Category: E-commerce

How to Use Social Media to Sell More Products Online

May 27, 2016

Social media is now a very important aspect of marketing. No company can choose not to use social media because everyone else is using it already. This is not a new trend that one must be discussing but there are certain things that can be improved with respect to social media marketing in 2016. These techniques will also help to sell more products online. The social networks that one must really focus on are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These three social networks are likely to grow in popularity and with their own advertising platforms, these three social media giants will help you to sell more products, regardless of whom you are selling to. It is to be noted that Instagram is owned by Facebook while Twitter is still an independent entity. If you are looking towards advertising on any of these websites, try to do the ground research first and then attempt to come up with a strategy. There are several ways with which you can use social media tools to sell more products online. Some of them are: 1. Have a Twitter campaign for each product Each product should have a specific Twitter campaign dedicated to it. You can have these campaigns simultaneously for different products. As Twitter has a very lateral narrative approach and people usually do not go back to read what you tweeted hours ago, you will need to be consistent with your approach, which means, tweet repeatedly about the same product in different ways and contexts. 2. Use Facebook carousel ads Facebook’s carousel ads are great for introducing several products at once. It allows you to share 3 to 5 images at one go, so that you can promote all products or related products. This helps you to gain greater mileage than static ads. Facebook carousel ads can be used to showcase services too and if you can produce explainer videos, it is a great idea to incorporate them into your ads. 3. Integrate Instagram into ad campaigns Instagram is used by many companies to engage their audiences. Each time there is an event or some news, share it on Instagram to humanize your company. Do not use Instagram to share your products as that will likely put off your followers. Instead, use Instagram to send your followers to your landing page. 4. Tell your brand story across platforms Your brand’s story must be consistent and must be shared across social platforms. For instance, if you are making a product for men who are looking at gaining mass, create a story that is consistent and publish it on all social channels without being repetitive. This takes the effort of course but a good social media agency will help you to do that. Conclusion Certainly, these techniques are likely to generate a lot of curiosity among users and will likely drive traffic to your website. When you use omni-channel techniques with these social media approaches, you will be able to sell more products, thanks to increased brand awareness. Certainly, 2016 will heavily depend on social platforms to drive sales figures up.  

Read More »

4 Ecommerce Trends in 2016

May 6, 2016

There are a number of trends that are being reported by industry pundits as being symbols of what is to come in 2016, in the area of ecommerce. These ecommerce trends generally involve some amount of mobile integration, multi-channel models, and responsive websites. We have put together certain trends that we feel will rule the roost in 2016 when it comes to ecommerce websites. These trends should help you to get an idea where the industry is heading and how best you can prepare yourself for changes that are ought to occur. Moreover, you might also find inspiration to make changes to your existing ecommerce store, so that you are better able to handle all the changes that may happen this year. 1. Real time analytics Traditional ecommerce analytics has so far been limited to judge what is happening over weeks or at best weeks. Real time and actionable analytics will help you to spot trends instantly so that you know what your customers are doing and what you need to make them buy what you are selling. Customer engagement and actionable management of visitors will help you to increase sales. 2. Online loyalty programs Online loyalty programs will continue to grow in size and stature. It is now common to see that special discounts are given to certain credit or debit card holders. The banks and certain applications may provide further discounts in order to reward a customer’s loyalty. This trend will likely grow in importance and more ecommerce stores will offer loyalty rewards in 2016 and beyond. This may or may not involve debit or credit cards. 3. Deeper into mobile territory There will be a deeper thrust to go mobile among companies. There will be more focus on mobile marketing, app-based targeting, custom app solutions and responsive website designing. More people are using mobile phones and tablets and this means, 2016 will continue to grow as a mobile market, just like 2015 did. We still have not reached a level of plateauing. 4. Omni-channel business model The omnichannel business model understands that people no longer buy just in brick and mortar stores nor do they use their desktops to access ecommerce websites. Instead, they may use mobile websites, applications and even visit brick and mortar stores when they like something on their cellphones. Thus, omnichannel business model brings a seamless and integrated shopping experience to shoppers so that there are no abandoned carts. Going omnichannel will likely be a big priority for most businesses in 2016. Points to remember As seen above, it is quite clear that there will be a focus on real-time analytics in 2016. Companies will begin to observe how their customers behave while purchasing. Online loyalty programs will also continue to grow in popularity. They may even grow to become more complex and embedded in ecommerce marketing strategies. Companies will also trudge ahead towards a mobile-first approach while omnichannel business model will likely be the new buzzword all year long. If you are looking for success in 2016, be sure to follow these trends.

