Monthly Archives: June 2022

What Are the Challenges You Might Face as an Ecommerce Brand in 2022 and How to Tackle Them like a Pro?

Owning a business may be difficult, and all business owners encounter obstacles that must be conquered in order to prosper in their sector. Whether you own a physical business and want to experiment with online sales or you’re ready to dive fully into ecommerce, it’s crucial to understand the ecommerce issues you may face.

The pandemic and consecutive events that lasted for over 2 years, accelerated the ecommerce adoption. Ecommerce’s retail market share climbed as much in the first half of 2020 as it had in the previous five years. By 2024, global online revenues are estimated to reach $6.4 trillion. That’s a massive market to possibly profit from.

Here are some of the challenges that might come your way while managing an ecommerce store –

Finding the Proper Market and Doing a Competitive Analysis

E-commerce enterprises may face greater competition than traditional retailers. In most situations, shoppers may compare a company’s items to every other online offering available worldwide, rather than only those retailers or products offered in a specific town or region. A key problem of B2B e-commerce is keeping your company on your clients’ radar. As a result, finding the suitable market and understanding the rivals operating in that area is critical for online retailers.

Faced with Greater Competition

You are not the only one who has noticed a significant increase in ecommerce sales. Many entrepreneurs and wannabe entrepreneurs are taking notice. Despite the fact that new stores are opening on a daily basis, there are still chances to get a competitive advantage.

Unless you’re offering something absolutely unique, you’re certain to have some competition. The trick is to figure out how to set your brand out from the competitors. What unique value propositions do your products provide that set them apart from the competition? Or, if your items are identical to others, how can you differentiate your brand or customer experience?

Finally, you must provide customers a reason not just to choose you above other similar offers, but also to be so pleased with the goods, brand, and experience that they both purchase again and persuade others to do the same.

Providing a Comprehensive Omnichannel Experience

According to research, shoppers are shopping more omnichannel thirsty than ever before. They may initially connect with your business on social media, then conduct pricing research on a marketplace, and lastly make a buy on your website. The key to a successful omnichannel strategy is to not only meet your customers wherever they purchase, but also to provide them with a consistent brand experience across channels.

According to recent BigCommerce and Retail Dive study, 46 percent of retail executives anticipate boosting omnichannel investment in the future, compared to their investment intentions prior to the COVID epidemic.

Marketing, Exposure, and Lead Conversion

Brick-and-mortar stores have an upper hand in catching customers’ attention. Ecommerce brands, on the other hand, might have to struggle to be noticed in the short span of time that a user is online, without spamming them. As an e-commerce firm, you will face a variety of marketing challenges.

Your marketing strategy should focus on increasing internet presence and turning leads into consumers. You should do the following to establish a successful marketing campaign:

• Determine your target market and tailor your messaging to them.
• Keep track of your leads and categorise them accordingly.
• Maintain constant contact with email subscribers.
• Create a consistent brand voice for your social media, website, and other sources.

Cybersecurity Concerns

Cyberattacks may threaten the security of your eCommerce website by infecting it with viruses, and they can also jeopardise the security of your customers’ sensitive data, which can harm your brand’s reputation and push them away for ever.

This scenario is one of the most crucial challenges to overcome in the eCommerce business, and it is undoubtedly one of every eCommerce owner’s worst fears.

Product Refunds & Returns

Product returns provide a difficulty for eCommerce and online merchants due to the increased demand for online sales, since they are prone to worker inefficiencies and worse, refund fraud.

Return fraud occurs when a buyer purchases a high-quality goods, utilises it, but never plans to retain it. In exchange, the consumer requests that the store charge the full retail amount.

Platform Compatibility Issues

One of the biggest challenges for an ecommerce firm lies in making the brand easily accessible at every platform. Whether your customer is using a mobile application or a web browser or their PCs, the website/app should come with equal ease of use on every platform.

Magento is a platform that comes with a solution to issues like platform compatibility, cybersecurity concerns, delivering an omnichannel experience and much more. Migrating to Magento 2 is a good idea if you are looking to run an organised, hassle-free ecommerce firm.

Interested to know more? We suggest you read this blog – https://www.embitel.com/ecommerce-insights/how-magento-2-migration-provides-a-competitive-edge-to-ecommerce-stores

Lack of Physical Inspection

One big problem of eCommerce is that online buyers purchase things without first personally inspecting them.

Many firms are looking at new technologies like as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to obtain a competitive advantage over this eCommerce difficulty.

Augmented reality enables eCommerce brands to show customers what a product would look like in their real space (imagine visualising a sofa in your living room), whereas virtual reality enables showrooms, for example, to allow customers to visualise the product in a virtual setting but from the comfort of their own home.

