Direct-To-Consumer E-commerce revolution in India
CommerceX Partnership with Unicommerce, SARAL – India’s biggest eCommerce summit to shape & grow the businesses post COVID-19
CommerceX Partners with Unicommerce, SARAL-
CommerceX has partnered with Unicommerce, Saral- India’s first ever eCommerce summit to be held on 30th May 2020. This would be an event for the entire eCommerce and retail industry with the ambition to deliver a unique platform for all to interact, plan, and shape their businesses which will lead a better future for eCommerce.
As an integrated eCommerce partner, we help brands to grow their businesses through various e-commerce solutions including multichannel strategies, design, technology, and marketing with exceptional expertise & proven processes to scale up the revenues. The event is set to host 20+ industry leaders who will be sharing their experiences, views, strategies and concepts to empower businesses around the country to understand & uncover solutions to their challenges in a post-COVID-19 world.
1500+ eCommerce Sellers, Brands and Retailers both MSMEs and enterprises will be a part of the event and share a single panel together to gather knowledge and explore all potential ways to drive their business to the next level.
Why Partnership with SARAL?
CommerceX is a leading Integrated eCommerce solutions provider for Retail brands anywhere in the digital road-map! We are a new age digital brands enabler agency specializing in providing holistic e-commerce solutions for data driven sustainable business growth. We create an eco-system and service levels that enables fast and efficient growth for digital brands. We are a data driven high performance firm which excels in end to end performance marketing for digital brands across various categories.
We want to help businesses navigate through the uncertainties prevalent due to the Coronavirus outbreak and Unicommerce’s SARAL has been designed exclusively to help those businesses, especially since consumers are expected to interact with businesses increasingly through different digital mediums.
The major expectation of businesses all around the country is to find solutions to the issues of bringing their eCommerce operations back on track and diversifying business across multiple digital sales channels to increase profitability.
The discussions for each session have been designed in a way to offer answers to all such queries by the participants through leaders from key stakeholders in the eCommerce ecosystem.
By being a part of this event, retailers, brands, and eCommerce marketplaces can figure out the best possible ways to secure business, and learn from the experts about how to cope up with situations of crisis in particular, how can automation help make the businesses more resilient in the times of crisis.
What will CommerceX & SARAL include?
CommerceX caters to all the requirements of an eCommerce firm very closely and provides them with a holistic portfolio of solutions which comprises captive site development, marketplace growth and end to end marketing via Paid media, Affiliate, CRM etc. We would be amongst a very few agencies providing our clients with a strong technology infrastructure backed by a robust operations backbone and providing best in class acquisition metrics.
We are integrated eCommerce partners for our clients which indicates our intent to grow their business as our own and thereby we mainly operate on a revenue share model which is unique and distinguishes us from other agencies. Click Here to know more: Partners
The SARAL event will comprise of 5 unique sessions with panellists from various domains of eCommerce ecosystem including Frontend, Delivery, Payments, Customer Engagements, Logistics and many more who will share their insights on “How can eCommerce Selling be Simplified”. The event will solve our purpose to help the businesses lay the foundation for being better prepared for post Covid-19 environment.
Some of the main points of focus in the panel discussion will include:
- Building your own D2C brand in eCommerce
- Growing Marketplace presence
- Perfect Automation Stack to implement eCommerce
- Offline-to-Online: The “new normal” in post COVID era
- Implementing sustainable eCommerce operations
Every session will have a 15-20 minute Q&A part at the end which will help you to solve your doubts and get the answers of all your questions, allowing panellists to interact and address the queries of participants.
How will you benefit by being a part of SARAL?
The event will be packed with multiple benefits for the attendees and offer a plethora of opportunities for all to interact and network with industry leaders and discover answers to all possible concerns. Some of the highlights include:
- Free enrollment – Witness the biggest virtual eCommerce event from the comfort of your homes without having to spend anything on it.
- Exposure to large viewers – Via live sessions, network around a wide pool of attendees, and make new connections all at a single panel.
- Increased awareness about best practices – Gather knowledge from experts about various important eCommerce practices to streamline operations.
- Flexibility of choice – Choose from multiple sessions, attend what interests you and caters to your queries most accurately.
- Association with Decision Makers – Indulge in discussions and hear from various industry pioneers about their perspective on future business opportunities.
- Perusal for future references – Access the recorded sessions later on to refer to important concepts or the flexibility to connect with any of the experts to discuss further on issues impacting your business.
The purpose of CommerceX partnership with Unicommerce, SARAL is to bring the overall ecosystem together in these tough times, helping out each other to enable stronger, better, & smoother eCommerce operations worldwide.
