The streets might be empty and many shops closed, but the corona crisis doesn’t mean that even the smallest business can’t sell its wares.

According to GTM Plus, there is still a huge consumer demand for goods but companies need to have an effective online store and strategy to tap into it.

‘The whole world is facing a problem as customers cannot physically come to your shop or pharmacy,’ says chief executive Nelia Kovbasa. ‘It’s safer for them to stay at home and buy online. But a lot of businesses are only offline and they need to move online to survive right now.’

Her own business, headquartered in Prague and with offices in Ukraine, has been supporting firms in the Middle East, Europe and the US is moving to an online sales platform for the past five years. She said that this digital market is relatively young in the Netherlands, where a lot of small businesses have a physical store but no functioning website.

Online earnings

‘Let’s say we are talking about shops,’ she says. ‘Right now, they should mostly be closed and cannot sell to clients at all. The only type of earnings they can make is online. Even if they are open, people cannot go out so much so they will not buy in their regular physical shops in the same way: this means earnings will be 90% from online. But without a strategy for going online, and communicating with customers, they won’t do it effectively.’

GTM Plus is offering a special package to get established businesses, new platforms and even start-ups online and with a functioning e-commerce website within one week, for around €2,000. ‘In one week, from selling nothing, you can be selling online to your customers,’ is the promise.

The company can help a business develop branding, logo or visual identity or use existing ones, and currently has a special offer to create three web banners to alert customers to the new shop, free of charge. Of course, the webshops will adapt perfectly to mobile use, and GTM Plus can offer additional services such as special features, promotion and communication through social media.

Internet promotion

While some firms have stopped developing new web products due to coronavirus, particularly in ticket selling and entertainment, GTM Plus has seen a boom in new clients who want to go online to promote themselves via the internet. ‘People won’t find such a competitive deal elsewhere, to get online within a week,’ says Kovbasa. ‘We work fast, we know the pain, and we can relieve it.’

She adds that without the world wide web, this crisis would be a very different experience. But even so, it is both a step into an unknown future, and a chance for companies to take their first step into a 21^st century sales environment.

‘From my point of view I think this coronavirus has provoked a crisis that is possibly even bigger than after World War II,’ she says. ‘We don’t know where it will end. Right now we can predict nothing – we can only think about what will be helpful during the criris. We need to adapt to life right now and use all the tools we can.’

Contact GTM Plus to enquire about their online-in-a-week service via the website.