Monthly Archives: February 2023

Top Three E-commerce Strategies for a Guaranteed Successful Ramadan Online Sales

In the Islamic calendar, the holy month of Ramadan is an audacious test of faith, devotion, and determination. The activities during this month-long occasion revolve around praying, daylight fasting, gift-giving (Eidia), and breaking the fast post-sunset.

To accommodate the holy practices and successfully perform fasting, millions adopt lifestyle changes as a part of their daily routine. One of these lifestyle changes includes waking up as early as 3:30 AM to have the first meal, called Sauhar before commencing the fast. Successfully performing a Ramadan fast is about strategizing your meal intake. The importance of strategizing is not just restricted to people celebrating the festival but is extended to e-commerce stores to meet customer requirements.

During this period, reports suggest that people use e-commerce stores from as early as 4 AM, especially on mobile devices. This not only points towards the growing influence of e-commerce but also its reliability. Due to the growing demand, the competition to gain recognition as a well-established e-commerce store/brand has only increased. Hence, it becomes a priority for online stores to execute a well-planned e-commerce strategy to maximize their profits.

Here is an Early Eidia in the Form of E-commerce Strategies you can Follow During your Journey:

1. Don’t just have a website, build a reliable e-commerce store:

Selecting the right platform to develop your e-commerce store is the first step of the many steps that need addressing. Leveraging robust, secure, and high-performance platforms such as  Magento, SAP Hybris as the foundation of your e-commerce strategy will ensure a robust e-commerce architecture. E-commerce stores made using -performance-oriented and feature-rich platforms are highly customizable. Having a dedicated team with subject matter experts will help you seamlessly deal with these complexities. Partnering with experienced e-commerce strategic consultants will assist you in the following ways:

• Develop customizable solutions to address specific business issues by reaching out to a larger audience using the omnichannel approach.
• Identify the right platform as a part of your e-commerce strategy.
• Get an unbiased opinion in tweaking your e-commerce strategy.
2. Strategize better using Analytics:

Having insights into the website performance gives you the ability of preventive maintenance. Business analytical will provide valuable data and insights to help you make informed business decisions. Here are a few ways it plays a critical role in updating your e-commerce strategy:

• Analyze the metrics for sales and revenue.
• Identify trends and consumption patterns of your buyer and segregate them to aid in setting price points and product offerings.
• Analytical tools help personalize the customer experience by assessing their behaviours and preferences based on the demographics.
• Provide insights on the SEO performance and areas of improvement.
• Consolidate data to aid you in inventory planning and management.
• Assess your e-commerce marketing strategy using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as Ad Clicks, overall traffic, sources of incoming traffic, new and returning traffic, and time spent on the e-commerce store.
3. Content is King, but Marketing is Queen:

To maximize your business growth, curating the right form of content is one of the basic needs. The digital content consumed today is of three types; words, images, and videos. Curating all three types of content based on user demographics is a job half done. The other half, content marketing, is arguably more important as its key objective is reaching out and generating leads. As marketing enables sales, running conventional marketing campaigns can bear a heavy load on your pockets.

Large organizations have dedicated marketing teams to handle marketing actions. However, due to budget differences, small businesses do not give much importance to marketing the product. As the saying goes – every problem has a solution – this problem has a solution too. Automate your marketing campaign to simplify lead generation. Here are four reasons why you should make marketing automation a part of your e-commerce strategy:

• Generate credible leads at a lower TCO and enhanced efficiency rate
• Gain insights on the paths used to access your product information.
• Free up time to nurture leads.
• Make informed decisions based on automated marketing insights.

Plan your E-commerce Strategy and Inventory Around These Product Categories:

Wonder what gets sold the most during Ramadan? Well, the answer is not as simple, e-commerce stores have witnessed a change in consumption patterns during this period. During the initial weeks of Ramadan, the most sold items belong to Food & Beverage and FMCG categories.

Followers cater to lavish meals before and after fasting to maintain festive spirits. However, people celebrating the festival prefer preparing food at home rather than ordering food online. Online stores can use the e-commerce strategy of Quick commerce to cater to customers’ needs.

Due to the short supply lead times, quick commerce based apps and solutions has risen in prominence. If you have a quick commerce store, we advise you to run your business 24*7 in this festive period. Ensure premium packaging as any sort of damage will deter a returning customer.
 

You will experience a traffic surge during the first three weeks of the festival. Shoppers likely start buying Eidia’s and make travel arrangements to join their families during this period as sales have previously spiked by 67%. But sales figures decline after the third week as followers focus on spending time with near and dear ones. Below are the most sought-after products for gifts:

• Clothing and Accessories
• Dry Fruits
• Jewellery
• Perfumes
• Electronic Gadgets
• Beauty Products & Personal hygiene supplies
• Home Decor

Following these e-commerce strategy tips can bulletproof your online sales campaign and reap the festive rewards.