We’ll be coming up with more details on Saral and keep you updated on all the progress. Watch this space to know more.
Connect with us for Business & Partnerships
CommerceX bags end-to-end eCommerce mandate for TT Group
CommerceX has bagged the integrated digital mandate for India’s leading innerwear and apparel brand “TT” along with the private label “Hiflyers” from the same group.
TT Group is a 50-year-old business house with presence across India and selling in over 65 countries across the globe. The brand name “TT” was awarded Master Brand Status in 2012 and Most Promising Brand Status in 2015.
This new engagement with CommerceX will help the group to reach out to the growing internet savvy population which was missing out in its offline presence through MBO’s and EBO’s.
The Gurgaon based performance agency will be responsible for managing a 360-degree digital strategy for the brand ranging from digital media spends, marketplace management, performance marketing campaigns along with Technology and Customer retention.
Subir Ghosh, COO, CommerceX,said, “The brands TT and Hiflyers have an existing latent demand for the value conscious digital consumers who are seeking the best quality at a particular price point which the brand promises.
With our specialized capabilities in the use of performance analytics across channels, we will strive to see this partnership go from strength to strength.”
Sanjay Jain, CEO, TT Limited, added, ” We are excited in onboarding CommerceX as our digital ecommerce partners as they have a proven track record in scaling a brand on the captive website from scratch which is the most critical period.
Their expertise in the eCommerce digital space, particularly their ability to marry art and science gives us confidence in this partnership.”
CommerceX bags the end-end eCommerce Mandate for Azani Sports
This Engagement will help Azani Sports deploy a unique ‘end-to-end performance model’, powering on Technology, Marketplace, and eCRM for digital customer acquisition.
The account was won in a multi-agency pitch. And will be handled from the CommerceX Gurgaon office.
As part of this mandate, CommerceX will handle the end to end digital including – Technology, Marketplace Management, Digital advertising, Performance Marketing, Customer retention/loyalty and reputation management for the company.
CommerceX will also leverage Customer data management platform (CDP) – Cross OmniChannel marketing automation to execute personalized campaigns at scale. Commercex is partnered with the industry’s leading cloud-based CRM tool, that enables companies to personalize online and mobile marketing campaigns with richer and more actionable information about targeted audiences.
Subir Ghosh, Lead – Client Success, CommerceX, said,
We are excited about the opportunity to work with Azani Sports as this will help strengthen our foothold in the Sports segment. Our analytical and technological method of approach is sure to drive the desired business results for Azani Sports”
The four-year-old Azani Sport is an athleisure brand that sells online and through select retail outlets and is backed by likes of Fireside Ventures and Sequoia Capital. It offers customised products across categories and has become a demanding brand where global majors like Puma, Adidas, Nike have already captured the market.
Siddharth Suchde, Founder & CEO Azani Sport said, “At Azani, we were looking to work with an agency that has done exciting work in the brand commerce space and helped brands like us scale thier digital demand generation efforts significantly. We have chosen CommerceX as our partner after a multi agency pitch as they bring in this niche expertise along with a core team that has significant experience of running eCommerce business. We look forward to carrying out disruptive digital campaigns in the coming quarters and take Azani to greater heights with our digital first approach!
Case Study – Digitally Native Personal Care Brand
Case Study – S. Chand Publishing
Does your Promotional Email Reach out to Inbox ?
One out of 10 promotional Email – Never reaches the Inbox
So Where do they go?
- Some email blocked by email providers
- Some email gets sent to the SPAM Folder
GETTING EMAILS DELIVERED TO THE INBOX INVOLVES MORE THAN JUST HITTING SEND.
Over the past few years the
#customer journey has transformed and, along with it, expectations of what a brand should deliver.
Gmail doesn’t like us – how can I fix it?
The most common question asked in the ecosystem of eCRM Marketing.
Covering this question – Here are some tips & Tactics.
Your first step is to look at the domain’s reputation over the full 120 days and note any dates where reputation changed, and to what degree. How?
Heard about Google postmaster? – A tool to analyze your email performance, Learn from Gmail delivery errors, spam reports, feedback loop, and more.
- Get Register your sender domain with Postmaster (*if not done already)
Then, try to rule out the most probable causes of each change one by one, with these two reasons being most common:
- Spam complaints
- Insufficient engagement/reputation to support the email volume the sender is attempting to deliver into Gmail/G Suite.
SPAM?
Try to identify, into TRAP or User SPAM
Spam traps are a type of fraud management tool, used by major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and blacklist providers to identify spammers so they can block emails from them.
If a spam trap address ends up on one of your subscriber lists, and you send to that list, it’s called “hitting a spam trap”.
