When we talk about a digital business, many more traditional entrepreneurs think that it is just doing digital marketing for their physical company to attract new customers.
But in reality, a digital business means much more than having a website and attracting new customers through Google and Facebook.
Expansion of Physical Business into Digital Business
Understand below each advantage you will have when creating a Marketplace-based digital business compared to expanding your physical business in the traditional way. But I already tell you that creating a digital business requires less costs and greater efficiency compared to offline expansion.
Physical Marketing vs. Digital Marketing
When you start a physical business, you usually do offline marketing, with leafleting, banners, point-of-sale communication, and advertisements in local media. Of course, you can also invest in Google and Facebook and attract people to get to know your physical business or for you to provide your service, but it is still restricted to your city many times over.
Now if you are creating a Marketplace, which is a digital business, your chance of reaching users from other cities, states and even countries using Digital Marketing is much greater, since you can have a network of vendors or service providers in any city, with its platform.
Own Inventory and Third-Party Inventory
As the Marketplace is a Virtual Shopping, the owner of the Shopping is not responsible for the stock of products of its tenants, correct?
So instead of having to buy a larger number of products, to have them in stock and prepare for growth having to invest in advance in products that you don’t know if they will actually sell at the speed you expect, in a Marketplace you can count with third-party stock, which are the sellers registered in your network.
Own Logistics vs. Third Party Logistics
The same happens when we talk about Logistics. Instead of having to hire people to separate the products being sold and send them to the logistic partner for delivery, which would be the case for a physical business, at the Marketplace you don’t have to worry about that, as the delivery responsibility of products is from the partner seller.
Local Scope vs. Global Potential
The same Marketplace that connects professionals or retailers in your city, can be replicated to other states and even countries.
With this, unlike a physical business that works only locally, either to sell products or to go to the customer to provide a service, in a Marketplace you only take care of connecting the parts and that way you can easily expand the operation to other regions, depending just a good local marketing strategy in the region where you want to operate.
Physical Rental vs. Online Platform
In a physical business, it is common to have a rental cost, and depending on the location of your store or office, this rental can be very expensive.
And when you need to expand your physical business, you have to look for a new location to rent to open a new store or store more products in stock. Or even if it is a service company, and its team of professionals grows, it also needs a larger office to support its expansion.
Conclusion
Expanding a business is not an easy task, but if you have a physical business and seek to invest less time and money in your expansion strategy and use all the potential that a digital business offers compared to a traditional business, I believe that creating your Marketplace itself is more efficient than hiring more people and renting new physical spaces to grow your company.