Read More »

How Magento Can Kick-start Your E-commerce Store

April 4, 2016

If you were planning to start an online store or an E-commerce website, you might probably be thinking about Magento. Magento is an open source E-commerce platform that holds a market share of almost 30%. It is known for its versatility, ease of use and security. With PHP programming language as its base, Magento has come a long way from the initial days when it was released by a company called Varien in 2008. This open source platform has really grown in the last few years and is currently one of the most popular platforms. In this article, let us take a look at how Magento can help you to kick-start your Ecommerce store: 1. Magento is versatile Magento as a platform is very versatile. You can easily design your store the way you want. It can also be set up for a small or a large store. It can handle complexities of all kinds, making it truly versatile. 2. Magento is affordable Being an open source platform, Magento is affordable. It might cost you money to get it installed by independent professionals but the software itself does not cost any money. It is important to note that Magento also does not require a lot of maintenance, additionally cutting down your expenses. 3. It is user-friendly Magento is very user-friendly and comes with an interface that is easy to handle. You do not have to be a professional to tweak it though it helps to hire one. It can be easily used by even those who do not have any particular software skills. If you are looking for an Ecommerce platform that is simple and easy to use, Magento serves the purpose. 4. It is business friendly and can be customized Magento comes with a number of business features that will appeal to companies. It has easy cart systems and checkout processes that will ensure that more products are sold, rather than be left behind in shopping carts. Moreover, it can easily be customized to suit your needs and tastes. 5. Magento is highly secure When it comes to online shopping all of us are worried about security. Magento ensures that your new store is as secure as those that have been around for a long time. With its focus on digital security and privacy, you can have a sigh of relief and continue to build your E-commerce store, always knowing that your customers’ details are safely stored. Looking forward As seen from the points described above, Magento is one of the most popular E-commerce solutions in the world today. It is an open source program that is cost-effective and user-friendly. It also comes with business features and if you need more, you can always get it customized by professionals. Most importantly, Magento provides the kind of security that is required for a fledgling E-commerce start-up. Indeed, it continues to be preferred by most small and medium business all around the world. In short, if you are looking at starting an E-commerce website or a simple online store, Magento will do what is required for your goal.

Read More »

