Social networks are so functional today that they can exchange any type of information from any device and without long authorization procedures. Photos, music, videos, messages, voice recordings - anything can be sent to anyone. It is not surprising that many individual entrepreneurs, instead of creating their own website or online store, work through VKontakte or Facebook groups. The free and simple interface are serious reasons to opt for a social network. Nevertheless, the number of individual sites and online stores supported by one person is growing. Why is this happening and at what point is it worth thinking about creating your own site?
The first parameter by which social networks lose to offline sites is design. A simple and convenient interface is not a sufficient tool for advertising your products, especially if the company has reached the level where you can start talking about the brand. Recognizable brand or the famous "style of the master" oblige to have a website that is able to impress.
The second point is not obvious for website visitors, who, perhaps, would be more convenient to use a social network, but it is very important for marketers and webmasters. This item is a promotion for which social networks do not provide any worthy opportunities. Although social promotion can deliver a significant amount of traffic and, as a result, a large number of customers, increases the potential audience by an order of magnitude.
Information management capabilities when using your online store also take the business to a whole new level. First of all, an offline site makes it easy to receive orders and keep records. The development of original forms for specific products provides, for example, automatic calculation based on a database of the amount of remaining products. Other columns of the same forms serve as the basis for “product cards”, according to which buyers search and select products.
Finally, your own website is easy to set up and expand. You can connect a chat, a forum, any polls and forms of communication to it. The introduction of internal registration makes it possible to store information about customers, conduct mailings and promotions for regular customers, and for this you do not need to write original codes - special templates in the website builder as , already contain this functionality. Considering that nothing prevents setting up a repost of site updates to other resources, it turns out that the simplicity of social networks is inferior in use to a large number of additional options of an offline site.