Recent speculation in the online community has suggested that eCommerce will become a much less profitable option for businesses across the UK. Regulations within the sector are increasing and as a result, barriers are being implemented and costs are rising.
Industry experts claim that what once was a cost-effective method to boost sales online is now becoming harder to achieve. At one time it was a viable marketing technique used by start-up business to make take advantage of the World Wide Web. Web hosting was cheap and shopping cart applications cost next to nothing to download.
However, as with all marketing methods the industry evolves and certain techniques become more lucrative. At present, the UK online market represents a massive 6% of the country’s GDP (gross domestic product). This equates to around £82 billion in value, simply from the internet and £45 billion of this total figure is provided by eCommerce channels.
But the growth of the sector is set to decline and this can be contributed to a number of different factors. Regulations play a big part as well as different options which are emerging in popularity.
If you are a merchant of any size and you accept credit cards and therefore transmit and store cardholder data, you must be in compliance with PCI Security Council standards. You are subject to PCI Compliance and this can be crippling on resources, maintenance, and expenditures. You have the responsibility to secure cardholder data properly and if the data is stolen and it’s your fault you could incur fines.
As well as PCI Compliance, online businesses that accept VISA payments have to pay a fee and this can be as little as €250 to €5,000.
But it isn’t just money that is having an impact on eCommerce. Search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) are further online marketing strategies and they are increasing in popularity because of how effective they both are. These two have their own costs but more and more businesses are realizing just how much of an impact these techniques can have on a firm’s marketing efforts.
Regardless of what marketing method you use, businesses are struggling due to the difficult economic climate. Whichever system you implement, in the end, it will be the consumer that pays the price as businesses push up costs to stay afloat.