Advantages of being a part of Magento Ecosystem in India

November 23, 2015

Magento is an open-source content management system specially designed for e-commerce web sites. This magnificent software was developed by Varien, a US based company and was launched in March 2008. According to research done by aheadWorks in October 2014, Magento’s market share among the 30 most popular e-commerce platforms is about 30%. Magento is a resourceful platform with a flexible cart system, gives the website owner good control over the look, content and functionality of their e-store. It acts as a powerful marketing tool, facilitates search engine optimization and catalog-management tools. It is available in various editions ranging from open source to large-scale enterprise SaaS based systems. Why companies must choose it? Magento has been specifically designed keeping in mind the need of e-commerce businesses. Businesses of all sizes use Magento to their advantage. Some big names using Magento include Samsung, Olympus, Men’s Health, Nestle, Nike etc. Though WordPress and Drupal are the closest competitors of Magento, over the years Magento has formed its niche as e-commerce. Magento has a lot to offer as it is highly scalable by allowing e-store owners to host few products to thousands of products. A number of plug-ins and themes are available to enhance the customer experience. Though every e-store needs to be configured according to the needs of the business, Magento is always a great choice when it comes to custom functionality. Following are some of the most important reasons to use Magento-based e-commerce website. 1.  Open-source CMS The best thing about Magento is that its Community Edition is available for free. It is can be installed and exploited the way you want to. New features can be added to achieve required functionality by installing Magento extensions which are easily available through Magento Connect. A huge developer community across the world is constantly working on it to improve the security, usability and experience of the users on a Magento website. 2.  E-commerce is the USP Magento is considered superior than all the leading CMS today as its e-commerce solution is the best with hoards of features and specifications suitable for a fully functional website. 3.  Scalability Magento website can be scaled up or down depending upon the customers being served or the traffic on the website. The demand for scalability rises with the growth of the business and Magento always lives up to more than your expectations. 4.  Remarkable performance A Magento website guarantees high performance especially high page load speed, query processing and related performance parameters to make sure that visitors don’t abandon the website.  These parameters play a key role for any website especially when the share of traffic coming from mobile devices is increasing rapidly. Furthermore, Magento utilizes high-end caching techniques like Varnish so that e-commerce companies are left with no reason to grumble about. 5.  Flexibility Magento enables the website designers to create unique user experiences irrespective of the device they use to access the website. Magento is a flexible platform enabling you to add customized back-end workflows to meet specific business requirements. The look and performance of your website are in complete control. 6.  Multi-tenant capability Magento is highly capable to create multiple online stores. It gives you full control of your inventory, billing, customer information and records from a single admin dashboard. 7.  Seamless integration With Magento, you don’t have to worry about third party integration. It is enabled to integrate seamlessly with payment gateways, database applications, shipping services, tracking, customer orders and so on. Integration makes the whole transaction process very smooth, starting from user placing the order till the fund transfer to your bank account. 8.  Magento is SEO-friendly Magento website had to be SEO-friendly considering that it is used specifically for selling products. Every Magento website has set of preloaded features like search engine friendly URLs, site maps, layered navigation, meta-tags, meta-descriptions etc. 9.  Mobile commerce friendly Mobile shopping is on the rise, thanks to the growing internet penetration and increase in the number of smartphone users. Magento incorporates multiple HTML5 capabilities to facilitate incredible shopping experience for mobile users. What are the various features of Magento CMS? Magento is the fastest growing CMS in the market for e-commerce websites. It is a feature-rich CMS platform broadly subdivided into Magento Community Edition and Magento Enterprise Edition (includes exclusive features).  Following are some of the features of Magento in general: 1.  Site Management  It gives you the ability to control multiple websites and e-stores from a single administration panel. The amount of information being shared is completely under the control of store owner. It has a robust administration permission system to a lot specific roles to the users in the organization. It is equipped with various APIs to make third-party integration simple. A number of design templates make it easier for the designer to customize the website. Content can be managed easily with a click of a button. It also enables the store owner to conduct A/B and Multivariate testing with Google Website Optimizer. 2.  Analytics and reporting Magento is integrated Google Analytics to keep a track of visitor metrics. It helps the store owner to generate sales report, enable RSS feed for new orders, generate tax report, abandoned shopping cart report, best viewed and best purchased product report, stock report, total sales invoices and total sales return and a lot of other benefits. 3.  Marketing promotions and tools Magento is quipped to conduct polls and newsletter management. It provides you with a landing page tool for managing campaigns. It enables catalog promotional pricing and flexible coupons aligned with stores, product categories, time period and target customers. Magento offers you free shipping, and bundled product options. Multi-tier pricing for bulk discounts is another sought after feature of Magento.  Magento facilitates up-sells in shopping cart and cross-sells on product pages. Sending wishlist to friend via email or RSS and new items promotional tool are all part of Magento’s marketing ability. 4.  Checkout, payment and shipping Magento enables to have single-page checkout. It is integrated with

Read More »
success-of-ecommerce-in-india

Why Is Ecommerce So Successful In India?