Check for more details here:
HOW TO FIX THE PROBLEM
Spam traps are designed to identify senders with irresponsible list building techniques so you won’t find a public list of traps that you can delete from your list to solve the problem.
√ The only way of finding and deleting them is to take a close look at your list quality in general.
5 Best way for Protecting your email reputation
1. Avoid changing your IP address
2. Monitor your – Complaint rates – Hard bounce rate – Spam trap hits
3. Do limited test runs
4. Manage your email volume
5. Remove feedback loop complaints/unsubscribes quickly
We Know Email
Get the actionable Audit you need to improve your email reputation.
Write to us: crm@commercex.com
A look back to Sakshi’s Journey from an Intern to a Team Member
A look back at my journey: from intern to a team member.
I started as an Intern at CommerceX in February of this year and got promoted to a team member later. Although I know it doesn’t really matter whether you are an intern or a full time employee, everyone is equal here and that’s one of the key values of CommerceX.
When I look back at my first day at CommerceX, the picture comes out pretty clear. As it was my first job I was so nervous that I started my day a little early and reached office at 9 am. The day started as usual, nervous and excited, As per my expectations I met Rajeev Sir & Shivani for my onboarding process. Opposite to how formal I had expected it to be, my reporting manager(Rajeev Sir) and my HR took me out for a cup of coffee and briefed me about the company and my role which made me feel quite comfortable.
When I first started with the team, I was just a beginner in the marketing industry, a young girl who is in her last year of college and starting her career with just a glimpse of what this industry could offer. But everyone here holds an expertise in their respective fields of business and is ready to help anytime. If I were to mention three reasons why I love working at CommerceX, the first would be the People – I get to work with an incredibly smart, self-driven and intellectually curious group of people who challenge me on a daily basis, but are always willing to lend support where needed. The second would be the career progression opportunities that I have benefited from. The last (but by no means the least) key reason that I enjoy working at CommerceX is our services. This job has taught me a a lot which I don’t think I could have learned as quickly anywhere else. Thanks to the team here that I am now prepared to take on whatever challenge the future holds for me.
During my time at CommerceX, I have been lucky enough to have a few mentors. Through these relationships I have not only learned valuable new skills but also been provided new and different career opportunities. I feel incredibly well supported at CommerceX and know that I can reach out to not only my mentors, but also to colleagues across the organization, given how generous people here are with their time and expertise.
I know that this is just a beginning of what will be a great career with a great company and I look forward to working harder every single day of the week and growing with the company.
I believe what the Company believes “Work Hard, Stay Humble”. !
Clicks to Footsteps: Measuring the impact on offline sales of Online marketing
Smartphones have become the remote control of our lives, where every thing from clothing to grocery, is being called at your doorstep with your thumb clicks. All is due to effective sync between the online and offline E-Commerce practices, Let it be inventory, chain management, delivery management and every thing involved in between.
With digital marketing been the primary source of a marketing channel for some brands, it becomes very important to measure the impact of it across all channels. Lately, Many Brands are trying to make Sync between their online campaigns and offline sales. It is understood that there is an impact of the online effects on the offline sales, but how much is what becomes the question.
Many channels are doing this by gathering offline data from the advertiser and try to make sense out of it by comparing the unique click Ids, email ids, phone numbers, and device Ids. Let’s see how each channel is solving this problem.
Google ads have a unique GCLID with every ad, which clicked and the user fills a form, can later be marked as a conversion if converted offline against the same GCLID. The problem with this is that you can’t track view conversions since the user requires to click on the Ad on the ad.
Setup your Google Conversions: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7012522
Impact
This is store level data accumulated over the August to November 2017 (US-based participation), and retailer ROAS varies between 2x to 14x.
Facebook went one step further, and here you can actually track if the person has viewed (even if no action was taken on the ad) your ad, and converted. If he comes to the offline store or a restaurant, you can have his phone number uploaded on the Facebook panel actually see if the impact was from the online marketing. Usually, the match rate of the conversions is between the range of 40 to 70%, at best.
Impact
Many brands are using the Facebook offline conversions technique, especially in-store visit campaigns. MomsCare with Bionic scaled their offline sales and maintained an ROAS of 7.5x, with 16% new users. They integrated their EPOS with Facebook offline conversion API and optimized the ads in real time and automated way.
In a similar way, Max Fashion recorded an ROAS of 26x and 2500 conversions using Facebook offline conversion API. It is a middle east brand for clothing and increased online, as well as drove 25000 people to their stores with online campaigns
Find more case studies at: https://www.facebook.com/business/success/categories/offline-conversions
Beacon Tracking
Beacons can be really helpful in tracking the footsteps in the offline stores and then using mobile IDs, we can track those offline conversions. This is how beacon tracking works
This can be revolutionary when it comes to the measuring the impact of the online marketing, Stores in UK and US has started rolling out beacon tracking, and even shopping malls are doing so, so you can be served Relevant ads according to the Mall you’re in.
