Digitalisation in Business – How it Changed the Buyer-Seller Equation?

Digitalisation in business has propelled empowerment. It has made life easy for people from either side of the counter. As it has helped businesses to reach out and serve their customers better than ever before, it has also helped the customers to compare the products and services before making an informed purchasing decision.

In the past two decades, digitalisation in business has been a game-changer for businesses all across the world. It was a slow and steady process, a combined impact of an efficient IT framework, digital application, and an adept network of data that has helped businesses to scale heights of success. Let us see how digitalisation has made our lives and businesses easier and more optimal than ever before.

What is Digitalisation in Business?

Digitalisation is a way of integrating the entire business process with the help of Information Technology in such a way that everything can be accessed, monitored, and managed via computers. This is the simplest way to understand the process of digitalisation. And having said that, an immense and ever-expanding process of business operations begins from here.

There are certain vital aspects of running a business pertaining to the product/ service that it offers, operations, employee management, and dealing with the customers. Right from the time computers were introduced, digitalisation has only helped to smoothen up the process and made opportunities more viable for entrepreneurs.

How Digitalisation has Changed the Business World?

Global Reach

With digitalisation in place, the world has indeed shrunk into our computers, tablets, and mobile phones. Never before was it so easy and seamless for people living across the oceans to reach out to each other? Thanks to the digitalisation of business, now it is possible for people to connect, network, and gather information from any corner of the world in a matter of a few clicks.

Convenience

Computers can complete a task in a faster and flawless manner as compared to when the task is done manually. This is something that we have learned in school. And for a generation that has grown up with various digital gadgets all around, this swiftness and accuracy are the only normal. Yet we are not completely alien to the idea of standing in a queue to get a train ticket or pay the bill. It’s only because of the digitalisation and business process that facilitate a system that has helped the ‘from-the-comfort-of-your-own-house’ become a reality in our lives.

Faster and Improved Communication

Digitalisation has been the biggest disruption in the field of communication. From handwritten postcards, letters, demand drafts, money orders to fax and further getting all the paper works completed and coordinated digitally via email. From dial-up telephones to pagers to video calls – we have witnessed the entire digital evolution. With the steady progress of digitalisation, everything around us changed and brought the world closer to us, and thus changed the buyer-seller interaction propelling unprecedented business opportunity and growth.

More Safe and Secured Financial Transactions

Thanks to digitalisation, making financial transactions has not only become faster and convenient, but it has also made it safer and secured through an end-to-end encrypted procedure. Sending and receiving money has become as easy as a tap on your phone screen.

Artificial Intelligence

If you think of it, it would feel a little uncanny. An advertisement pops up on your Facebook page. You click on it, browse through the website, and leave without making a purchase. Then you open another window and the same advertisement pops up once again. And thereafter, the same product icon will be visible across all the web pages that you visit including all the social media platforms. Doesn’t it feel like the seller is stalking you?

That’s just one of the many things that artificial intelligence facilitates. Now businesses do not need a salesman to make cold calls or pursue you to sell a certain product or service. Artificial intelligence does that for you.

Innovative and Low-Cost Marketing Strategies

Advertising and marketing campaigns for a brand always came with a certain price tag. Nobody had ever thought that product promotion could be done as subtly as sharing personal experience on your social media page. A no-cost concept such as affiliate marketing came into being because of digitalisation. How beautifully and effortlessly products are being presented in front of the target audience and are even converted into sales! This was simply unimaginable in the pre-digitalisation era.

Disruption and Dynamism in Businesses

Digitalisation has opened so many new and innovative business ideas that were unimaginable even a decade back. For example, nobody had ever thought that blogging or social media postings could become potential sources of income. And it did not stop at that, every day there is something new to learn and evolve your business processes accordingly.

Upgraded Retail Experience

Retail has grown from apparels being pulled out of shelves by the store staff and spread over the counter to clothes being hung in very well organised aisles for customers to browse through it and try it before purchasing glancing over the size chart, product description, and users’ review before buying the stuff online. The same retail experience percolated into other categories such as white goods, furniture, shoes, accessories, and even groceries and fresh stock. And thanks to the effective deployment of digitalisation, the retail experience has only gone from better to best. Customer complaints and grievances are also handled in a better manner than ever before making it to be a win-win for both buyer and seller.

Better Knowledge Sharing

The scope for networking and knowledge sharing has enhanced in a manifold manner. E-book, kindle editions, and audiobooks have opened up the ever-expansive digital library where you can read a book without having to hoard a physical copy of the same. This apart, the online workshops and webinars have facilitated learners to meet the best of the mentors from any and every part of the world. Meeting people and sharing ideas and knowledge with them has become the new normal.

Generating Employment

It is only because of digitalisation that words like remote jobs, work from home and freelancing has become a reality now. This has lifted so much of burden off the chest of many job seekers. In many parts of the world, child-care or old-age-care, or any other homebound responsibility has marked an end to one's career. The answer that the corporate work culture could not find, digitalisation has found it effortlessly.

Digitalisation has been a major saviour in the COVID-19 pandemic. Had it not been for it, the world would have come to a standstill and the economies would have been hit in the worst manner. When the malls and retail stores were closed down, the conveyance was stopped, offices and schools were closed, the entire state and economic mechanism sustained completely on digitalisation.

Also read:
How the penetration of online stores has increased from Tier-1 to Tier-2 & 3 cities?
Businesses that boomed Globally this Pandemic

FAQs

Q. I am a small businessman with very little education. How can I go for the digitalisation of business?

A. Several digital consultants in the market help out small businesses to deploy digitalisation processes in their business operations.

Q. I have a small grocery store that caters to the neighbouring areas around my store. Why do I need to digitalise my business?

A. It is really good to hear that your grocery store is doing very well within the neighbourhood but should you want to expand your periphery and reach out to a bigger customer base, it makes sense for you to deploy digitalisation in business. You could even supply through online grocery apps and websites.

Q. Is it safe to get paid through online money transfer apps? I am an old-fashioned retailer. I find it very complicated.

A. Of course! It is safer than hoarding cash in the cashbox of your shop. And operating an online money transfer app is no big deal. These apps are linked to your bank account. So the money received is going straight to your bank account and nowhere else. You can take it out in the same manner as you have been doing for years.

Q. What if someone hacks my account or cheats me online?

A. You will have to report to the officials dealing with a cybercrime where such issues are addressed and solved.