Top 8 Digital Business Ideas in 2023

Today, people are spending more time on the virtual, digital space. Whether it is browsing social media or booking event tickets online, people are spending more and more time on the internet every passing day. A TOI [1] research reveals that 33% of people spend considerable time on social media. If we look deeper, around 16% of them use it for online show streaming, 16% for music streaming, 13% for online press, and around 22% for other activities. It is suggested that businesses should also grow digitally by 33% in order to provide improved customer experience. Keeping the digital business growth of SMBs in mind, let us discuss a few of its advantages.

The driving objective of a business is revenue. The growth of revenue depicts the health of the business. Rapid digitization has had a direct effect on revenues of businesses. SMBs that have proactively adopted technological advancements are experiencing high profitability. According to a KPMG report [2], online businesses have experienced a revenue growth of 19%, while the offline businesses experienced only 10%.

Presence of online business in addition to or besides physical stores enables an enterprise to achieve wider market reach. With technology customized with online presence, SMBs can unlock remarkable opportunities to grow their business both locally and overseas. SMBs can explore new markets with increased digital engagements, moving forward to compete with the leading players of the industry. E-commerce marketplaces can expand their geographical footprints by developing enhanced customer experience and support for better supply chain solutions. This way, enterprises can sell 24/7 and expand their customer base rapidly with relatively minimal operational cost.

Tech Mahindra’s report [3] found that new digital technologies are able to reduce the operational cost by 20-30% with improved labor and capital utilization. Digital transformation allows SMBs to reduce their overall costs by optimizing marketing and operational costs. Innovations in digital integrated product planning, information and communication technology, supply chain management, shop floor monitoring and control, and smart use of ERP hold the key for SMBs to achieve accelerated operational efficiency.

With business intelligence and data analytics, SMBs have more opportunities to make informed decisions by gaining deeper insights on customers’ choices. SMBs are revamped with next-generation customer engagement capabilities as they are utilizing customer intelligence and insights to predict and analyze customer requirements, launch new products in line with customers’ choice, and to deliver the right products on time in a cost-effective way [4].

Cloud-based solutions - where the basic software is provided without charge, whereas virtual goods, functionality or proprietary functions might be charged - have encouraged SMBs to enhance their customer experience and develop technological capabilities.

Digital transformation has contributed to enlarging the vision of operations for SMBs. It has majorly impacted various non-tradable services by making them tradable now, which in turn has aided offline businesses to discover more options online and expand.

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A simple process of online product referral bringing in money became a business in itself. You use your abilities for a company to sell their product, and the company rewards you. One of the biggest advantages of affiliate marketing is its scalability. Salespersons from specific companies are entitled only to sell their own products. As an affiliate marketer, you can earn commissions by promoting products from different companies.

You can explore to start your own online business. The online business model creates value by enabling exchanges between consumers and producers. Now, sell products with growing market demand across the platforms.

If you choose to sell through any e-commerce marketplace, you get a host of services in connection with your online sale. For instance, Amazon.in provides services called Amazon FBA, which provides fulfillment services to the sellers on its marketplace. With Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), the sellers can store their products in Amazon's fulfillment centers, and Amazon facilitates fulfillment of an order placed by a customer on the marketplace (including picking and shipping).

Monetizing your blogs written for SMBs is not an overnight outcome. You should keep patience and give it time as it can take some time before your monetization strategies pay off. But if you have the idea for a perfect business, blogging is a great way to accelerate your income

Amidst this COVID-19 crisis, start your business by selling products online. You can try selling:

Essential products: To deal with the coronavirus, Governments have imposed various guidelines, including lockdowns, and as a result, regular life is disrupted and people prefer [5] shopping online. In this digital era, grow your business with facilities like Local Shops on Amazon, where the local stores are digitized to increase their sales and customer base, thereby helping them overcome the crisis posed by the pandemic.

Non-essential products: With the local kiranas supplying groceries and essential items online, you can opt for supplying other items of non-essential yet regular use by many customers. Items such as pet products, vegan produce, and products specific to the older generation are still struggling to fit into the daily essentials category. Now, with online marketplaces, raise your game in digital business by selling products, which are out of the daily essentials category but are in dire need to fit in.

Artisan products: During the pandemic, artisans amongst others have lost their income significantly. If you want to set up your own digital business with a catch, make the artisans meet the global customers by collaborating with them to sell their products online.

Books: With countless options on the internet, start your digital business of selling e-books via online marketplaces. There are many online marketplaces, including Amazon that will allow you to sell e-books to thousands of customers spanning geographical barriers.

Finding a reliable supplier is one of the first essential steps for e-retailers or online sellers, especially if they are not manufacturing their products locally. You can become a supplier for these online sellers and bridge the gap. You can choose from different types of suppliers – networks, dropshippers, wholesalers and distributors, etc. and help online sellers find the right products to sell online.

You can now consider dropshipping as one of the growing digital businesses. Dropshipping has lately become a popular business model as it has made e-commerce business simpler and more inclusive. Shipping is taken care of largely by e-commerce platforms and adding new products to your shopping list takes just a few clicks. The greatest advantage of dropshipping is that you need not bear the cost of any inventory or warehousing; you can simply sell other products if the market is losing any product popularity. The startup costs are relatively minimal for dropshipping; all you have to pay for is your website and the internet. Also, most of the dropshipping services allow you to provide your own labels, without making the customers aware about the dropshippers.

E-learning gained popularity among students during the COVID-19 lockdown period. Now, you can host an online educational platform where teachers across the globe can create and sell their courses. The digital business market is growing worldwide, and with the possibility of online platforms for selling educational courses, you can also take a leap and grow your digital business. Read more about popular digital educational platforms here.

Usage of the right digital marketing techniques, tools, and strategies, can even make a small or medium business grow rapidly on digital medium. You can register as an online seller on a reliable e-commerce marketplace like Amazon.

In this era of digital businesses, the above discussed digital business ideas can help you immensely in taking a leap in the industry to establish your own digital business and be a successful entrepreneur.