The World’s cultural shift of interaction with brands has changed the way we track our conversions, however, not far majority of the people have realized the power of traction of offline conversions and how it can help in creating accurate impact reporting to online marketing.
The day we would be able to fully understand the online impact on the offline sales and footsteps, the world is going to be a better place for us marketers.
5 Great examples of Triggered, Automated Marketing Campaigns that Actually Work
5 great examples of Triggered, automated marketing campaigns that actually works
‘’63% of companies who outgrow their competition are using marketing automation’’
Marketing automation or CRM is when software automatically sends campaigns to your customers and prospects based on triggers you define.
CRM automated emails are highly effective and have the ability to drive massive revenue and results for businesses as they achieve 86% higher open rates, produce a 196% increase in click-through rates, and generate 320% more revenue than standard promotional emails. With stats like that, marketers can’t deny the power of marketing automation.
Welcome email series
Welcome emails are your first chance to make a great impression on subscribers. Using CRM Software, you can create a stellar experience for your subscribers with a one-time welcome email, or a series of emails that help onboard them.
Lee Jeans welcome email series featured a special welcome discount to its first time subscriber. And with this second email in its welcome series, it reminds the subscriber to avail the special discount on their next purchase thus creating a sense of urgency. Lee’s welcome campaign does a great effort in building a relationship with the customers.
Reminders
Reminder emails attract customers to keep buying their products and services over time and help retain which acts as a opportunity to deliver a timely message to your customer.
Nissan collects relevant information about their customers, including the purchase date of their car. They can then use the purchase date to automatically trigger a reminder email six months after the car was purchased to schedule the first service appointment.
Birthday or Anniversary
Birthday & anniversaries are special occasions where CRM software’s can send automated emails to customers with special offers. These act as highly effective strategy to drive revenue and also increasing customer happiness at the same time.
The first step is to collect your customer’s birth date and add it to your email list, like how payback does for its customers.
Most Active Customers
It’s simple to set up a series of automated emails that can make your most active customers feel special and keeps them engaged, and spending.
Sephora does an excellent job with their VIB which offers early access to new products and special promotions for customers who spend a certain amount of money.
Once someone spends the required amount, they’re entered into the VIB segment of the email list and automatically receive an email introducing them to the VIB program. This email welcomes them to the program and provides an exclusive VIB-only offer that encourages them to make additional purchases.
Re-engagement
You can encourage email subscribers who haven’t purchased in a while with an email-exclusive offer, “Save on your next order” discount like Snapdeal does in the below example, or cart abandonment deal:
Disclaimer: The pictures and data used in this post are just for reference and have no links to the brands.
Simran Jit Singh – Shares how it is like to work at CommerceX
” My journey started Strangely when Akash convinced me to join CommerceX, and trust me, there have been no regrets, and that decision was one of the most influential decisions of my life.
The Founders gave me opportunities to perform at different levels and to learn by giving first-hand experience in digital marketing, giving client accounts and teaching me various aspects of digital marketing. These guys breathe E-commerce Marketing, and to work with them, is a pure delicacy.
The journey has been so far one of the best days of my career, till now and still, there is a lot to learn and absorb from the Founders. The work Culture encourages everyone to be accountable, Learn, and Grow continuously, which is not the case with most of the companies where your growth become stagnant at some point.
I am sure the experience I am currently having and the level and quality of work that’s given to me, is surely going to help me build a strong foundation of my career
From working late nights to partying, the life at CommerceX is a continuous motion of being a better self from the previous day. It’s been five months now and doesn’t feel like it, The time has passed so fast, maybe Because I enjoyed working here so much that I have lost track, and I would like it to be that way only”
Discover Mayank’s Journey of Success at CommerceX
Discover Mayank‘s Journey of Success at CommerceX, who recently completed a year, he shares his experience with the family we have here. We wish him Good Luck and look forward to have even greater year this time. Keep Rocking !
“A year ago I joined here as a data operations executive who was to stay behind the screen and crunch numbers. But then as I started to understand the data and the business, I wanted to do something different. And I got the opportunity to enter client management to pre-sales to sales strategy to what not and the work became a rollercoaster ride from then on. I have been really blessed with amazing mentors who selflessly helped and guided me towards various milestones which enabled me to wear multiple hats on different occasions. I learnt so many different aspects of business in just 1 year which I would have learned in 4 years in an MNC.
