urgent

Having an online business doesn’t mean that you are carrying out all your operations over the internet. By just having social media platforms and email addresses used to communicate to customers translates to a positive effect on your business. The major benefits of having an online business include having worldwide access to customers throughout the 24 hours in a day. It means that you can answer all questions from customers, therefore, giving the customers the impression that you are reliable (Kim, & Min, 2015). Secondly, it improves your flexibility in carrying out transactions hence enhancing service given to your clients.

Conducting business online saves the costs of business transactions. This is because there is a minimal number of employees meaning a lot of money is saved that would have been used to pay employee remuneration and other employment benefits. Most online businesses delivers their products very fast because they always have someone in every part of the world that does the deliveries (Sharma, & Lijuan, 2015). Online business increase professionalism because there is minimal contact between the customer and the seller maintain respect. Online businesses mean minimal paper waste. Because there are fewer receipts to record transactions instead the receipts are stored online.

The online business saves on space. You can work from home. Therefore, there is no need to rent an outside space to conduct your business. It helps to cut on marketing costs because online marketing is done at minimal cost or no cost at all. With the presence of a website, customers can easily visit your website and select the products that they need and make a purchase and only wait for delivery. This has made transactions very easy (Ho, & Vogel, 2014).

Negative effects of having an online business

As much having a business online has positive effects it also has its negative effects. Booming online businesses has inspired more and more people to start online businesses since the startup is fairly simple and considerably cheap. This has led to more and more similar business cropping up all desperate to succeed. This has led to the saturation of the market place, making it more competitive. Small retailers are placed in the same pool with big retailers who lower the prices of the products, thus affecting the small retailers negatively and even phasing them out completely (Kurnia, Choudrie, Mahbubur, & Alzougool, 2015).

With an online business, it’s easy to collect personal data because all transactions are recorded. This data can and has been used to steal from customer’s unknowingly bringing hefty fines and mistrust from customers. This is an intrusion of customers’ privacy, and it should be regulated. Online business transactions are also insecure since one cannot know for sure the actual owner of the credit card and customers transact with a risk of a third party intercepting and stealing their data if the website is not properly secured (Cao, Lu, Gupta, & Yang, 2015).

Online business has a higher return rate on products and goods than face to face businesses. Most online businesses do not follow the rule of “what you see is what you get,” this is because most online retailers post pictures of products that will attract you but do not deliver on what is promised. This might not be a problem for big retailers since they can store the goods, but for small retailers, it can be very difficult to manage these returned goods.

Summary

In conclusion, online businesses have made business fast, easy, affordable and available to customers on a button click, convenient and cheap, but it has also brought some negative effects to small scale traders such that they cannot deal with the competition from the big traders, information security and online fraud.

References

Cao, Y., Lu, Y., Gupta, S., & Yang, S. (2015). The effects of differences between e-commerce and m-commerce on the consumers' usage transfer from online to mobile channel. IJMC, 13(1), 51-70.

Ho, R., & Vogel, D. (2014). The impact of social networking functionalities on online shopping: an examination of the web’s relative advantage. International Journal of Business Information Systems, 16(1), 25-41.

Kurnia, S., Choudrie, J., Mahbubur, R. M., & Alzougool, B. (2015). E-commerce technology adoption: A Malaysian grocery SME retail sector study. Journal of Business Research, 68(9), 1906-1918.

Kim, S. K., & Min, S. (2015). Business model innovation performance: when does adding a new business model benefit an incumbent?. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 9(1), 34-57.

Sharma, G., & Lijuan, W. (2015). The effects of online service quality of e-commerce Websites on user satisfaction. The Electronic Library, 33(3), 468-485