October 26, 2015

E-commerce has become the most exciting sector in India today. With a growing number of aspiring rural and urban internet-connected customers, there is a tremendous scope of online selling. There is a huge one-time customer base in India. The concept of e-commerce is not new to India. Domestic players like Rediff Shopping, Yahoo! Shopping, Indiatimes Shopping, Sify Shopping and HomeShop18 have been in the market since early 2000s; though they figure nowhere close to the top 10 players in India today. The chief reason is their failure to sense the market demand, limited product catalogue and skewed focus towards sellers rather than consumers. Moreover, the consumer sentiment was also not so strong at that time due to lack of trustworthiness for buying online. Winds of change However, over a last couple of years, the ecommerce market has drastically evolved witnessing an influx of start-up companies. Currently, Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal are the market leaders. Flipkart grew at the rate of 476% in terms of goods sold in the year 2012-2013 which clearly is a sign of aggressiveness in the market. But with growing internet connectivity in tier-II, tier-III and rural areas, the number of internet users is rising exponentially. According to an estimation by Gartner, India’s ecommerce market is expected to reach $6 billion by the end of 2015. According to Goldman Sachs, India’s ecommerce market will account for 2.5% of India’s GDP by 2030 and expected to touch $300 billion. Global players like Amazon and Alibaba have entered the market to reap the advantage of this huge market potential. What makes India an attractive destination for operating ecommerce shops? The following article will profoundly analyze the story of ecommerce success in India. 1. Changing consumer demographics According to a report released by UN in November 2014, with 356 million 10-24 year-olds, India has the world’s largest youth population despite having a smaller population than China. India is prepared to include 300 million new online shoppers in the next 15 years. With increasing online mobile penetration, India is hooked to have the second-largest digital population in the world by 2030 followed by China. Changing consumer demographics with high disposable income both in urban and rural areas has become the driving force in ecommerce growth. It has led to bigger online order sizes and changes in consumer lifestyle. Besides that, consumer purchase behavior has evolved significantly especially in tier-II and tier-III cities. The idea of sitting at home, comparing prices and product features has excited the Indian users by enhancing their shopping experience. After travel; apparel and electronics remain the most popular categories people prefer to buy online. 2. Telecom infrastructure The internet penetration and the number of broadband users are increasing rapidly. According to Google India, Indian internet user base is likely to touch 500 million by 2018-19 which will stoke Indian economy beyond measure. The number of internet users surpassed 300 million in December 2013. India Inc. has pumped a lot of money into spectrums and building telecom infrastructure to provide 3G internet to 25-30% of the population. Moreover, 4G internet has already become a reality in India with the introduction of Airtel 4G services in Vishakhapatnam. It will give a much desired thrust across India once services are initiated in different cities. 3. Proliferation of internet-enabled devices Increasing adoption of devices like smartphones, tablets and laptops has contributed significantly towards ecommerce growth. Moreover, 3G-enabled smartphones are available in the market at highly affordable rates. According to research firm Gfk, the total mobile phone sales in India was recorded at 200 million units in 2014 and smartphones comprised more than 25% share at 53 million units. Globally, India is seen as the fastest growing smartphone market especially due to falling prices of smartphones and impetus towards smartphones from feature phones. 4. Exponential growth in mobile application market With increasing mobile internet connectivity and growth of smartphone users in India, m-commerce is a major contributing factor towards the success of the sector. Remarkable growth witnessed by online mobile medium is slated to overtake ecommerce in few years. The increase in mobile application download to access e-retailers is solid testimony. According to a KPMG report, it is estimated that mobile application download would grow six-fold by the end of 2015 touching 9 billion apps. Moreover, India has been the fastest growing mobile app market consecutively in 2013 and 2014. The growth in mobile app market is so high that many ecommerce companies are considering discontinuing their full-fledged websites to focus solely upon mobile platform. 5. Evolving payment landscape Indian economy largely runs on liquid cash basis. Most Indians do not trust to make payments online because online transaction is a relatively new concept here. Also, payment gateways have also not been very effective due to high transaction failure rate. This made it imperative for ecommerce companies to introduce cash-on-delivery. Around 60% of total trade happens in cash-on-delivery mode only, according to Goldman Sachs report. Apart from that, ecommerce companies and banks are devising new methods of making online payments. Launch of digital wallets like Mobikwik, Pockets, Airtel money has instilled a level of confidence among consumers and is finding rapid acceptance. 6. Fierce competition The competition in ecommerce has become too intense with leading players adopting aggressive selling strategies. Most ecommerce companies are capable of spending big. The customer acquisition cost is running high. Companies are playing on volume trade and are incurring operational losses. They are offering deep discounts far below the MRP making it a lucrative offer for consumers. Free shipping further adorns the offer. All this is being done to acquire the majority market share. 7. Cultural factors India, the leading emerging market in the world, has a population desperately looking for access to consumer goods at competitive prices. The ecommerce in India is largely classified into travel, e-retail and online classified. The travel trade is composed of flight, rail, bus and hotel bookings while the online classified is broadly subdivided into job, real estate and matrimonial

Read More »

Ecommerce in India – What is in Store for the Future?