Logistics Woes

The worldwide pandemic’s state-wide lockdowns have caused a disruption in production, a temporary halt in the movement of completed goods and raw materials, and a scarcity of chips used in automobiles, game consoles, and other devices.

With the worldwide supply chain issue affecting over 169 industries, including the warehousing industry as one of the most affected, it might get overwhelming to tackle this challenge.

Customer Satisfaction

Customer loyalty is a fickle beast. Your firm may struggle if you do not have client loyalty, because obtaining a new customer is five times more expensive than maintaining an existing one. Customer loyalty stems from a seller’s brand integrity and mutual trust with the customer. Because there is no face-to-face connection in an eCommerce shop, building trust and loyalty requires more time and work.

What can be the Solutions to These Challenges?

• Search engine optimization geared at your target demographic, messaging that establishes a planned conversion funnel, and powerful calls-to-action that define the user experience may all increase your website’s conversion rates.
• Review client complaints and conduct customer surveys on a regular basis to evaluate your customer service. As required, update your procedures and rules to guarantee you’re fulfilling client expectations.
• According to an American Express survey, 40% of consumers prefer to speak with a live person on the phone for more complicated concerns such as payment disputes. While providing automated customer care is handy, clients still prefer to speak with a human agent when dealing with complicated financial concerns because they want rapid and correct responses, as opposed to chatbots, which provide a scripted and automated response.
• Making a backup of your whole database and all your information is critical in the eCommerce industry. The usual rule of thumb is that the larger the website, the more frequently it should be backed up
• When you include all costs (including delivery fees) in the pricing of your goods, it becomes more appealing to your buyers.
• Sticking to trusted partner brands can be useful in tackling labour shortages.
• Purchase materials in bulk: Do you require poly mailers (thin plastic envelopes) or bubble wrap for your packaging? When you buy materials in bulk, you may save up to 25%!
• Make your return and refund policy clear: Make sure your clients can readily access thorough information about this in your Terms & Conditions, FAQ sites, and even your checkout page, and that the rules are clear.
• Implement a multi-language website: By providing product information in several languages, you can assist your diversified client base while also opening up your business to previously unreachable target markets.
• Target particular audience segments: Targeting specific audience segments boosts your chances of greater conversion rates and prevents you from spending time or money on consumers who aren’t interested.
• Track your marketing data carefully and keep track of how effective your digital marketing strategies are. If something isn’t functioning, examine it and make changes to make it better.
• Try to make the ecommerce experience as seamless as possible. Starbucks’ loyalty rewards programme is an excellent example of an omnichannel strategy. While the rewards programme is largely administered via the rewards app on a participant’s mobile device, users can fund their rewards account through a variety of methods, including their mobile device or using the website.

Embitel as a Magento Partner Company

Having or establishing an e-commerce store comes with the above discussed challenges. If you’re wondering how to create a flawless and one-of-a-kind user experience, we’ve got you covered. Magento commerce includes a plethora of complex features. Working on an e-store has never been easier, whether it’s updating existing material on your website or offering choices for future development. In addition to providing a personalised online experience, migrating to Magento 2 will improve your website’s speed and performance.

Selected Magento Solution Partners across the world are now offering Magento accelerator solutions. Embitel’s Magento accelerator solutions, also known as Rapid Deployment Packages, are easily affordable to all sorts of enterprises.

If you are looking to partner with a reliable Magento development company for a successful ecommerce journey, drop us a mail at sales@embitel.com

Bottom Line

What is the takeaway from all that we read? Transparency is essential for developing a sustainable online business. Managing your own ecommerce firm for the first time can be a difficult endeavour, especially given the industry’s numerous hurdles. Recognizing the potential problems ahead and planning for each scenario, on the other hand, will help you navigate each issue efficiently.

How E-Commerce Players in South East Asia can Brace Up for Double-Digit Shopping Festivals

The concept of the Double-digit shopping festival takes inspiration from the world-renowned Double 11 or 11.11 shopping festival. The first Double 11 shopping festival was unveiled on November 11th, 2009, as a pilot by its founding member Alibaba Holding Group. The online shopping festival had two clear-cut objectives:

1. Promote and encourage the general public to adopt online shopping as a viable option to meet their materialistic needs.
2. Celebrate singlehood and counter Valentine’s Day in a vastly populated country (China) by offering irresistible discounts and benefits on attractive products.

The 24-hour shopping festival proved to be a masterstroke as the sales figures have witnessed year-on-year exponential growth since the introductory festival. Sales figures surpassed other international shopping festivals such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2013. Moreover, the global pandemic fuelled the apprehension towards conventional shopping, making online shopping far more feasible.

This successful sales strategy, first introduced in Double 11 gave rise to several similar shopping festivals throughout the year, expanding from China to other South-East Asian countries. These shopping festivals are being referred to as Double-Digit Shopping Festivals today.

