mortar are no longer enough to keep ahead of the competition.

An ecommerce website, if marketed properly with good search engine optimisation, social media, email marketing, and pay per click, will start to generate sales, leads and contacts and act as a ‘Silent salesman’ without you having to do the face to face business development or pick up the phone.

This week Greenleaf launched an ecommerce site for bespoke jewellery designers Jewelled of Godalming.  The site was built using a CMS system and open source software.  The software is modular in design, which allows for additional functionality or ‘extensions’ to be easily added, such as the online shop.  Since the software is an open source project, these extensions are well developed, tested and reviewed and as such, extremely stable and affordable.  You can view the live site here : www.jewelled.co.uk

eCommerce – Some Stats

• 28.5 million Brits make online purchases. This number is expected to increase to 32.5 million by 2014.
• Over two in five (42.6%) of Brits are now shopping online at least once per week and the average shopper is now spending £71 per month on online goods.
• Online shopping has grown by 25% to £4.4bn year on year.
• The popularity of online shopping has increased despite the recession.  Some 42% of consumers say they have bought more than last year versus 16% who claim to have bought less.
• 75% of shoppers browsed online retailers for discounts on Xmas and Boxing Day.
• For the UK, we use a cautious increase in sales of 12.4% for a sales estimate of £42.7 billion (€48.0 billion). The UK was the first European country with online sales of more than 10% (10.5%) in 2010.