e-Commerce Business in Guernsey
An e-commerce business can have customers anywhere in the world and doesn’t need impressive high street stores. For an online business, the premises are the website and the front door is its homepage. What it needs in terms of offices and warehouse space depends on what it is selling – and the same goes for staff.
From a recruitment firm’s point of view, there are two sides to the arrangement: finding staff to fulfil the orders and take care of the administration, and maintaining the website, including – crucially – the ordering and payment system.
Companies that operate online include both those that have a physical product to sell and those whose merchandise is intangible.
In Guernsey and Jersey, those with warehouses and storerooms are selling everything from vitamins and cosmetics to music CDs and DVDs. For them, recruitment firms find staff to do the physical fulfilment, such as the ’pickers and packers’ who take items off the shelves and set them on their way to the customer, and replenish the shelves when new stock arrives. But there is more to the companies than that: they have office staff including accountants and so on. The positions that need to be filled range from junior all the way to the top.
Then there are the clients whose business doesn’t involve items that have to be posted to customers. With online gambling firms, for instance, the transactions are purely financial and it is all done over the Internet. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need staff – the employees just tend to be based at a desk and work with their brain rather than their hands. The specialists they employ in addition to the general office staff include traders - the people who set the odds and monitor sporting events. It’s a different kind of work and requires training, but if you’re good at mental arithmetic and interested in sport it can make for a very satisfying career.
Because the website is so important for e-commerce businesses, recruitment in this area also involves consultants who specialise in IT, telecommunications and electronics. Companies whose business is based partly or completely on e-commerce need web designers, web developers, website administrators and webmasters – that sort of thing. These people may have more modern skills than shopfitters, but in many ways they are doing the same job: making the company’s (online) premises attractive to customers and ensuring it is easy for them to make the transaction.
Many of us have had the experience of finding what we’re looking for online, but become frustrated when the ordering and payment mechanism is confusing, over-complicated or inefficient. Looked at in conventional terms, it’s like finding what you want in a shop but being unable to pay for it because the till won’t open or the slot in the credit card machine is blocked.
There are other elements to e-commerce, too, such as the crucial matter of ensuring that your website comes high on the list when a potential customer is putting key words into a search engine. It is all part of the 21st century way of doing business and, while the general principles of attracting and satisfying customers are the same, an understanding of, and training in the ways of the web are essential.
Guernsey has a shortage of suitably qualified individuals in this area and vacancies can be open for months at a time – which is obviously time-consuming and generally unsatisfactory for a company reliant on the technology to convert serious interest into sales.