India’s FMCG trade is dominated by millions of traditional mom and pop stores, despite the large surge in the online retail sector.
But COVID-19 has moved most of the consumers to online for almost everything. The pandemic has impacted the entire business world. Almost every country was locked down to break the chain of coronavirus contamination.
With social distancing being strongly advised, most of the ecommerce services were suspended temporarily, with just the essential item supplies. But the good news is that the FMCG industry has not had an entire fallout like some businesses like travel and hospitality.
During such testing times of pandemic, maintaining business continuity has become a major challenge. If you already have an FMCG online store and are struggling to boost online sales,
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The 5 must-have features you should consider for your online store
1. Mobile-first features to cater maximum customers
According to a Google Survey, over 61% of consumers are likely to leave the site if it is not mobile friendly. Mobile-only users are already exceeding the number of desktop users. And to respond to the customer demands, you need to build an online store with a completely responsive and mobile optimized approach to maximize conversions.
Today, when mobile commerce is the new normal for online businesses. You need a dependable ecommerce platform that allows your customers to shop using their smartphones. Moreover, the platform should have the capability to engage and convert maximum customers with exclusive features. StoreHippo is one such ecommerce platform that can boost the online sales of your FMCG store as it is built on a mobile-first approach. You get a mobile responsive store and also, offer the features to create iOS and Android apps without any additional cost. The exclusive PWA features of StoreHippo is an icing on the cake. It makes your website look, feel, and work like a mobile app on any device.
2. Automated marketing features to boost conversions
Automation has become essential in today’s world of ecommerce. Well, it does not mean robots to work with. When you build an online store, automation means the pre-set triggers to send timely and hyper-relevant messages to customers and delight them. It is totally worth it to be more effective and automate your marketing campaigns for a smoother and more effective process. For example, if a customer abandons the shopping cart, an automated email will encourage the customer to revisit the site and complete the transaction.
And that’s not all. The amazing marketing and promotion features of ecommerce platforms can help you send personalized deals and offer customer-specific discounts. And this is how the marketing automation feature of an ecommerce platform can do wonders for your FMCG online store too. StoreHippo offers all these features and much more to boost your online sales. It provides a strong discount engine that can make life easy for you by giving you simple tools to implement a variety of discounts, coupons and promotions. If the discount engine has advanced features like device-based discount, location base discount etc. you can run various sale offers every day and boost your business growth like never before.
3. Personalization
Nearly 74% of online consumers get annoyed with websites where the content (e.g., ads, offers, promotions) appears irrelevant to their interests. So, it is clear that the days of “spray-and-pray” marketing are gone.
If you want to gain and keep customers, you need to offer high-end personalization. More relevant your offers, the higher the chances they will stay and buy from your FMCG store. But the irony is that you need to have the right tools and features to leverage these features for your store.
You can make your marketing and promotions relevant and highly targeted with StoreHippo. The marketing tools offered by StoreHippo can help you plan a set of marketing strategies for targeted audience groups that increase your overall online sales. It helps you to utilize customers' browsing history, interests, and preferences to send them personalized marketing messages. The powerful discount engine also acts as a power booster to increase your online sales.
4. Better stock and inventory management
The FMCG sector deals with a broad range of products and inventory. And arranging this much inventory requires a lot of resources and effort. While many companies manage the inventory and orders manually, using an ecommerce platform to manage it automatically can help you attract more customers and increase your business revenues. This feature seems to be a regular one but it serves you to increase your operational efficiencies, save a lot of time, and money. The lesser time you take to manage these the more you can focus on analysing, improving and growing your business.
StoreHippo lets you do exactly the same. It helps you to streamline the product management to improve your product visibility, and improvise the inventory management processes. When you build an online store, you need very precise stock and inventory management features. StoreHippo allows you to improve your order accuracy, fulfilment and reduce refunds. It also gives you an insight into your order metrics and helps you plan a better marketing strategy.
5. Integrated payments and shipping to create seamless experience
The seamless logistics and payment processes help you to increase your online sales like never before. While this may seem the last step in creating your online store, you might want to think about it beforehand to create seamless processes for shipping and payments. Selecting the right ecommerce platform helps you integrate the auto-shipment process and payment gateways in no time. The seamless logistics help you to manage order deliveries, shipping discounts, returns, refunds and overall shipping process. While payment gateway for FMCG online stores help receive the money instantly without waiting for cash on delivery payments. It also eliminates the possibilities of fraud and theft.
Selecting StoreHippo can let you get a seamless shipping and payment process without any additional cost. When you build an online store with StoreHippo, you can easily integrate your online store with its one-stop shipping solution, ShipKaro. This helps you to leverage auto-shipment tools like the bulk upload of products to be shipped, real-time tracking of orders that are out for deliveries and arrange scheduled pickups for your carriers. And the payment gateway integration provided by StoreHippo allows customers to make payment from multiple options to make payments like debit cards, credit cards, internet banking, payment wallets, etc. Give a secure and hassle-free shipping and payment experience to your customers with StoreHippo.
How StoreHippo can help you boost your FMCG sales during and after the pandemic?
Now when you have the complete blueprint of FMCG ecommerce sales and exclusive features you need in an ecommerce platform, it is the time to take the plunge. And the best part is that you need not to wait for the pandemic to end, you can get going with your online store today. Creating an amazing FMCG online store can help you leverage business specific features and start selling right away. Our 300+ inbuilt features are not only technologically advanced but also very easy to use. Some of the exclusive features include:
Drag and drop features to create unique online store designs
Powerful marketing and promotion tools that are specific to time, products, deals, customers, and more
SEO tools to optimize your content and overall online store for increased organic online searches
Business process automation features to increase operational efficiency
With a gamut of features for every business process, StoreHippo ensures that your FMCG store has everything you need to boost online sales. Experience our unique features with a 14-day free trial online store today.
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