When I look back, I see an amazing journey with CommerceX which fuels my aspirations to do better than I did yesterday every day. I am super excited and very eagerly looking forward to my next ventures here at CommerceX.
Cheers to the amazing team!”
The Giant in Awakening: Amazon Ads
E-commerce Strategy
Exploring the platform and using its potential in nascent stage could help marketers to be ahead of the trends, so that when they become mainstream, the early adopters would already be doing it for some time and would have gained expertise. When Google ads came in 2000, the clicks were just few cents, and every company who did bidding and believed in Google, are now billion dollars companies, including the first company to ever join AdWords; eBay, Later Amazon, around 2003.
We all know history repeats itself and the same thing is happening on the Amazon Ads. People are getting to know the potential it has because marketers can now manifest the direct consumer intent and boost the sales. Because on Amazon the product wins, not brands. And within the ecosystem that Amazon has created, the people reviews have major impact on the minds of potential buyer.
This kind of ecosystem favors the small business to come to Amazon and start selling their product without having any operational issues, which was a case half a decade ago.
Amazon Ads favor the small business to grow their business as the ads have great potential to impact minds because consumer comes to the platform having a buying intent. Though the product is in developing state and still figuring out some issues like daily reporting and live ads data, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be growing to become one of the great marketing platforms in coming years.
What do amazon ads offer?
Currently, the Ads have three product lines, the Seller ads, Brands ads and Managed ads by Amazon.
The seller ads are simple product ads a seller is selling, could be of different brands, customized, and doesn’t restrict to one vertical. These ads show on the first page of search results.
The brand Ads is a great product for brand recognition, as now you can target people with keywords and give more placements, like deals page, details page, along with search results.
The ads managed by Amazon gives better visibility to the advertisers and placements like fire stick, Kindle, and other partner platforms.
Why Amazon Ads are more than Sales?
Boosting sales is one of the benefit that Amazon ads offer, but the potential of these ads are beyond that. It is the best advertising platform to launch new product or brand because according to a recent Quantcast study, 4 in 5 shopping journeys end with customers purchasing one of the first 9 brands they considered. See the potential of getting into the minds of customers first?
The great example of an excellent product launch is Airheads, who saw 120% lift in awareness with their new product launch and reached masses beyond they were expecting.
Amazon ads are also about brand discoverability, the recent campaign proves it. A brand, ‘Oodji’ increased their brand’s discoverability by 76% branded keyword searches during the campaign period. So people were actually looking for a brand after they see the product ads on the Amazon.
Verdict
Amazon ads have great potential to reach the desired potential customer, and with 100 million members, we’re sure you will find the right one for you. If you’re into sure of the growth of Amazon, and consumer potential, let’s have a look at this data.
Source: https://www.statista.com/
Now If you’re a new age marketer! Why wouldn’t you want to grab this attention?
The impact SEO And Content Marketing have when they work together to accelerate Your Online Success
In the past decade, both SEO and content marketing have changed the way of the digital marketing world.
We at CommerceX work with clients across the digital spectrum in India and want to spread the interesting correlation in how SEO lends a hand with brand awareness, website traffic, PPC and lead generation.
Let’s try and understand what the terms we mentioned actually mean by definition. SEO refers to the technical process of increasing the quality of traffic and attracting maximum visitors to your website. On the other hand, content marketing is focused on using valuable and relevant content to drive profitable customer or client action.
We cannot definite SEO in isolation as it would be meaningless with content marketing. In particular, SEO is actually strategized around content marketing since every website needs words, articles, substance, keywords, etc. In order to be successful, both must go hand in hand.
Keywords
The building blocks of SEO is about finding relevant keywords and incorporating them in your content so they rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). It is the art of using keywords in an appropriate manner and follow a strategic approach to get the desired result. You should look to avoid stuffing a page with keywords and overoptimize. There is a balance between SEO and content which you should strive to schieve.
Keyword strategies are critical for optimum search engine marketing (SEM). We at CommerceX, research the top websites and competitive keywords that are closely associated with the specific business or industry we are associated with. We try and follow a logical approach in the use of Google’s Keyword Planner, which happens to be a keyword analysis tool to analyze the most popular keywords in terms of volume and competition classified into high, medium or low. We use the already well-established AdWords database of diverse industries including technology, health, entertainment and much more.
The critical process of embedding target keywords is important to rank well and boost traffic. But again, it is important to reiterate not stuff them in the content. If keywords are repeated too much it will have a negative impact on SEO. Do implement a reasonable approach and use the main keywords in the title and body section.
Quality Content
Both SEO and content marketing require a lot of consistency. Unique, fresh and creative content gets indexed rapidly and thus ranks higher than low-value and repetitive content.
