E-commerce Outsourcing and its benefits

Commerce is all about business. The business includes trading and communicating. In recent years the world’s commercial sectors have developed at a higher rate. The trading has increased very fast. It has occurred because of the development in the communication sector. At first, people would wait for meeting dates to sign contracts and give or take orders as the communication was not that much developed. Nowadays a simple video call is enough to sign an agreement and a fax is enough to send the paper. This improvement in communication in the trading sector and business via the internet is called E-commerce.
It’s a bit tough to start an e-commerce business, Continuous efforts will improve the condition of the company and will take it to a better position but after the workload will increase it will get difficult to maintain the business than growing it. Then the need for Outsourcing will arise.
Outsourcing is an $88.9 billion dollars industry in the U.S alone in this current year. It has increased so much because it has helped a lot of business to grow very fast, it has saved a lot of their valuable time.

What is Outsourcing?

It is when an external company is hired for some internal works at a fixed rate. To save valuable time for planning new updates for the company and focusing on important works, outsourcing is used. It is generally the works that are more time to consume. These works are given to vendors at a fixed rate; they do this work for you.

Merits of E-commerce outsourcing

In the case of e-commerce traders, Outsourcing can be of great advantages.

• Time-Saving – The biggest advantage of outsourcing is that it saves valuable time and helps you to focus on further important business plans and important production management.

Laura Lee Sparks (a successful entrepreneur) says that "Most entrepreneurs have great talents but many times they think they can do it all," Sparks also says. "That can really stall the growth of the business. By outsourcing the day to day back-office tasks, the business owner has more time to focus on generating income."
An entrepreneur may be able to do the work himself but it will cost her more time which she can invest in planning further details of increasing the income. So, outsourcing is a useful medium to save that time and let the hired outsourcers do the work for you.

• Concentrate on Expertise – It helps you to save time as well as focus on the competitive advantages of your company and how to increase it. It helps you to concentrate on the USP (Unique Selling Proposition) of your company. For example Basecamp an Online business that provides the customers with web product development tools. Their product quality was better but their communication management wasn’t that good. Its owner said”As demand for our services grew, we found ourselves increasingly disorganized. We didn’t like the rag-tag image we were portraying to our clients. They were paying us good money — and our work was good — but the way we organized the work, communicated about the work, and presented the work wasn’t satisfying. It was time to tidy up and get our shit together”.

They simply handed over their work to an outsourcing company and focus on developing their products features and efficiency. At present, it is counted among the best e-commerce company that has developed using outsourcing.

• Cheaper than a Full-time Employee – It is cheaper because a full-time employee will cost more, his salary will not be the only expenses but recruitment cost, training cost, employment taxes and other costs of an employee will also be added with it. On the other hand, hiring an outsourcing company or outsourcer for it at a fixed rate will be cheaper and efficiently affordable.
• Hiring Experts – Sometimes a company has ideas and manpower nut it still isn’t enough, it may need an expert for some expert level work. So, they may outsource an expert for that specific job.

For example Alibaba
Alibaba may be known as a global marketplace, but according to the book Alibaba: the Inside Story Behind Jack Ma and the Creation of the World's Biggest Online Marketplace, the company initially outsourced its development to a firm in the U.S. At the time, overseas development talent was still in short supply and the U.S. had the skills Alibaba needed to compete with e-commerce giants like eBay, and did it all behind the Chinese internet restrictions.
In this way, by hiring an outsourcing company Jack ma developed the whole Alibaba group.

When to Outsource

When managing time and managing clients become tough outsourcing will be necessary. Sometimes expertise will be needed to do some works outsourcing will be helpful at that time.

Works that can be outsourced:

• Part-time jobs like book-keeping and accounting

• Data entry and data verification

• Customer service and IT Support

• Marketing and telemarketing services

• Shipping and administrative tasks

• Content writing, research, and editing

• Social media coordination and promotion

• IT tech services and network support

• Data security and website integrity.

Conclusion

So, Overall outsourcing can be of a great use to the online retailers for their product development, planning new strategies, managing communication issues, progressing income and grow the company to a greater level. Therefore, the need of outsourcing has increased due to these issues. It has also helped the consumers around the world in making their lives easier.