We all know that e-commerce giants have made it possible for lots of people to quit their day jobs to work as small-time entrepreneurs. For a long time, these entrepreneurs depended on the enormous reach of eBay and Amazon. There was no other way for businesses run from a living room to reach such a large audience on their own.
Since then, this landscape has evolved. Instead of relying solely on e-commerce giants for their survival, niche e-commerce businesses can now utilise Google Ads and Facebook Ads to reach their audience directly. You might ask, wasn’t this the case before? What has changed? The answer lies simply in scope. Every year, Facebook’s audience grows ever larger, especially since Instagram joined the Facebook family.
Similarly, Google Ads benefit from greater reach by the simple fact that there are more internet users with every passing day. That means there are more potential customers for every possible interest out there.
Both Facebook and Google ads also have greater effectiveness as smartphones make it ever easier to pay for purchases online with Apple Pay and Google Wallet.
Companies like Malaysia-based Blossom Tea are finding that fairly niche products like floral tea are viable through advertising now. Underlining the importance of search engines and social media, BT founder Jian Leen says “Without Facebook or Google, we would lose 99% of our sales instantly”.
This is unprecedented opportunity in the age of e-commerce. Further, this phenomenon is not limited only to physical products either.
Once upon a time Craigslist ruled the roost for online listings. Everything that could be sold was sold on Craigslist. The Craigslist leviathan made founder Craig Newmark a rich man. In a time where every sort of startup attracted venture funding, Craigslist was the exception to the rule, building a success without funding.
However, even this remarkable giant was subject to the mega trend of internet growth explosion. Eventually, Airbnb ate up Craigslist’s apartment listings section, and dating apps made it ever easier for singles to find date with a swipe, also eating up Craigslist’s personals.
Though B2B was never a Craigslist staple, smaller non-e-commerce companies like coworking space search engine Seekspaces have likewise benefited from the viability of ever more niche websites. Seekspaces shared that coworking space search and comparison have grown exponentially on Google over the past half a decade. The possibilities for B2B sales are unlike anything in the past. Formerly, business process outsourcing and PBX phone systems were the preserve of Fortune 500 companies. Today, even solopreneur e-commerce companies can purchase these services with a few clicks and a company credit card.
You may find it doubtful that niche companies are really flourishing even more than the tech giants that we see all around us. That would be normal. We can see the fingerprints of Google, Facebook, Amazon and others all around us. The influence and pervasiveness of smaller e-commerce businesses is a hidden current that we cannot perceive directly.
By looking at some proxies, we can begin to reveal the truth. As companies such as Shopify grow, we begin to recognize the size of small e-commerce companies as a whole. The increasing popularity of SSL certificates as trust markers as reported by W3Techs is another proxy for purchases by smaller e-commerce companies, which have to pull together their tech infrastructure mostly on their own.
It is a literal sea of opportunity out there. Readers of Entrepreneurs Unplugged will find that this opportunity is enormous, yet slow to be recognized, and slower still to be taken by most. In a world mesmerised by cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence, real business problems are overlooked.
This article was written by Jian Leen from Blossom Tea.