Good content must be able to entice your clients in addition to solving a particular issue. It is advisable to write influential content by incorporating important keywords and targeting visitors. This happens to be one of the most critical factors through which Google determines the relevance of a page and thereby ranking a piece of content. Using creative ideas and embedding the most important keywords is the key to acknowledged content.
User Experience
SEO is not just about blogs, articles, keywords and linkbacks but also about optimising robots.txt, enhancing metadata and using tags appropriately.
Technical optimization makes a web page appealing to the search engine and ensures that the site has no broken links with any error codes (like 404s). Otherwise, the source will be poorly ranked by the search engine. Optimizing URLs and making the slug — everything after the .com — concise drives the search engine to find the relevant subpages and categorize the different parts of your site. This is vital to the success of any SEO campaign. The technical SEO elements benefit the UX and are present so as to publicize the content.
A good sitemap ensures an easy approach to content for users, and optimized robots.txt crawls the site so that viewers can access the content. The appropriate tag provides outstanding and superior indexing and authentic search results. Tags like header tags and title tags benefit the user by strategizing the content in a way that is useful for readers and simple for the search engine to understand.
A good title tag ensures a great user experience as the visitor can recognize the information from the page before they actually click on it. Header tags (H1-H6) hold great importance to differentiate headings and subheadings within the content to make it well-organized.
Traffic
Linkback, link-building or inbound linking is another major factor of SEO. Connecting your links with high-domain authority sites like .edu and .org drastically increases traffic. Though developing links is possible by connecting with link-building agencies, the best method is to create expert content. To get a link back and boost traffic, stellar content is worth it.
Conclusion
SEO and content marketing are not disparate departments. In fact, both need each other. Content marketing is only successful if it has appropriate SEO. Together, SEO and content marketing are explosive.
Trends that will define India’s E-commerce by 2020
Statistics show that e-traffic through mobiles will be 6 billion by 2020 and this will define the future of E-commerce.
The E-commerce market in India has recently garnered a lot of attention when global giant Walmart picked up a majority stake in India’s largest online retailer Flipkart. This is by far the world’s biggest eCommerce deal by absolute value and has set the future trends for more investments to follow in the coming years with a focus on niche categories like Fintech, Online Grocery and Furniture. This would also suggest that logistics and supply chain would get a major boost with the end customer being the actual gainer. Online shopping is set to get more convenient now and consumers should expect faster deliveries and competitive pricing of products and services.
There has been a huge spike in internet consumption in the last 5 years, aided by the competitive data tariffs across the country, e-commerce is fast gained momentum and has become an essential element of our daily life. With every passing year, newer platforms are sprouting up in the dotcom trading arena, thereby enlarging the size of the pie to a whole new level. Prompt customer-care service, after sale grievance handling, easy returns and attractive discounts have ensured that more and more customers are taking to online shopping now. Consumers today are not hesitant to order big-ticket items such as AC’s, Fridge, TV and even furniture online.
With the market perfectly poised, here are a few trends that are expected to flourish throughout 2018 and continue into 2020.
Same Day Delivery Will Become a Norm: The time between placing the order to receiving the delivery will reduce further and same day and in some cases delivery within a few hours will become a new norm. Customers hate the waiting time and one thing that tops their wish list when shopping online. Although this is a tough expectation to manage for the retailers, its implementation will guarantee more traffic at the shopping website than ever before. To ensure convenience and safety of shopper’s money, quick turnarounds and easy return, as well as refund policies, needs to be guaranteed.
Increased Use of Voice & Video Recognition: With artificial intelligence (AI) and technologies such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Home in place, consumers want to upgrade their online shopping experience and use voice instead of text. In some of the developed countries, one can easily give orders and check status at Dominos stalls through their voice. The online shopping channels across the globe are also making efforts to enable the same at the earliest. According to a study, the upcoming year will witness around 33% of consumers giving voice commands while shopping online.
More Visuals, Less Text Clutter: Shoppers prefer simple interface with easy accessibility and navigation while shopping online. If they feel the need to think about it and ask others, they simply prefer to move onto to other options as they lack the time and there is a plethora of options open for them. Customers prefer more of visuals and video options over text clutter as they are both easy to understand and be remembered. Hence, the future willsee the shopping portals with more simple home pages, striking visuals and extremely simple navigation bars with least of text clutter in the websites.
More of Sales Categories: At present, the e-commerce portals stay dominated by computer and consumer electronics, apparel & accessories, clothing, books, personal care, child care and other hobby items. No doubt, categories like food, beverage and gifting range which were earlier not a preference have now become a ripe opportunity for businesses that enter this arena. In the coming years, e-commerce will witness a boom in the demands of auto-parts, furniture & home furnishings, office equipment and supplies, medicine and healthcare products and many more.