October 5, 2015

Ecommerce is thriving in India. All thanks to the booming online retail industry that defies the slow economic growth and spiraling inflation. Advanced technologies and web applications with safe transaction assurance are giving enough reasons to the new age Indian buyers to shop online.  According to eTailing India research, ‘Indian Ecommerce Market will reach $90 billion by 2019. Gartner predicts that by 2016, online shopper base will grow almost three times to 100 million compared to 35 million at present, and over half of the new buyers would be from Tier I and Tier II cities. Besides, the growing middle class and the purchasing power of young consumers are driving the growth of the online retail industry like never before. This makes India one of the fastest- growing eCommerce markets in Asia-pacific region. Big Retailers are going Online The partnership between Amazon and Future Group owned by Big Bazaar or Snapdeal and Croma is no more a partnership between two retailers but has expanded to a vendor or technology partner aiming to offer logistics and technological services. Besides, both Reliance retail and Shoppers Stop are also planning to launch their eCommerce sites and revamp their digital platform to reach as many as their target group. Retail Ecommerce Sale in India from 2012-2018 The competition is getting fired up with almost all online businesses trying to discover and promote something new every now and then. So the question arises as ‘How do all of them survive?’ Is it through variation in products or through sales and coupons? Undoubtedly, these are significant part of the business; however, the future holds something more creative than these. 7 out of 10 Consumers will Shop via Mobile Percent of Internet Users in India from 2011-2018   Needless to say that internet and mobile devices are changing the way we engage with our daily lives. The change is now visible in the online shopping behavior. With 975 million mobile phone connections in India and penetration at 140 per cent in urban areas, eCommerce businesses are seeing apps as the way to push sales, with some even planning to make it a delivery platform.  Smart devices account for approximately 50% of traffic for all marketplaces. A year ago, mobile traffic accounted for less than 10% of the entire traffic to FlipKart, however, the figure rose to 50% in recent times. Similarly, Snapdeal is the market leader with nearly 65% of its total orders coming through mobile devices. The increasing affordability and accessibility of internet connections is drastically boosting mCommerce. Innovation at its Best   P.C. Ispr.info The time is not so far when eCommerce technology will enable us to see, touch and feel online products. Online businesses in India will soon have their virtual fitting rooms where customers can try on outfits and see whether it fits them well or not. Many companies claimed that such a feature can severely reduce the return and refunds and increases the sale massively. Not only this, a few retailers are also investing in developing 3D shopping experience to enable visitors walk through the passageway, converse to a sale representative while choosing products and also make the payment at the virtual cash desk just like offline shopping. Well! ECommerce in India has something more in store for the future. It promises to deliver the products on time based on the customer’s GPS location. Enhanced Logistics   P.C. sanasecurities.com More companies will streamline or re-invent logistics for their eCommerce portals to thrive. Large eCommerce players are focusing on hyper local delivery network or last mile delivery network to boost the product delivery speed. Some of them have already filed exclusive rights for an anticipatory delivery model, which aims at dispatching products to customers even before they’ve ordered for it, thereby reducing shipping time. They would even start using new delivery model which will use the highly technically embedded drones or helicopters for instant delivery of items. Many other eCommerce companies are also thinking of using crowdsourced delivery services. Although expensive, crowdsourced models can be an excellent facility when it comes to delivering products as it can alert a pre qualified driver of a pending delivery through the use of smartphone app. The supply chain has improved significantly and e-tailers are even leveraging on the services of Indian Post for greater reach across the country. Besides, online ventures are also trying their best to overcome one of the biggest drawbacks of being unable to collect the delivery if buyers are not at home. Ecommerce companies are installing personalized lockers just like your own mailboxes. This locker will be electronically locked with a password along with camera surveillance. Some more Apps Awaiting   P.C. Scanova.io QR Code shopping culture is gaining momentum. Online merchants with an aim to make the most crowded places like bus stops, metro stations or trade centers convert into shop windows with paper copies of the actual store products are using this machine readable code in their advertisements. This enables prospective buyers to scan them and reach the relevant landing page to place an order.   P.C. passcomms.com While QR codes will allow for immediate purchasing decisions, biometric sensor will allow for immediate payment for the chosen items. This will become a fast and secured one-tap purchasing mode making biometric shopping go mainstream in the near future.   P.C. addontechnologies.net Decision made via QR code and payment done with a finger touch, soon products will get delivered based on the GPS location tracking. This is going to drive a demand for GPS tracking apps to allow easy delivery of ordered products at any location. Don’t be surprised if you find varieties of pickles getting sold online. The growing popularity of online shopping is encouraging retailers to be in a much larger and more competitive landscape to sell their products. With innovation becoming the new strength, entrepreneurs are coming up with clutter-breaking ideas to create new verticals. No wonder, the cost of building eCommerce sites will drop, but the cost of

Read More »

Facebook Updates Pages with Shopping and Service Sections

September 23, 2015

Facebook has done it again. This time it has made much easier for brands to display their products and services on their Facebook Page.  Facebook has introduced two new sections – “Shopping and Services” to make your Facebook Page more complete than ever. Businesses can not only feature their merchandise directly on Facebook but also can offer their services. “Shopping and Service” On Facebook Page This is indeed a great opportunity for businesses to transform their Facebook Pages into online shop, inviting and engaging more target audiences’. Market experts predict that these sections will be a super-hit in an instant. “Shopping” will allow users to convert into customers on the page and assures a bump in ROI and an increase in sales. While the “Services” section is set to allow brands to showcase exactly what they can do for prospective clients and customers. When brands can highlight their credentials and detail of what they offers, lead generation from an active Facebook community are set to amplify drastically. Facebook Partnered with Shopify The company has already partnered with eCommerce service Shopify, to help merchants who use Shopify’s service to sell their products directly in the ‘Shop’ section on Facebook Page.  Clicks on the products will take the users either to the Store’s website or let them check out directly on Facebook. The transaction tracking and payment processing will be managed by Shopify. This is one of the ways Facebook is making itself into a kind of online mall. “Our goal is to make it easy to sell products where the customers are,” says Shopify’s director of product, Satish Kanwar, “and increasingly that’s on mobile.” Some More Updates The company is also allowing Page administrators more control over how they interact with their target audience through Facebook. Besides, the administrators can also respond to the common questions through a “Saved reply” option while the “Reply Privately” feature allows them to make private replies to public comments. The company says, these new sections and more call-to-action options will make Facebook the ultimate place to shop online and survey for services.  Company’s Mission Facebook emphasized that no matter if you’re a non-profit organization, a cake shop or a big brand, your Facebook Page should hold the relevant information people are looking for. It believes that certainly this will enable better communication with the customers and support business goals. The updates are meant to customize companies’ Facebook presence based on the type of businesses they are in. For Facebook, shopping is just another thing you do in the real world. Facebook doesn’t just want to be your friend. It wishes to become your world.