Competition in Double-Digit Shopping Festivals

As mentioned earlier, the success of the Double 11 shopping festival presented an opportunity for an e-commerce boom. This business opportunity gave rise to several other shopping platforms such as Shopee by Tencent, JD.com, and Douyin.

These shopping festivals compete with Double 11 during the rest of the year. For example, Shopee introduced Shopee 9.9 as a Double-Digit shopping frenzy on September 9th. JD.com directly rivals Alibaba Holding Groups’ shopping platform Tmall with its shopping festival during November. Similarly, several other sales festivals such as 6.6, 7.7, 10.10, and 12.12 have followed suit.

Reasons Behind the Increasing Demand for Double-Digit Shopping Festivals

Sellers at double-digit shopping festivals have quickly adjusted their sales and marketing strategies to match the evolving consumer trends. They do so by:

1. Deep discounts and excellent supply chain: Double-digit shopping festivals give an average consumer repeated opportunities to procure their desired products at discounts up to 90%. A thriving and transparent supply chain due to established trade networks and efficient warehousing has enabled the successful adoption of same-day delivery on products.
2. Wide customer base: The strategy is tailor-made to attract consumers from the higher middle class to the lower class from China and other South-East Asian countries. These consumer groups have the highest population concentration. Also, the rising GDP has resulted in higher consumption power amongst average citizens in China and other South East-Asian countries.
3. Live ecommerce: The response from live-streaming during pre-sales marketing campaigns uncovered the great potential in live e-commerce. E-commerce players have adopted the live streaming approach by employing influencers and limited-time discounts. This sales tactic entices the consumers into buying products immediately, so that they don’t miss out on the discounts.
4. Adopting the Mobile-first approach:  E-commerce players use Mobile-first approach for marketing due to the constantly growing mobile user bases. In 2016, internet users via a cellular device overtook the users via conventional browsing devices such as desktops and laptops. The e-commerce players capitalized on this trend to adopt mobile ecommerce platforms that offer immersive shopping experiences at the customers’ fingertips.
5. Gamification: The next step to creating an immersive shopping experience was introducing games and rewarding the best performers using red packets. Rewarding monetary benefits as traditional red packets instills a feeling of gratitude among the consumers. Gamification, coupled with live-streaming, creates a win-win situation for the user and the brands involved in the shopping festival.
6. Adopting Sustainable Technologies: The rising global environmental concerns have fuelled the dependency on green technologies. The sales of sustainably sourced products such as air-conditioners and apparel have vastly increased. Sustainably-sourced sales highlight the conscious efforts of the stakeholders in lowering carbon emissions and inching closer toward carbon neutrality. Adoption of green supply chain management coupled with sustainable procurement makes the customers feel that they are positively contributing towards the environment.

Players, Brace-Up for the Upcoming Double-Digit Shopping Festivals

Handling overwhelming sales figures during the shopping festivals require a great deal of planning and preparation beforehand. Typically, an e-commerce player needs to prepare for the shopping festival in three stages, pre-sales, sales, and delivery.

Success at each of these three stages is essential to provide a complete shopping experience. For example, during a Double-Digit Shopping festival, an e-commerce player needs to handle traffic surges, peak transaction volumes, and copious amounts of data while ensuring an uninterrupted shopping experience.

Here are some ways in which e-commerce players can brace up for the upcoming shopping festival:

1. Look Out for the current sales trends: A trend analysis is the first and foremost step to optimally planning a sales and marketing strategy for the shopping festival. Using sales trend analysis will help the player focus on a target market and curate a marketing strategy to drive traffic to the e-commerce platform. Google Analytics is the most commonly used software for baseline analysis. To perform deeper sales analysis, one may use dedicated business analytics software such as Adobe Analytics from the Adobe Experience Cloud suite of products.
2. Zhongcao Campaigning and Deal Priming: Using a pre-sales campaigning strategy such as Zhangcao Campaigning (planting grass) means marketing the content related to fashion, food, and cosmetics in advance to spread the word about the product before the sale occurs. Complimentary to this, the product can be promoted by Deal priming, offering a product at a slightly discounted price as a promotion strategy before the actual sales festival.
3. Stocking Up: Just as e-commerce platforms during double-digit shopping festivals need to deal with traffic surges, they also need to fulfill overwhelming volumes of product deliveries. Preparing for the sales festival by stocking up the inventory to rapidly meet the order demands is an essential step to keep a customer happy and possibly retain them.
4. Managing and Tracking Inventory and Deliveries: It is essential to employ inventory management software, integrated with RFID tags, at shopping festival centers and warehouses. This helps in managing stocks of products to enable same-day delivery.
5. Using automated warehouse essentials: Using image processing and IoT for product sorting and dispatching can reduce the dependence on manual assistance improve efficiency.
6. Using Cloud-native technologies: The founding company of the Double-digit shopping festival, Alibaba Holding Group., utilizes its cloud computing platform Aliyun to tackle the problems faced during traffic surges, data management, and user experience. The use of cloud technologies eliminates the need to invest heavily on-premise servers to manage and protect the smooth functioning of the sale. Players can migrate to an ecommerce platform integrated with cloud (such as Adobe Commerce) to improve operational efficiency.
7. Testing the system architecture: The viability of the cloud facility employed needs to be tested by load testing. The system architecture should be tested for extreme/ peak traffic to simulate the system behaviour and performance. The system architecture can also be stress-tested by withholding cloud services, to examine system behaviour and identify single-point-of-failures.
8. Testing Page Speed: Quick refresh rate and page loading speed are two parameters e-commerce websites should never compromise on. A slow page speed could potentially ruin a shopping experience by blocking the chance of finding desirable leads. Hence, it is essential to optimise the performance of your ecommerce store prior to the shopping festival.
9. Optimizing the platform using SEO:Ecommerce players can optimize their website based on keywords related to products to drive more traffic.
10. Simple checkouts: Reducing the number of steps during checkout will help retain sales, prevent cart abandoning and enable a smooth checkout process. A smooth checkout process, paired with reliable customer support and multiple payment options will add to a great user experience.