If you are looking to optimize your e-commerce store or mobile app ahead of Ramadan sales, our digital consultants can help you. Drop an email at sales@embitel.com and schedule a one-on-one call so that our consultants can help you with a customized e-commerce roadmap for successful sales this year.

How to Migrate Your Content from Adobe Managed Services to AEM as a Cloud Service

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a cloud service has proven to be a game changer for enterprises using AEM platform and Adobe services. By using AEM cloud services marketing teams can concentrate on innovations and building great experiences much more efficiently. The time saved in planning product upgrades is huge!

Cloud service plays a significant role in bridging modern features and scalability of AEM with the agility of cloud-native frameworks. This facilitates organisations to fulfil user expectations with ease.

We have created this step-by-step guide on how to migrate from Adobe Managed Services (AMS) to AEM as a Cloud Service. This article explains the phased approach that should be taken for this migration.

Launch Process

Adobe has developed a Content Transfer Tool to pass current source content from existing AEM instance (on-premises or AMS) to the target AEM Cloud Service instance.

This tool also transfers users or groups instantaneously.

The new version of the content transfer tool offers benefits such as:

• Self-service method to pull out a migration set only once and share it into multiple environments parallelly.
• Better user experience through loading states, guardrails, and error handling.
• Ingestion logs are preserved and used during troubleshooting.

Pre-requisites

• AEM 6.4+ versions
• 20 TB of repository size
• 25GB Max of total Lucene index size

Setup and Configurations

Content transfer tool is downloaded as a zip file from the Software Distribution Portal. It is deployed as a package via package manager.

Steps

1. Login to experience.adobe.com and go to Experience Manager

2. Go to Cloud Acceleration Manager – Launch button

3. Create your first project

4. Give the Name and description and click on Create. Your project would be created as shown below

5. Clicking on the created project will open the project screen and select the content transfer – click on review

6. Click on create migration set as shown below

7. Provide name and description and click on create.

8. Once after the creation, click on 3 dots and copy extraction key


9. Go to Software Distribution Portal, search, and download content transfer tool package
   

   Make sure you download the latest version.

10. Upload and install the package content-transfer.all-2.0.12.zip on your instance package manager.
11. On your instance Go to Tools – Operations – content migration – content transfer

12. Click on content transfer – create migration set and paste the extraction key which is copied from the cloud acceleration manager

13. This verifies the key and shows the validity after entering the value.
14. Provide the path which needs to be migrated and click on save, which establishes connection between source and target.
    For ex: /content/we-retail
    or
    /content/dam/wknd-events
    in this case.

15. Select the migration set and click on extract.

16. Verify your details in the pop-up with your path and click on extract.

17. Extraction will take some minutes and status will be shown as finished in the extraction status.

18. Go to your cloud acceleration manager in cloud storefront sandbox and verify the migration

19. Paths would be shown when you close the pop-up.
20. Click on Ingestion Jobs – click on New Ingestion – provide the required checkmark values – click create

21. Pick the migration set

22. Select the required server of your environment on sandbox and click on Ingest.

23. You will be able to view migrated content on your AEM cloud service.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that any new application installation brings its own set of challenges.

For a smooth migration to AEM Cloud as a service, you need a team of AEM engineers who are adept at planning the migration end-to-end and handling dynamic situations. If either of them is not in sync then it might lead to ad hoc problems, complete halt in the process functioning, or mismanagement of resources, time and money.

At Embitel, we have a team of skilled AEM specialists with expertise in multi-cloud infrastructure, security, scalable architecture and tools, all types of cloud migrations, and practical risk and compliance management. Reach out to us at sales@embitel.com to explore our AEM success stories.

Author Bio– Chiran Kumar is our Associate Director with an impressive record in Application design and Architecture. For over 11.5 years. He has been at the helm of various digital experience and e-commerce projects for leading software organizations.

Chiran has completed his post-graduation in Computer Applications from Al Ameen College, Bangalore. Apart from work… Chiran loves to nurture his passion for bikes and travelling.

Tips to Outshine your E-commerce Competitors During St. Patrick’s Day

Every so often, it becomes challenging to dedicate time to prep for a festival/event. Online shopping offers customers the luxury of choosing from a wide range of products in the comfort of one’s homes. St. Patrick’s Day is the time to celebrate Irish culture. What’s better than cashing in on the thriving e-commerce industry to get into the festive spirit?

