Adding a web commerce store to your small business website will help your company be found online. Sure, it can support or even replace a physical storefront, serving as an online marketplace to reach more customers interested in your products. But did you know that simply adding a web commerce store will also help your business improve website traffic, expand your email database, and perform search engine marketing? Highlighted below are the reasons why.

Your customers are looking for information about your products

Whether you have a web commerce store or not, you can bet that your customers are looking for information about your products. Studies have found that 62% of consumers search online to find more information about a product before they purchase it in a physical store, and 56% of consumers expect small businesses to have web commerce capabilities (source).

Knowing this, your business is likely missing out on a golden opportunity for more sales and a better customer support experience if you don’t have a web commerce store available providing that information. The cost of adding this feature to your existing site is not as high as it used to be, either, and there are a number of low-priced options that make this expansion simple and affordable.

Having a web commerce store gives you the ability to collect information

Most online merchant services allow you to collect email addresses, phone numbers and other useful contact information that is not as easy to collect at a physical store during checkout. At an online checkout, you can ask your customers to sign up for an e-mail newsletter which allows you to build your relationship with your customers, send out promotions and make more money in the long-term.

At your physical storefront, your customers are often in a hurry and won’t have the time to fill out a card to give you their information, but with an online purchase all they have to do is click a checkbox.

A web commerce store allows you to perform search engine marketing

Search engine marketing is an essential aspect of online marketing that you can really start implementing in your business when you have a web commerce store. With individual pages for each of your products, you can create unique content for each page and optimize the meta tags for your target keywords (source).

With careful on-page optimization along with other SEO methods, you can rank highly for many of your keywords when you have a web commerce store. Without one, it can be much harder to rank for product specific keywords.

Your visitors can quickly share your webpages and promotions

Another major advantage of having a web commerce store is the fact that your website visitors can share the deals and products that they like or just purchased with their friends through e-mail or social media. This allows for more effective word of mouth advertising, and if you have a really exciting or generous promotion going on, it can quickly become viral.

You can easily relist your promotions on Facebook, Twitter and other social media websites for more exposure, and your promotions will spread more quickly through those channels than they would with offline marketing methods.

If you’re on the fence, you should launch one

You don’t need to hire developers full time to create a fully functional web commerce solution for your existing website anymore. So, if you think that your business can even remotely benefit from an online store, it’s well worth it for you to launch one!