The sales and marketing strategies used by the players in the Double-digit shopping festival are ever-evolving. Global e-commerce players can use Double-Digit Shopping festivals as reference business models to attract and retain customers on their platforms.

Interview with Digital Experience Head on Customer Experience Scenario

1. What are you currently doing to enhance your customer experience?

-We are applying modern day omnichannel experiences and targeted content marketing which caters to our customers, brings awareness and ensures an unbroken digital journey on any platform they choose to use for their web experience.

• Ensuring deliverables as per the project scope through – weekly summary, reports, meetings, feedback, experience
• Creating predictability and improvements
• ITIL framework
• CMDB
• Dedicated SPOC
• TAT and resolution
• Proposing better and new best practices
• Proposing better ROI and futuristic solutions
• Cloud-based services
• Automation
• Staying focused and engaged
• Being part of their team

 

2. What kind of measures have you taken to ensure customer’s privacy and security?

-Information of the customer is secured in the native geography of the customer’s location. For example, AWS caters to its clients in the APAC region with their localized instances and no longer is data stored or transmitted trans-continental, this not only ensures higher degree of security but also maintains peak performance on large scale usage and installs at customer locations.

• Data security and compliances
• Secured architecture approach for solutions and design
• Security tools for Managed services, development, testing, and hosting
• ISO 27000 standards
• Reports and review
• Maintaining security patches and updates
• Data access retains with customer

 

3. What is your take on automation in digital experience?

-The automation or re-use of digital experience components is vital to the conversion of prospects who interact with brands and their products online. On the delivery front, it ensures a consistent cross-channel experience anywhere at any time. Content that is updated or created is delivered across every touchpoint systematically and native to that venue of consumption for the customers. Data is no longer siloed and is shared across publishing channels, so each part of the digital experience is uniform as it has a 360-degree view of the prospect and tailors the experience accordingly, it helps in adapting to the customer at the right place and at the right time.
 

4. What according to you will be the trend/technology that will rule the roost in the 2022 digital experience and why?

-A trend that has long begun in manufacturing and/or automated machinery to a substantial extent is Industry 4.0, this would begin with the next phase in multiple data collection and/or profiling of customers at the deepest level to serve experiences that are further streamlined and have more relevance to their search and consumption of products and services. While unified experiences do exist, now, post-pandemic, customers would look for less stress-bearing experiences and lesser options to choose from, the mindshare or experience capital will have to be carefully managed and systems that reflect great experiences but are also adept at collecting “experience” data will become more and more relevant.

• AI
• ML
• IoT
• Security
• Cloud consolidation and optimization
• Omnichannel
• Automation
• Hybrid working environment
• Blockchain

 

5. What is the competitive differentiation of Embitel when it comes to digital and customer experience? (Or USP of Embitel that sets it apart from its competitors)

Embitel has long been a market leader in developing/implementing large scale platforms such as AEM, AMC, etc., with the next generation of engineering and consulting prowess more and more customers are now engaging with us for advice/consultation from Day 1 of their digital transformation journey, Embitel now not only implements and maintains the platform of choice for clients but also helps in building those journeys and assets which would become the brand’s lynchpin for its GTM/BD efforts. The ability of Embitel to stay involved from Day 1 and offer insights into a digital launch and day-to-day process augmentation for clients sets it apart from its competitors

• Open for building new services, platforms, solutions as collaboration using the existing or new partner
• Multi-domain experience ranging from – applications, front-end, back-end, cloud services, product engineering, testing, industry-specific solutions, OEM partnerships, automation