After only 30 years of the internet, there are now just under 1 billion websites in the world. Of those, only 173M+ are currently active. That may seem like an overwhelming number when trying to find new leads online and quantify the size of your eCommerce market, but this task doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming, writes Liz Fulham from SalesOptimize.
Do you know how many eCommerce websites there are in the world? Less than one percent of the active internet is eCommerce i.e. 1.7M websites and growing. For sales executives and businesses in all industries, it often feels like you’re searching for a needle in a virtual haystack the size of Mount Everest. A person can only qualify 100+ websites a day, which is a big problem facing companies when trying to find sales leads using conventional search engines.
How Does this Impact Your Business?
Let’s say a camera manufacturer, Max Speed, a jovial fellow, would like to know the true size of his worldwide market online. He wants to know how many websites in the world might be interested in reselling his Max Speed cameras.
The Average Joe Way: Max Speed enters “Camera shops” into a search engine and it returns about 624,000,000 results. So many of these results are duplicates. Remember there are only 173M + active websites. That’s an almost infinite amount of man-hours of work for the (no-longer) jovial Max and his newly hired team to sift through, pull their hair out and silently scream about.
Lead Generation – Where Do You Find Your Next Sales Lead?
After finding some quick wins using Google, Max’s team wants to find more sales leads. Businesses can look to LinkedIn, Kompass, Experian, Dun & Bradstreet etc. to do this. While these options are better than a Google search, the complete answer is still not there. The reason is that thousands of eCommerce sites are missing from these searches. eCommerce merchants live in the world of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter etc. How does Max and his team search these platforms for eCommerce sales leads?
New Options
The good news is that there are major developments in data mining and deep web analytics. This is a big investment area globally. Using some of the new search engines, Max and his team can now enter “Camera shops” into a business search engine and, in just a few seconds, they can find thousands of results for camera shops that are active and selling to his market right now. As a result, Max gets rich all by himself, keeps his hair and gets home early! He no longer needs to hire an army to search the internet to find quality sales leads.
It is estimated that 2015 saw over $1.7 trillion traded by online businesses. In the UK, Black Friday broke the £1bn ($1.4bn+) threshold in sales. When you look at the global sales opportunity of $1.7 trillion, only a very few of the large online merchants pull in more than $20 million a year. Instead, the large sales figures come from a combined larger number of online businesses (albeit lesser-known) that are consistently doing in excess of $250K a year.
Again, this goes to show that there are lots of sales leads out there still to be found – and a need for much more refined search engines/databases to identify those sales. Of the ones that are out there today let www.SalesOptimize.com be an option for consideration.
Finding new sales leads can be challenging for many businesses, but the advances in data mining and analytics means there are new opportunities for savvy business owners to narrow down their potential eCommerce market and identify leads to foster further growth.
Written by: Liz Fulham, Founder and CEO, SalesOptimize – helping businesses to quantify the true size of their B2B eCommerce market and identify new online shop leads.
The post How Big is Your eCommerce Market? appeared first on Small Business Can.