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We all need a career it’s – the thing that puts food our tables, heats up our homes, and lets us live the way we want to.
Most people prize stability and security when mapping out their career moves, and it makes sense to do this – it’s stressful not knowing where your next paycheck is coming from, especially if you have a family to look after.
This is why using a Professional Services Job Board remains one of the most popular ways to build a career and it’s one that helps countless people to feel good about the choices they make about their future.
However, if you aspire to not only take charge of your professional destiny but also rule it with an iron fist, regardless of your circumstances or where you come from, then you’re living in the right era. In many ways, the internet has served as the great leveler: granting everyone access to resources and tools, be they young or old, rich or poor, male or female.
One of the biggest driving forces behind this march towards equality of opportunity, oddly enough, is ecommerce. Ecommerce — online retail — is ruthlessly profit-driven. When new technology with real-world potential comes along, ecommerce retailers will immediately look for ways to profit from it. And as self-serving as this is, it also ensures two things:
Furthermore, if you aspire to financial independence but lack a specific plan, ecommerce is the perfect path for trying things out and incrementally finding your niche. In short, today’s ecommerce technology is changing how people — particularly young people — view entrepreneurship. Here’s how:
Are set office hours really all that useful? When there’s a team working on shared projects within a shared environment, it’s valuable to have everyone around simultaneously, but otherwise it’s rather antiquated to insist that everything adhere to an 8-hour period in the middle of the day. It’s bad for both efficiency and morale.
Ecommerce has been about flexibility from the beginning, for obvious reasons. Outside of the practical elements (such as handling customer support requests), it doesn’t call for specific hours — shoppers can place their orders whenever they wish to, day or night. Merchants don’t need to be glued to their screens. They can go elsewhere, doing whatever they like as long as they fulfill their responsibilities. It’s tremendously freeing.
Ecommerce stores have also been leading the world in shopping and entrepreneurship flexibility. Consequently, having a strong marketing strategy is a must. Strategies like performance marketing help ecommerce businesses focus on consumer behaviors and that helps businesses reach consumers on mobile. This further alleviates the 9-5 routine as stores can now be anywhere at any time.
When ecommerce first became established as an industry to watch, smartphones were yet to achieve their current ubiquity. In fact, mobile browsing was still more of a concept than a practicality. But over the course of a decade, the smartphone browsing experience went from a concept to the dominant form of online access.
Would this have happened regardless of the influence of ecommerce? Yes, eventually. But that quickly? It doesn’t seem likely. It was that unstoppable desire for profit that saw businesses invest heavily in perfecting the mobile experience — and today, it’s the ecommerce industry that’s pushing the advancement of usability.
Why does this matter for entrepreneurs? There are two reasons: it makes it easier for them to create appealing mobile interfaces for their stores, and it makes it easier for them to run their stores. After all, usability isn’t just for the front-end. Admin dashboards of today are incredibly intuitive compared to their predecessors.
Back when an entrepreneur needed to secure premises to establish their own business, everything was complex and intimidating. There was the not-insignificant matter of rent, the problem of commuting, and the practical demands of turning a hired space into somewhere suitable for serving customers.
Today, that barrier no longer exists. Anyone who wants to dip a toe into ecommerce can do so without any major initial investment. They can approach it from any angle, prioritizing their tactics based on their unique resources. If they’re time-poor but cash-rich, they can just pay for stores before reworking them or tuning them up to sell later. If they’re cash-poor but time-rich, however, they can painstakingly develop their own stores (it’s easy to find software), designing all the elements themselves to avoid the expense of paying for assistance.
And then there’s the prevalence of automation tools that greatly boost the ease with which an entrepreneur can run their store. Everything from email marketing and PPC ads to feedback collection and lead attribution can be made hugely easier through the use of intuitive automation software. Taken on aggregate, ecommerce software is transformational — enough to take a novice to financial independence if they approach it correctly.
As we’ve seen, the influence of ecommerce (both directly and indirectly) continues to drive technology that is flooding the online world with entrepreneurial opportunities. The major takeaway from this for the B2B world? Keep your best employees happy. They likely know that they can build independent careers if necessary, so you must ensure that they’re content and satisfied in their roles.
For more information on starting your own ecommerce business, don’t forget to check out my guides or blog for the latest news, tips and advice.
