Grow your business globally with ecommerce platforms

Online giant Amazon is no doubt the biggest store of its kind in the world. What started as a fned-upon idea had since gone global after being born out of a garage in Bellevue, Washington, on July 5, 1994 as an online marketplace for books that its founder Jeff Bezos was selling.

Today, it’s the biggest online seller of computers, electronics, software, video games, furniture, toys, jewellery, food, among many other things, and is now the world’s most valued company with annual revenues exceeding US$386 billion.

Within just over two decades, Amazon had made Bezos the richest man on the planet with assets exceeding $190 billion and the company continues to g expanding to publishing, cloud computing, air cargo and logistics, AI and other smart technologies in the marketplace.

So how does Amazon and other ecommerce platforms earn? Through commissions which vary between 5% to 45% depending on products sold either as supplier or 3P (third-party marketplace seller), shipping fulfilment fees and other seller services they provide. That’s apart from their own sales generated from their online and physical stores.

Others charge monthly fees from free to hundreds of dollars. Some platforms that operate their own payment gateways charge a fee whenever payments are made. Others get fees for every transaction made on their platform.

e-Commerce has revolutionized how we sell services and things and shop. It has opened up new doors of opportunities for small and medium enterprises no matter where they are. It enabled financial technology to thrive and so are the supply-chain of deliveries either through walking, biking, air cargo, via land or sea.

So how do you find the right platform for your business?

First, determine if the platform can sell your products, deliver it where it’s needed and arrange for online payments in different ways. In some cases, it should have a plan for collecting and filing taxes internationally.

The platform should have enough customization options to make things fit for your products or brand. It should enable you to manage orders, ship goods, track inventory, and otherwise handle the back-end of running a store without you needing to resort to spreadsheets or other apps.

Choose a platform that offers ways to integrate with other services, marketplaces, apps, and the like, either through a healthy plug-in and extension marketplace or built-in features. The apps should enable you to do things like automatically add new customers to your mailing list or sell through social media.