Read More »

Magento’s Success in India – An Analysis

September 18, 2015

An ASSOCHAM-Deloitte study states that  e-commerce in India is set to reach $16 billion mark by the end of 2015 on the backdrop of growing internet penetration and rise in the number of online shoppers. The online travel industry accounts for more than 60% of ecommerce share in India. Smartphones today represent 35% of the total mobile phone market in India. Internet penetration has already surpassed 300 million users in 2014. Apps are revenue drivers Exploitation of mobile applications is rising as apps are major revenue drivers especially for large companies. Indian market has witnessed a spurt in the entry of global players. Development of secured payment gateways and innovation in mobile technology are other contributing factors towards ecommerce growth in India. Products being offered at very low price in comparison to traditional retail stores are a major game changer for price-conscious Indian population. Convenience, of course, is the underlying benefit of ecommerce. Majority of the start-ups springing up today are focused on digital platform and are trying to sell their products and services through their ecommerce stores. However, ecommerce in India is evolving fast beyond cheap products by offering convenience, high quality products, rich user experience, personalization of products, and excellent customer service. Ecommerce startups are changing the face of Indian merchandising and marketing business. Every ecommerce store needs a platform for operating a website. Choosing the right ecommerce platform is crucial to ecommerce store’s success. Magento, an open-source content management platform has witnessed huge success in India. Many leading ecommerce giants and startup companies are choosing Magento to build their e-stores. It gives a lot of customization and control to the e-store owner. Why is Magento so popular among ecommerce companies? There is no doubt that Magento has achieved a remarkable success in India and across the globe. Being an open-source platform, a huge developer community is always working towards improving the experience of its users. Magento is free to install and download. While the enterprise edition is paid owing to additional amount of security features offered against security threats. It allows you to download extensions from Magento Connect marketplace after the coding begins. This increases flexibility of improvising source code in line with the clients’ demands. The perfect suitability of Magento to ecommerce sites is attributed to its various features like customer segmentation, shipping facilities, vendor and CMS management, tracking facilities for cross-selling/up-selling and ease of product bundling. Magento offers you the freedom of hosting on any system. It allows the website owner to choose a hosting platform that suits their needs. Magneto is highly scalable. A large number of products can be easily added to the existing line of products without putting extra pressure on your pocket. It can be tailored to the needs of online retailers. You don’t have to be a big e-retail giant to run it as Magento provides you the ability of scaling up or down as per your requirement. Besides all the above benefits, Magento has a great affinity for speed. A Magento website loads at a faster pace as it quickly retrieves data through its powerful caching ability. How startups are using Magento to their benefit? Magento has served as an excellent platform for e-commerce site owners in India. Web developers have shown a keen interest in providing their customers with a safe, easy-to-use and a rich website. They have successfully implemented SEO strategies and ecommerce applications to explore its full potential. Many ecommerce startup companies have achieved remarkable success in a short span of time like FlipKart, Snapdeal, Yepme etc. The ecommerce environment is fully charged up in India and there is a huge demand for online shopping, cropping up from all cities including tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Case studies 1. Neevtech designed a Magento-based online gifting store A Pune-based startup, Giftease Technologies, got their e-store designed on Magento Enterprise edition. Their mission is to make giving gifts a delightful experience for customers. Giftease not only wanted to design the store but have extended server management. Many e-commerce stores in India are unsuccessful because of poor internet connectivity, payment gateway issues, long page load times that triggers abandonment of the website causing poor conversion rate. The solution The e-store integrated with PayU and CCAvenue payment gateways, SMS gateway for order fulfillment through COD option has a custom-built feature to identify shipping carrier based on the location of the customer. Neevtech enabled the company to generate multiple invoices with a single click saving their time and effort. Apart from that, abandoned and failed transactions are followed up with customers automatically over emails. Customers are empowered to search gifts based on occasions, recipients, age-group, price-range etc. Magento enabled Giftease to have a greater control over operations and seamlessly manage the whole website including banners, messages, emails, and shop-by features. The e-store was further set up on AWS cloud to simplify the process of deployment and server management. Giftease was also enabled to generate customized reports on the performance of the e-store. 2.  Magento implementation for an online grocery store KTree Computer Solutions successfully implemented an e-store for online grocery store called foodshoppy.com. The store caters to more than 500 orders a day. Company back office carries out all the operations like purchase, customer support, customer order tracking and payments. The company has a number of warehouses to deliver orders and also do packaging of orders. Being a startup, the company desperately required a rugged ecommerce store to sell their grocery products online and update product prices instantly. The solution KTree made log-in a simpler process. Category search was made easier for customers new to online shopping. Returning customers were encountered with a simplified catalogue. Customers were given a rich shopping experience in the shopping area. Customers were also given the choice of choosing custom delivery slot. Checkout process was made easier to reduce the confusion. All these changes led to exemplary results for the company. The number of daily visitors and conversion rate went up exponentially. Users had a rich

