There is now a wide range of e-commerce events, webinars, and conferences you can attend. Whether you choose to go to a real-world event, take part in a short webinar during your lunch break, or attend a multi-day conference all about e-commerce, you can pick up some very useful things.
If you run an e-commerce business, you’ll likely spend a lot of time making changes to your website, sourcing new products, keeping an eye on your data, and packing orders to ship to your customers. All of this can keep you busy so it can be difficult to justify taking some time out to attend an e-commerce event, webinar, or conference.
Once you attend one though, you’ll be able to see how beneficial they really are. There are actually some very useful benefits you can experience from attending one of these events.
You Can Learn Something New and Useful
Attending an event, webinar, or conference will likely teach you something new. These gatherings (both virtual and real-world) are commonly attended by experts in their field as well as other e-commerce business owners like you. The amount of knowledge and experience in one place can be a very impressive thing.
Listening to the guest speakers at an event, being in the virtual audience of a webinar hosted by an expert, or spending time surrounded by all things e-commerce at a conference can teach you things that can be implemented in your business that will help you be even more successful.
These events also give you the opportunity to ask questions to people who will probably know the answer. This can be an invaluable thing as you can get an accurate answer from people who genuinely know what they’re talking about.
Build and Develop Your Professional Network
Having a strong professional network can be an underrated component of running a successful e-commerce business. Your network is all the people you’ve come into contact with and have contact details for. It could include potential suppliers, industry leaders and experts, other businesses that might want to collaborate on a project, or other e-commerce business owners like you.
Your network is a valuable resource that can help keep you up to date with the latest industry trends, offer advice and guidance on any problems you might face, and inform you of upcoming changes, potential problems, or events that might be worth attending.
When you attend an e-commerce event or conference, you come face-to-face with a lot of like-minded people. Some will be in a similar position to you, others will be further along in their business success journey, while others might just be starting out. Connecting with other e-commerce professionals opens up a whole new world of resources, information, and lots of other benefits that can help you run a successful business.
Even attending a webinar where you don’t actually meet people face-to-face, still offers opportunities to communicate with other attendees and the hosts of the webinars too. Connecting virtually could still be the start of a very effective professional relationship. A strong network can make a big difference to a business so any opportunity to strengthen yours should be seen as a big benefit.
Find New Motivation
Sometimes it can be a challenge to keep your motivation levels up. Maybe your business has had an unexpected lower-performing month, maybe you’ve been working so hard to get your business launched that you’ve now run out of energy, or maybe you’ve been running your e-commerce business for a long time that you’ve got into a routine you’re not happy with.
Attending e-commerce events, webinars, and conferences can be a great way of motivating you to keep going with your business. Speakers sharing their success stories, other people running businesses like yours talking about how their business is performing, and simply being around people who are heavily involved in e-commerce can be enough to motivate you to try and push your business forwards and up to the next level.
No matter how much you love running your e-commerce business, it can be tough sometimes. It can be hard to stay motivated and it can be hard to know what to do next. Motivation plays a key part in running a successful business so a big benefit of e-commerce events, webinars, and conferences is that they can help increase your motivation and give you the ideas your motivated self can use to move towards success.
Generate New Ideas
When you spend time with other e-commerce business owners, e-commerce experts, suppliers, and speakers, the chances are that you’ll hear something, see something, or be introduced to someone that generates a new idea for you and your business. While some of these might be ideas that you never follow through with, you might just find that an idea generated at an e-commerce event, webinar, or conference can be the one that changes your business for the better.
Some of the best ideas come when you least expect it but being around like-minded people who have lots of knowledge and experience in the e-commerce industry can certainly be the type of place where your best ideas could come from. In the e-commerce industry, things seem to change fairly frequently so having new ideas that can help your business is always a good thing.
Confirmation That You are Doing the Right Thing
Self-doubt can be a big problem for e-commerce business owners. Not feeling confident that your strategies are the best ones for you, worrying that there could be someone else out there doing things better – these can all have a detrimental impact on your business and your own health and wellbeing.
Attending an e-commerce event, webinar, or conference can be enough to help you feel more confident in yourself and your business strategies. Let’s say that you’re running an e-commerce business that sells sunglasses. You have strategies in place that are aimed to get your website and products in front of your chosen audience. If you attend a webinar, an event, or a conference and an industry expert talks about the best strategies to attract the type of people you want to attract to your business, and they talk about some of the things you’re already doing – this can give you a big confidence boost.
Being confident in your decisions and knowing that you’re doing the most effective thing to help your business be successful can be the difference between carrying on in your business and deciding to try something else. You might be very close to success and that extra confidence boost could be exactly what you need to keep going until success arrives.
Understand New Technologies and Tools
With new e-commerce technologies and tools being developed on a pretty regular basis, it can be hard to know about them all, let alone understand how they can help you run your business. By attending e-commerce events, webinars, and conferences, you can get a much better understanding of how some of the new technologies and tools out there really work and whether they could help you.
You might be doing a lot of data management manually as you think this is the best and most effective way of doing it. However, if you attend an e-commerce event where new technology is being talked about that can automate a large part of the type of data you look at – this could lead to greater efficiency in your business.
Understand New Customer Trends and Behaviors
Customers have a habit of changing what they want and their expectations with little warning. This can have an impact on your business in the form of loss of sales, less traffic on your website, or more returned orders. E-commerce events are a great way of keeping up to date with the latest findings on consumer behavior.
Having a good idea about any potential changes that could be coming up or learning about certain patterns that seem to be forming in online consumer behavior can help keep your business ahead of your competition. Being able to adapt your business practices and strategies ahead of others can put your business in a very strong position. It can also help keep your current customers satisfied that you’re actually paying attention and listening to what it is that they want.
Meet Interesting People
If you don’t get anything else from attending an e-commerce event, webinar, or conference, you’ll likely get to meet some interesting people who can share some stories that appeal to you. While this might not help you run a successful e-commerce business, it can be nice to meet new people who have interesting things to say.
This is particularly true if you run your e-commerce business alone and spend a lot of time on your own trying to make it successful. It can be extremely rewarding to attend an event where people like you are gathered and simply talk about your work, your life, and your experiences. Sometimes an exciting story from an interesting person can give you a little break from some of the stresses associated with running a business.