The Irish Diaspora only adds up to 0.06% (80 million) of the global population but recent trends have suggested that one does not have to be Irish to celebrate St. Patrick’s day. Hence, one can expect upwards of 80 million potential customers. E-commerce stores have a golden opportunity to reach new heights for sales figures by cashing in on St. Patrick’s Day. So, e-commerce players, it’s time for you to gear up and embrace the incoming sales rush.

Historic and Cultural Significance:

St. Patrick’s Day plays a crucial role in maintaining the Irish heritage of Ireland’s patron saint, St. Patrick’s life. It is believed that the Patron saint is the prime reason behind the conversion of the Irish to Christians. Over the years, this festival has evolved from celebrating the religious aspects of Christianity to celebrating traditional Irish culture. The colour green holds an unrivalled prominence due to its cultural and political ties.

Categories to Look Out for:

Typically, the main event on this day is the feast filled with Irish delicacies and tank loads of beverages to set a festive tone! On the public front, one can see waves of people dressed in green, actively taking part and enjoying the world-renowned St. Patrick’s Day parades.

The ones who celebrate are all decked up in green clothing and accessories. Based on cultural beliefs, green makes you invisible to mischievous leprechauns. The most sold products during St. Patrick’s Day are mentioned below:

1. Shamrock – Stickers, Keychains, Bottle Openers, etc.,
2. Beer Mugs
3. St. Patrick’s Day-themed T-shirts and accessories.
4. Milk Chocolates in the form of Gold Coins filled in green pouches.
5. Jewellery – Shamrock-shaped earrings, green beaded chains, etc.
6. Green Top Hats
7. Party accessories – Green plastic cups, shamrock decorations, shamrock glasses, bracelets, etc.

The categories that contribute the most are food & beverage, clothing (green clothing), and party supplies.

This festive period provides e-commerce stores with a great opportunity for market growth. Sales forecasts of the past report optimistic figures of upwards of 5 billion USD in the United States alone.

How can Your e-Commerce Business Rake in Impressive Sales Numbers During the Busy Festive Period?

Look no further, as here are the nine different ways e-commerce businesses can gain traction in their stores:

1. Create an appropriate landing page:

A landing page for an e-commerce store aims to entice a potential customer into doing business with them. Vendors with e-commerce websites can customize their landing page to a St. Patrick’s Day-themed page by using green. Another way to incorporate the Irish tradition is using the Leprechauns’ pot of gold instead of a shopping cart as the pot of gold represents the treasure at the end of the rainbow. Avoid using navigation bars on landing pages as they possibly distract customers from any call to action (CTA).

2. Use the Omnichannel strategy to build your presence:

Potential global customers will have access to either a desktop or a mobile device. With technology improving daily, one can expect human dependence on e-commerce to increase heavily. However, e-commerce stores face the issue of providing seamless product access to their customers. Extending your e-commerce service from a website to a mobile application and retail store will instil a feeling of increased accessibility, brand growth, and reliability among customers.

Thus, it is a need, rather than a luxury for online shopping stores to adopt an omnichannel approach.

3. Launching Targeted ad campaigns on Social Media and OTT Platforms:

St. Patrick’s Day was a festival restricted to countries such as Ireland, the United States, Australia, and Canada as the Irish population prominently resided in these regions. Over time, people across the globe began going bonkers over this fun-filled festival. Due to the large demographic, selecting the right channel to publicize your products and services is crucial to maximizing sales.

Social media users have been on the rise ever since its inception and there are nearly 4.59 billion social media users today. Due to this, running ad campaigns on social media stores such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter will be highly beneficial as these social media stores offer ad spaces. People between the ages of 18 – 25 get into party mode. But people between the ages of 30-45 are the ones who make the most purchases, allowing you to run targeted ad campaigns on social media stores.

The number of OTT platform is on a steady rise since COVID-19. Some of the major platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Disney +, and HBO+ have begun running ads to generate additional revenue. Even lesser-known and budding OTT platforms have started tie-ups with brands to run ad campaigns that too at nominal fees as ads are an essential revenue for their functioning. E-commerce Stores and vendors should capitalize on this opportunity to gain brand recognition.

4. Optimizing your Store & products based on relevant keywords:

Grasping a customer’s attention is of prime importance, even more so when you run an e-commerce store. Customers have umpteen options in terms of Stores/websites/apps to choose from due to the huge number of ecommerce stores/apps that are mushrooming each day. But not all stores are optimized for keyword, content performance. So, their existence is not known to Optimizing the e-commerce store or the product based on the high-volume keywords based on the festive season will drive customers to your e-commerce site. Using tools such as SEMrush, SEO Power suite, KWFinder, and google keyword planner will help you choose the best keyword to boost sales. Keyword tools use parameters such as average monthly searches and competition to help you choose the best keyword. Refer to the most sold products to gain insight into the possible keywords for St. Patrick’s Day sales.