Read More »

The Best Practices of Video Marketing for eCommerce

August 31, 2015

A number of companies are realizing the importance of video marketing when it comes to boosting profits and reaching to a larger target audience. The fact is, many people prefer an audio-visual experience more than a textual one. This is apparently true among younger audiences and those who are unable to read for a long time. For such people, video marketing may seem like a better option. Moreover, very busy people will probably want to watch a 30 second video to understand the crux of the matter than read it. In this article, let us take a look at some of the best practices of video marketing for eCommerce. 1.      Start making explainer videos Explainer videos are videos that offer reasons and explanations as to why an individual  must choose a particular service or product. An advertisement is persuasive but an explainer video is informative and persuasive. It helps to know why we must buy a particular product and how it can be used. Explainer videos briefly describe the uses of explainer videos and ensure that people understand the need for a solution, how it can be solved with a certain product and finally, actually buy that product or service. 2.      Make a paradigm shift from textual content to audio-visual content Most companies still believe that textual content is all that their clients and customers want. This is not quite true. It is a well known fact that people process more information when information is provided in an audio-visual format. This helps people to understand what you are talking about in a very short period of time, instead of having to read through reams of textual content. Moreover, people are gradually realizing that they do not have a lot of time to spend on reading. Thus, they end up watching videos on YouTube, Vine, Vimeo and other websites where one can learn about products. Thus, making the paradigm shift from textual content to video is becoming apparent. 3.      Keep your videos short Videos should be short and sweet. No one really has the time to spend a lot of time on watching your videos, if they run into more than 60 seconds. They simply will get bored of your product and will move on to the next one. If you are making videos to market your products, you should ensure that they are around 30 seconds and that they explain clearly why a person must choose this product over some other product. Short videos help to retain people’s attention, and they will also be able to remember what they watched when they are short. Thus, it is important to keep marketing videos short in order to achieve eCommerce success. 4.      Make videos an important part of your marketing strategy While content writing is still the most important form of our marketing strategy, one must also make videos a part of our marketing strategy. ECommerce sites do not exist in islands. They depend on social shares, viral sharing and conversations on the Internet. For this to happen, a video is the best bet. One can easily make videos a part of a company’s marketing strategy and also save money in the process. There are professional agencies that make explainer  and other forms of videos in a short period of time and will also teach you how to market those videos to boost traffic to your eCommerce website. All that you need to do is include videos as a part of your marketing strategy. Final thoughts Video marketing need not even be expensive. Some of the techniques used in video marketing include using videos instead of blogs and marketing with product videos, video ads and explainer videos. It is important to remember that reading takes a lot more effort and time for people than watching videos. With these factors in background, it is safe to say that a number of companies are looking towards video marketing solutions. Ecommerce websites are particularly interested in video marketing as it helps to showcase products and services in a better light, and in a more sensual way (audio and visual senses). If you wish to increase sales and boost traffic to your website, choosing video marketing may be one of the better options.

Read More »

Do Cloud Based Solutions Benefit Ecommerce Platforms?

