It is undoubted that in this day and age, having a beautiful and functional website is crucial to your business. In the past two years, shops and stores have been affected by the pandemic. Many physical stores are forced to close as people stop going out, a trend that has persisted today. This highlights the transition of selling and buying behavior of customers from offline to online even more so than the past five years. Some of the most common questions from new business owners are “Why is it important to have a website?” and “Which platform should I use to build a website?”. In this article we will highlight both the importance of having a website, and highlight points to consider when it comes to choosing a backend for your new website. 

According to Digital Stat 2022, Thai people reigns at #1 globally when they measured how often we shop online, especially in food and home appliances categories. Each person reported spending up to THB 17,000 on online shopping per year.

This fact has led to a reconsideration of sellers about other channels and opportunities to capture more revenue through readily available online platforms and marketplaces such as Shopee, Lazada, or even their own social media channels. While this looks like a good thing, business owners usually find themselves starving as most of these marketplace also have up to 30% GP they need to pay for plus the sellers need to hit certain criteria such as store page traffic above X amount/month and more to be qualified for a Flash Sale category.

Most business owners at this point are asking the same question. Should I build a website? The answer is yes. If you wish to grow your business in the long term and reduce your business’ dependence on these marketplaces, a well-developed website is exactly what you need. 

We all know how much time each of us spent looking at a mobile phone, seeing ads and browsing through websites just to find the information we wanted. Imagine that if your potential customers can’t find you when they search, it’d leave them no choice but to go for your competitors. Having a strong and coherent online presence is of absolute importance when you need to compete. Many brands achieved a higher growth rate by having a strong online presence than having a good brick-and-mortar store, because it is just that much easier to scale on your success online than offline. There is almost no limit to the investment, and in return, you may reap out of it. 

Consider building a website if you need: 

If you are a decent business, your customers expect you to have a good website. It is another proof just like your business registration. If you do not have one and do not have even a good page on social media, people will doubt your legitimacy. Therefore, having a well-designed website that reflects your brand, have proper functions and loads fast on mobile is a must for every business.  

Having your own online store that sells well without relying on a marketplace e-commerce platform such as Shopee or Lazada means you can save up to 30% of sales revenue. While we understand that it is necessary to have a good presence there and the sales are good, you surely would not want to rely too much on them and play within their rules forever. Having your own website means you do not have to wait to launch a Flash Sale. With the flexibility and capability of a well-developed site, you can become the market place itself for your customers. Remember, well-known marketplaces are websites, too. They just have so much marketing budget they took off. 

A Website can be tailored to meet any of your needs. This also helps to highlight the brand’s identity and creates a competitive advantage that the marketplace cannot give you. For example, our client is a suit tailoring shop and there is simply no way any marketplace can offer their client a function to select fabrics, input body measurements, and show a rendered 3D model of a jacket they selected before ordering. These are unique functions available for a custom-built website. 

Building a website by your own can offer you this, and the flexibility of doing just about anything. It’s your world.

With website analytic tool integration, collecting and analyzing your customers’ data is a breeze. You can better understand the needs and behaviors of your clients. How they interacted with your product and services. Which channel(s) they prefer to contact you and many more points which can be used in your product and service improvement. With sufficient conversion tracking, you can know the entire customer journey from finding your website to purchase.

A website can be tailored to meet any of your needs. This also helps to highlight the brand’s identity and creates a competitive advantage that the marketplace cannot give you. For example, our client is a suit tailoring shop and there is simply no way any marketplace can offer their client a function to select fabrics, input body measurements, and show a rendered 3D model of a jacket they selected before ordering. These are unique functions available for a custom-built website. 

Building a website by your own can offer you this, and the flexibility of doing just about anything. It’s your world.

While owning a website certainly has lots of benefits, it is not an easy feat to build a ‘great’ website. There are many website building platforms and tools to assist business owners in building their site without knowing a single line of code. Just drag and drop, and that’s it! 

However, most businesses will fall short when it comes to website performance which needs a knowledgeable person to control the quality and user-friendliness of the site. Think of it as having an engineer or an architect when you need to build a house. You can build on your own alright, but it would be that much better with them around.  

WordPress and Wix are good choices for a business owner to start with when they want to create their own website, especially Wix with its drag & drop system. Let’s compare the two with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Wix is a website builder which is designed for normal people like us who are not really into coding. Build your own amazing website with just a small amount of time with its drag and drop feature. It’s a thumb up for:

• Beautiful templates that can be used, no need to work it out from scratches.
• It’s like doing PowerPoint. Super easy to use, just drag and drop the elements to create your very own website. Coding is not needed.
• Wix App market is available when you need additional functions to your website. 
• Website could be built with multi languages without using any other plugin
• Users don’t need to update the plug-in or website itself, Wix will take care of this for you. Also security is excellent.

However, there are some thumbs down too:

• Not very compatible for e-commerce websites based in Thailand. A payment has to be done through PayPal if you choose Wix.com in Thailand which is a little complicated. We would not recommend having e-commerce website with Wix in Thailand in 2022. If you are in other parts of the world, that’s another story. 
• There is no customer service in Thai language. All support system, tickets, call center and articles are in English. This can be a challenge for some. 
• You cannot choose your hosting provider but Wix. Their business is to offer a website building platform AND a hosting. Once you build a website with them, it is recommended to just host with them. Luckily the cost is not expensive compared to others.

Let’s have a look at another option for how to build our own website, WordPress, one of the most popular website building / Content Management System (CMS) that is widely used in the world today. 

It’s an open system with more options for plugins and advanced functions.

• Choose among beautiful themes to start with, there are also lots of plug-ins to install for your website as the community is one of the largest in the world. 
• Recommended for e-commerce website as it has WooCommerce plugin to support every aspect of e-commerce system of the website. This system could run well even with 10,000 products if built right. 
• Recommended for a highly customized website with its open platform. Developers can just custom code some parts up to suit your needs.

However, with those flexible advantages of WordPress, there is also a downside of that:

• Most of the time you cannot build a detailed WordPress website without some coding knowledge. You may purchase a theme but may not be able to have the function or cannot edit it exactly the way you like because some coding is required. WordPress is much more complicated than Wix. 
• If you wish to use some plug-in, you may need to pay for the plugin fee used on the website.
• If a WordPress website is poorly designed, the owner may have a hard time editing it later. Some will need to go back and rely on a website developer to edit which is not a good idea. Say if you can edit it easily but you need more functions later, you will still need to go back to the developer because if you do it yourself the website may crash. 

Our quick recommendations

Pick Wix, if you want a fast and easily built website that doesn’t need to have advanced functions and it updates itself.

Pick WordPress, if you want an advanced function like online store and ecommerce system on your website with ability to build everything as you desire. But also keep a developer close by. 

No more headache. Let us handle everything

If you think the process of sourcing website developers and building a decent website are complicated, let Convert Digital support you through. Our experts act on your behalf and speak with your chosen website developers to ensure it is made to our high standard and ensure your investment money will not be in vain. Also, we can help you build both WordPress or Wix website depending on your business needs. For more information about our service, you can find it here