5. Inventory planning and management by Integrating an ERP system into your e-commerce Store:

Tracking the existing stock and preparing for order surges is critical for a successful sales campaign. Inventory planning and management become even more essential during St. Patrick’s Day as your business is likely to experience a spike in orders in the days leading to this jolly festival. Employing sales forecasting tools and past shopping guides will help you brace for an intensive festive period.

In addition to the forecasting tools, integrating an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system into your e-commerce Store will give aid you in the following ways:

1. Maintaining adequate inventory by notifying you when it slips below the critical limit.
2. Automatically gather order data and customer information to ease the manual burden on data collection.
3. Provide real-time order tracking updates to customers.
4. Offer customers multiple shipping options based on cost variations.
5. Providing financial analysis of the sales campaign.
6. Create interactive digital catalogues to keep potential customers better informed:

Printed catalogues have been the go-to marketing tool for small businesses. However, this age-old technique has drawbacks as it will only increase costs as your business grows. Creating a digital catalogue rather than a printed catalos will help you access a larger customer base. An added benefit of providing a digital catalogue is keeping the circulation costs bare minimum. Inaccuracies can quickly be edited and re-uploaded in the system in the case of a digital catalos giving you an edge in communicating effectively with your customers. Digital catalo’s can also get designed for access across various devices. It is necessary to keep navigational complexities bare minimum to enhance the user experience.

7. Cultural Sensitivity:

With the cancel culture thriving, your PR and the marketing team need to be cautious of how you publicize your product. A tiny blunder could land your e-commerce business in hot waters. Refrain from posting anything offensive to the slightest of degrees.

8. Create exclusive promo codes for recurring customers to enhance brand loyalty:

Everyone likes to be rewarded, even more so when the reward is monetary. Reward your loyal customers by providing exclusive promo codes and early access to products. Doing so will help you boost your reputation, retain customers, and potentially gain new ones as information about a reward spread like wildfires!

9. Manage traffic surge by optimizing your website and mobile application:

Traffic on your e-commerce is at its peak during sales festivals. Equipping your e-commerce store to handle large traffic leads to a smooth user experience. A smooth user experience leads to a happy customer. Here are three ways to prepare your e-store to withstand these surges:

• Testing the website capabilities: 

Simulating traffic onto your website before a sales festival will help you understand the technical limits of your e-commerce store. Sales festivals of the past suggest that the footfall to the website increases considerably on the days leading to the festival. Prepping to manage traffic well ahead of the sales festival is key to executing a seamless campaign. Load testing/Performance testing tools such as Webload, LoadNinja, and HeadSpin are a few of the many available tools to help gauge your e-store’s performance.

• Refresh Rate and Loading Speed:

Make sure your e-store is quick to respond to the CTA’s as online sales are stressful for the customer. Failing to do so will most likely push a customer to find an alternative store. Keeping the loading speed under two seconds will help keep the customer interested by enhancing user experience. Ensuring this will assist you in securing a better SEO ranking compared to an e-store with a longer loading time. A simple technique to increase loading speed is by compressing your files (both text and images) as large files take longer to load.

• Prioritize website security and user data protection:

Personal data protection is of utmost importance to any internet user. Selling customer information for financial gains is unethical and a major red flag for e-commerce websites. Assuring your customers that you refrain from this unethical practice will increase the legitimacy of your e-store. Having an SSL certificate will ensure customer data protection and boost your credibility as it encrypts the data in transit from the website displayed in the browser to the web server.

Integrating a firewall and an antivirus should be mandatory to minimize security breaches. Additionally, offer and stress upon using 2-step authentication to ensure an additional layer of security.

• Use Caching Plugins:

Caching Plugins are secret tools to optimize your e-store. They speed up the website and improve user experience. Cache plugins store data and files and resulting in a static HTML page. Doing so will result in quickly loaded pages and reduced burden on the servers.

Leverage the gaps left by the retail market and facilitate the needs of the festive season by focusing on the above-mentioned suggestions and target categories. Following them will you gain loyal customers and build a reliable e-commerce store.

If you are looking to optimize your ecommerce store or mobile app ahead of St.Patrick’s day sales season, our digital consultants can help you. Drop an email at sales@embitel.com and schedule a one-on-one call so that our consultants can help you with a customised ecommerce roadmap for successful sales this year.

Are TV Commercials Making a Comeback Through Ecommerce Brands?