August 21, 2015

As the internet continues to democratize information, it has also not failed to revolutionize the eCommerce industry. With the advent of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), eCommerce sector adopted the cloud technology to access big data, analytics and other applications online, from anywhere across the world. The industry implementing the Cloud Technology does not have to depend on physical server as they’re hosted in the Cloud. Why SaaS? SaaS is affordable and easily scalable to drive more traffic. It also enhances the overall product sophistication and customer support experience. They are more technically advanced and capable of hosting global infrastructures. The majority of the SaaS platforms have come a long way in terms of feature richness and customizability. However, to start your store on SaaS, you have to sign up for the service, pay subscription fees in order to launch your website. At the most, taking everything into consideration, it takes approximately 30 days to start your store, as payment gateway integration might take some time. Who does it benefit? Companies Looking for Easy Automation and Assimilation SaaS platform contains API, therefore, customer data, order data and products can be easily manipulated both through inbound and outbound automatically. Such a feature benefits the companies and enables them to develop customization in their ERP infrastructure and allowing them to keep the shopping cart lean and flexible. Companies looking for Ecommerce as a Spoke and not as a Hub If SaaS platform can be used in a broader scale making it connect to the back-office systems and turning it into a simple shopping cart, nothing could be better than this platform as it offers great economy and utility. Companies Looking for Rich Features Any SMB that wish to set up an online store quickly can highly benefit from SaaS platform. SaaS is ideal for organizations wanting to offload the hosting and management tasks of their eCommerce platforms with minimum expenditures. Companies Looking for Great Customer Experience and Contemporary Design When the entire platform is treated as a spoke in an ERP back-office project, SaaS can be redesign and reset in a short period of time. All large SMBs or mid-market companies should update their interface and think of redesigning their store every quarter. How does it benefit your Company? SaaS – Not only Flexible but also Scalable SaaS flexibility allows companies to have complete access to not only the front-end features that are visible to the customers, but also to the complex back-end system integration.  A company needs technology and direction to improve its infrastructure. An improved infrastructure always ensures to convert customers and increase revenue year-over-year. In this respect, SaaS solution takes care of the technology aspect and put experts on their toes, allowing them to redistribute their money to the different sections of their department in order to amplify the brand name and customer service. The Solution is Time-Effective Besides allowing for inexpensive maintenance, cloud-based solution is also time-effective. The majority of the self-hosted solutions, especially in the holiday seasons become unresponsive as they’re unable to cope up with the consumer traffic demands. However, quality SaaS providers offer a whole digital suite to optimize your eCommerce performance. The service provides proper redirects and site hierarchies that make sense to Google’s crawling bot and also ensures that their networks are capable enough to handle peak traffics. Easy Access to Order and Customer Data When an organization can access source code and database directly, they automatically get access to many other internal and external information in several ways, typically for back-up automation and integration purposes. This is undoubtedly, a huge benefit for larger organizations that believe in real-time data mining and want to have access to their own data whenever in need. Proficient Security with Excellent Uptime A SaaS platform always ensures that your store is up and running at top speed. The experienced professionals work hard to maintain a consistent and quality user experience for their clients. The larger SaaS eCommerce platforms enjoy a 99.99% uptime and which stay over many years. Also when it comes to security of a site, software updates and patches to address new vulnerabilities are the common elements required by an eCommerce technology. However, with SaaS solutions, these updates and patches occur automatically, allowing retailers to focus on their business. Managed PCI Compliance Credit card data management is a sensitive and time-consuming subject. Most importantly, managing PCI Compliance, which is a process of ensuring that an eCommerce platform is securely dealing with credit card information, is completely managed by SaaS providers. This complicated task should not be handled by any online retailer in order to prevent errors and confusions. A Streamlined Overall Experience When it is a matter of smooth checkout experience, SaaS platforms provide rigid workflows. They produce a frictionless checkout process, both on mobile and desktop platforms while performing professional A/B test. Also, the flexibility of easily modifying graphics, colors, layouts and updating themes on a SaaS platform allows the online merchants to stay up-to-date with the changing technology. How to go about Creating Ecommerce Site on SaaS? SaaS allows the required ease of getting a site up and running in less than 30 minutes. The basic steps involve  Sign up for the service and create an account  Connect the domain  Enter company information  Add shipping information  Choose the design template  Choose a payment gateway  Select a template  Add your business logo  Add your site content  Add a product It is time to utilize the democratizing capabilities of the internet technologies to increase ROI and grow your business. You’re ready to go with your eCommerce store on Cloud solution now. However, do not forget to include social media accounts, plan for email list, add additional products and promote your site.  

Read More »

Services

Industries

Company

Resources

Press Kit

MENU
Book a free consultation
CONTACT US

Let’s connect!

    Privacy Policy.

    Book a free consultation
    Almost there!

    Download the report

      Privacy Policy.