Personalization: Customers nowadays don’t wish to see what everyone else is watching. Instead, they wish for something that has been customized for them only. This issue can be well tackled by the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning skills. The managers of the e-portals simply need to keep track of customers’ shopping behaviors and arrange for products that best suit these behavioral trends. This tailor-made experiences will better assist the sellers in the classification of the target market under various divisions based on age, gender, pay scale and so on. The result will be a much accurate and targeted marketing campaign that will boost the sales enormously.
Cross-Channel Marketing: Compared to traditional print and broadcasting mediums, digital media is a vast universe full of possibilities for the marketers to market their products & services and reach out to the target audience with various message delivery options available out there. However, restricting just to one channelof digital media for sharing the message with the audience is of no use. The marketers need to curate a master strategy that works out for all e-channels be it smartphones, tablets, desktops and other devices. As per statistics, e-traffic through mobiles will be 6 billion by 2020; this is an important information for the marketers skipping the mobile channels from their e-marketing strategies. It’s time for them to wake up and transform their present business plans into OmniChannel strategies lest they should be invisible to most of the probable audience and will be left behind in the competition.
Here Are 3 Ways You Can Overcome E-commerce Operations Mismanagement
There are myriad of industry resources that cling to building up e-commerce businesses with a great front-end customer experience and driving conversions with marketing.
On the contrary, there are hardly any, who are talking about the operational side of the e-commerce.
And, that’s terrible because in the hindsight you know how missing out on the esoteric tasks of filling up inventory, tracking goods, recording sales, restocking shelves, predicting future demands, and identifying any other long-standing loophole can work against your e-commerce business.
And we have proof,
In 2011, Best Buy’s Failure to Deliver Items on Christmas Loyal Customers
Nike’s Long-Lived Ordeal of Getting through the Operations
So, is there a secret to not let operations destroy your e-commerce business overnight?
Some dark magic formula that breaks through the barricades to save your business from running down to the nubs?
Not Surprisingly, Yes.
Let’s dig deep further here:
Al Ries, Chairman of the Consulting Firm of Ries and Ries in Atlanta says,
“Most of the bargain shoppers are impatient shoppers too. And, the easiest way to convert them into ideal brand advocates would be to focus on core operations.”
Scalable Procurement:
Drawing from AI Ries, let’s start with few simple issues in operations.
- When & how to deploy your resources (cost, time, and labor)?
- How to promote valued relationships?
- How to construct the ownership of actions and accountability of progress & ROI?
Since commercial enterprises depend a lot on supplied goods and services to get through the core business purpose, it’s crucial to have a right outlook to acquire the products and manage each individual section of the supply chain effectively, irrespective of who is performing the tasks.
And, this is where a scalable framework would come into play.
This is how ChiefProcurement.com defines Scalable Procurement:
“Scalable procurement is not just to authorizing people with desired professional skills to but giving non-practitioners in the organization the access to manage the balance of supply-side activity.’’
The right framework includes:
- Code of Conduct to procure entities
- Ethics of Gifts and hospitality
- Division of authority to even the subordinates
- Easy fraud management procedures
- Supplier due diligence checklist
- Responsible Sourcing Policy
- Effective Supplier relationship and performance management procedures
- Preferred supplier guidelines (who are the preferred suppliers for every category and why)
OmniChannel Maximisation
Among the top operations is the scenario where the offline & the online world are moving on two different tracks.
The sure thing is that the E-commerce businesses need to fill this gap.
But, an important question over here is how will they do this?
Let’s go to a recent past recent past and see how a brand could do it!
Fraport AG
It is a German airport company which also operates the Frankfurt Airport.
But, what is more, important for you to know here is that Fraport has another major service- the shopping service, called Fraport Store (or Frankfurt). It has over 300 retail outlets making Frankfurt the biggest shopping mall in Germany.
Back then, Fraport was just a big name in the offline market ie. for customers who visited the store at the airport.
To keep pace with the changes in technology, it soon opened an Online shopping for their users.
But to the surprise, it was still missing a huge chunk of travelers who got less time to drop by the store and were very busy traveling.
How Fraport Could do the Omni Optimisation
The concept was seamlessly executed so that the customers can shop online while flying or on the off hours of their wait time, as well as pick-up, drop, ship, or deliver from store to any location within the airport or off-airport.
Of course, Fraport had to completely change the complex UI/UX design of its warehouse management software, synchronize the stores, drop-shippers, and third-party logistics to achieve this bold step of omnichannel vision.
