Any business that trades goods or services on the web, can call itself an e-commerce company.
Over the past few years, a number of companies have grown from very small commencements and accommodated their existing approaches to become giants of the e-commerce world, worth billions of money today.
Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Apple, are all giant businesses that perfectly epitomize this transition to success. Here is a deeper look at these businesses, and 4 teachings you can learn from them to advance your own business’s growth.
- eBay: Swift payments are essential
Founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995, eBay is a global auction website where users trade a wide assortment of items. In just over two decades, eBay advanced from a humble startup in San Jose, California, to an international e-commerce powerhouse. In 2016 alone, eBay produced an enormous $8.9 billion in profits, making it a real leader in the industry.
Due to the much high volumes of deals that eBay undergoes every day (presently over 2 billion), the business needed to make its payment arrangements as speedy as possible.
To optimize its web payments, eBay bought and formed its unique online payment mode named as Billpoint. However, Billpoint lost to outcompete PayPal in the online payments area. So, in 2002, eBay just acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion.
Following this purchase, PayPal has been fully united into eBay’s system, and this speedy payment option proceeds to help eBay process amazingly high volumes of deals every day.
- Apple: Turning to respond to real market requirements can grow profits exponentially
Apple was established in 1976 in a carport in Los Altos, California. In approximately four decades since Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak initially started modeling computers collectively, Apple has evolved into one of the greatest businesses in the world.
In fact, the computer and electronics firm is so successful that it enjoyed over $215 billion in purchases in 2016, more wealth than many governments use in a year’s time.
Apple began as a personal computer business. Its early models served to transform the personal computing industry and deliver computers into homes all over the globe.
However, sensing possibilities to satisfy market requirements with other types of produce, Apple transitioned from being just a computer business, to a much more distinct products and services retailer in the electronics scope.
For instance, a significant portion of Apple’s earnings now come from smartphones, tablets, watches, and even iTunes, its unique music stand. In fact, iTunes alone produced over $16 billion in the year 2013.
So, the teaching e-commerce businesses can learn from Apple is to prevent being defined into a single type of product if you recognize that your business can produce a broader range, and you also understand that the market is necessitating them.
- Walmart: Accommodating to putting up with the race is central
Historically, Walmart was formed on a retail image with customers crowding to its numerous brick and mortar stores. Nonetheless, in the last decade, Walmart has been transitioning to support a wider e-commerce section of its business.
In an effort to develop its e-commerce sales, Walmart has performed a number of critical moves. These comprise of closing or planning to shut down numbers of physical stores around the earth, launching a big e-commerce fulfillment center in Georgia, and engaging many programmers and software engineers to improve its e-commerce platforms and apps.
Walmart also built its own playing variant of Amazon Prime called Shipping Pass. This service only takes $50 per year, about half the cost of Amazon Prime, while extending many of the similar benefits, such as expedited delivery.
All of the efforts that Walmart has executed in its e-commerce section, including a 30% growth in Q4 2016 alone in U.S. e-commerce trades, have encouraged the company to produce over $478 billion in earnings in the year 2016.
Although Walmart has been a commanding retailer for many decades, it suffered the threat of failing a significant amount of their market share to tech-driven rivals such as Amazon and eBay if it could not improve to keep up.
Understanding the necessity to modify to keep up with the advanced economy, Walmart has aggressively continued its e-commerce offerings. This is showing to be quite successful, and in the future years, Walmart is poised to compete with Amazon and a few other larger enterprises for control of the most substantial shares of the e-commerce market.
- Amazon: The greatness of vision should never be undervalued
Amazon, one of the world’s giant retailers, was also established in a carport, just like Apple. Amazon was organized by a 30-year-old businessperson named Jeff Bezos in 1994. He recognized and followed the retail possibilities that the internet would present far ahead than most, and designed Amazon to take hold of these opportunities.
In its initial 60 days in the market, the business was already making $20,000 a week in trades. In just over two decades, Amazon has grown into one of the most influential and successful businesses in the society, with $135 billion in profits in 2016. The business has also become synonymous with capableness, innovation, and authenticity. In the present day, it trades an extremely vast variety of merchandises all over the planet.
The concept of Amazon is comparatively simple; take real-life goods and trade them through the medium of internet.
Many people could have made this idea and worked with it as Jeff Bezos did. Nonetheless, Bezos had the vision first and knocked everyone to the punch. That is the reason he was able to build Amazon as a significant market force so early in the “dot-com” upset.
Bezos’ vision, coupled with his work ethic, and the relentless innovation of his business has supported him to stand at the lofty tops of the third wealthiest person in the world. Vision is mainly what drove both he and his business and onto unbelievable levels of success.
Do you have any other teachings or suggestions for budding e-commerce business? Do share them with our readers in the comments section below!