But in the end, it could finally do that.
Now, here’s a right question- Is this something that your E-commerce brand can also achieve?
What can be the OmniChannel Operations best practices that you should possibly consider?
Let’s have a look at some quick best practices
- Having a strategic plan
- Integrating your existing systems
To break this down further, integration of the existing systems could happen by channelizing the organizational silos and bridging the disconnect between all previous multi-channel supply chains
- Seeing technology as the liberator and picking up the right technology for your business
- Promoting your business through new channels
- Taking the right set of people
Fraud Management Detection
When you’re a smaller company, your orders are manageable and your fraud risk is relatively lower.
On the contrary, as orders increase, the issue of fraud management becomes crucial.
The backlog of orders demanding your review puts a lot of pressure in your operations, leading to:
longer fulfillment times and annoyed customers
shorter order review time to maintain promised fulfillment times and a higher rate of transactions as fraud slips through.
In such cases, a good fraud management tool comes to your rescue that not only gives you the right decision point but also backs it up with guaranteed protection.
As you scale, and margins are top of mind, it’s always advisable to offload your fraud liability for a low, predictable cost.
What tips do you have to overcome operations mismanagement?
Read about the above examples in detail below
Flipkart-Walmart Deal- Top 3 Reasons How It Can Benefit the End Users
Recently, there has been a lot of anticipation and buzz going around the news that broke out a few days ago –
The world’s largest retailer, Walmart, has acquired Indian e-commerce giant, Flipkart for $16 billion
making this the biggest M&A deal in India this year.
Below, are the few tweets that show how people are not very excited about this news and foresee this acquisition as a big threat.
The problem here is that we’re just dealing with one side of the story and that people are mostly having biased opinions towards this acquisition. But, it’s always more advisable to view the two sides of the coin.
Now, of course, this isn’t a new technique, but applying this can, and still does, offer fruitful results/insights.
So, what’s on the other side of the coin?
Can this acquisition in any way give a boost to Flipkart’s current performance or the expectations that online consumers have?
Let’s have a look!
Improvement in Logistics:
Flipkart has always tried to find ways to strengthen its supply chain management with its in-house logistics arm EKart.
But, with the increasing number of Indians getting into the obsession with shopping online, the question has always been-
How will Flipkart gonna keep up the pace of delivering products with faster speed and higher accuracy, something that has always been the strength of Amazon?
Walmart, on the other hand, has arguably had the highest sales per square foot and inventory turnover for the past ten years.
Need Proof?
Walmart, at any given time, operates more than 11,000 stores in 27 countries around the world and manages an average of $32 billion in inventory.
So, with these two giants coming together, there is a high probability that the packaging, warehousing, and logistics will become far more organized, addressing the major pain point of the consumers living in Tier II and Tier III cities in India.
Increase in the number of discounts and deals for the online shoppers:
With Walmart coming into the picture and having a history of being extra-selective in picking up sellers, there will be a huge competition for prices.
This, in turn, will lead to less room for dubious businesses getting registered and selling sub-standard materials at huge discounts, impacting consumer purchase in a positive way.
Also, customers should prepare themselves to see a huge influx of online-exclusive deals from Flipkart.
The whole stunt of putting up massive discounts would now be more effectively executed because of the millions of dollars absorbed from the acquisition.
Globally, Walmart has been known to offer low prices to the customers through its efficient operations.
In fact, according to Aravind of Technopark,
One of the strategies of Walmart is ‘Every Day Low Pricing’ (EDLP), which is a result of a perfect sync in sourcing, supply chain, and frontend operations.
This will help the e-commerce giant push goods at a much faster rate and cater to the remote audience within a short span of time, thus fighting neck-to-neck with its rival Amazon.
Grocery at the doorstep:
Amazon is already an established player in the digital retail market. It has unlocked its first step towards establishing the future of grocery by taking up the ownership of Whole Foods.
Flipkart on the other hand, couldn’t do much in this section despite a lot of efforts and prior investment of 460$ million into E-kart.
It would be interesting to see how Walmart, who is already an established name and is among the largest procurer of perishable-produce and fresh items can add a different color to Flipkart’s effort in trying to reinvent the retail business.
But, one thing is certain. All this competitive tussle would certainly give end users a merry time.
They would be able to grocery shop online more often, up from one-two purchases a year to multiple purchases a month.
Conclusion:
Over the last decade, the Indian startup system has seen several ups and downs with the growth of Flipkart and has had a personal connection with the brand’s success story.
We don’t know yet what can be the later impacts of this acquisition but this is for sure that things will change as two biggest competitors in the online world come neck to neck.
Now, whether the change is good or bad, that is something that we will have to see.