How E-Commerce companies can jump-start the competition

Ecommerce has changed our world forever and this change is here to stay. 

Be it products and services, healthcare, real estate, ride-hailing services or e-learning, there is absolutely no barrier that has not been breached by digital selling and buying. No wonder the online sales figures are setting new records every year. 

• $2,411,638 m is the projected global electronic commerce market revenue in 2020
• 6.1% annual CAGR for period 2020-2024
• $3,053,937m is projected market volume by 2024
• 46.6%  is user penetration in 2020 and is expected to hit 60.3% by 2024
• $695.36 is Average Revenue Per User

Source: Statista

Surviving The Competition In The Ecommerce Landscape

With unprecedented growth, comes tremendous opportunity and naturally, every business owner wants to make the best of this scenario. While there is a share of the success-pie for everyone, it also means that your brand has to fight tooth, nails and claws to win the race.

And how do you do this?

You need to have the right arsenal to fight and win the battle!

So, you need to brainstorm research and analyze your own setup along with the competitive landscape. Then, identify ways and means to target your potential leads and improve conversions. You need to effectively strategize the ways to build your brand loyalty and once you build it, it is even harder to maintain it. 

The Action Plan To Jump-Start The Competition

In this era of deep discounts, value-added services and over-spending on ads, you need to have your own foothold. After all, you can’t afford to lose your customers to some jazzy ads or BOGO deals! 

You need a multi-pronged strategy to retain your loyal customers and keep adding new ones. And how exactly do you plan to do this? Let’s see some of the most effective ways and tools to ace the ecommerce race. 

Here we go;

1. Build an Effective Brand Strategy

Your brand is your identity and your story. How your customers connect to your brand pitch can make or break your business.  Brand strategy is a long-term plan and you need to design it carefully to achieve your goals. 

A well-defined and executed brand strategy affects all aspects of a business and is directly connected to consumer needs, emotions, and competitive environments. Your ecommerce brand strategy can position your brand effectively in the eyes of your customers. 

So, to begin with, ask yourself a few questions about your own brand-

• What is your objective? 
• What are your vision and mission?
• How do you wish people to associate with your brand? Say for quality, variety, customer support, exclusiveness, or other features depending on the type of business you have.
• Does your product solve a problem? Say, provide solutions which cater to healthcare, environment, education, travel and more.
• What is the target audience for your brand? Are they young, middle-aged, old? This will greatly reflect on the type of communication with your customers.

Once you have decided the pitch for your ecommerce brand, start creating the narrative. Use social media platforms, blog section on your site and even your product descriptions along with user reviews to gain social proof for your brand. 

StoreHippo provides you with end to end solutions to build an online store and create your brand’s narrative through blogs, social media integration, product descriptions and reviews. 

2. Unique Site Design And Experience

Have you ever landed on a successful and popular site with a shabby design? Think a while! No, you haven’t. Wonder why so? Simply because if your site sucks no customer is going to come and buy from you.

Your website is the face of your brand. So your site design should be unique and cater to the needs of your target customers. Do some brainstorming and first create a great logo for your brand. The logo design and colour should convey meaning and directly relate to the ethos of your brand. 

Then build an online store with an attractive website design. Avoid clutter and make effective use of white space, give detailed product information, keep the checkout page simple, give links, filters, detailed product images, etc. Beautiful website design is bound to impress your customers and bring them back to your store. 

With StoreHippo you can use the inbuilt design tools to make changes to your themes with drag and drop tools. You can also mix and match themes and different elements like header, footer etc to create a totally new look for your website.  

3. Grow Your Business With Mobile Commerce 

M-commerce sales with an average growth rate of 33.8% since 2016, are projected to reach $3.56 trillion by 2021.  By 2021, sales through mobile commerce would reach 54% of total ecommerce. 

It’s pretty clear that more and more customers are moving towards shopping on their mobile phones. Also, there is a large section of online buyers, especially from tier 2& 3 cities who are mobile-only Internet users.

M-commerce has given a boost to impulse buying and better redemption of promo offers and deals. Most of the e-tailers are receiving as much as 70%-80% of their sales from smartphones and tablets. 

Improving your customers’ mobile journey is the easiest way to ensure a wider reach and frequent orders. StoreHippo’s mobile-first technology helps you stay ahead of the competition. When you build an online store with StoreHippo it is a PWA which looks, feels and functions like mobile apps on all devices. Also, you can build your Android and iOS apps right from your admin dashboard at no additional cost.

4. Personalize Customer Experience

We are living in an era of extreme personalization. The whole idea behind keeping your customers loyal is to offer them exactly what they want without them spending time on searching and finding it. 

To implement it on your ecommerce website you will need personalized marketing pages, unified notification to push real-time deals and offers, offers based on browsing history etc. To be able to implement this your store builder should provide the requisite tools to implement these easily.

Remember, do not forget your abandoned cart customers, retarget them by sending emails and preferably offer discounts, freebies or clubbed items at a special price. Such small gestures will make a deep impression of your brand name in the minds of the customers and give an instant recall.

StoreHippo provides unified notifications(push, email, SMS) along with automatic abandoned cart follow up to help you personalize your buyers’ purchase journey. What’s more, you can make any number of marketing pages on the fly with dynamic marketing pages.

5. Attract Buyers With Interactive Content

Content plays a huge role in giving your ecommerce brand a lead over your competitors. Good content not only builds brand awareness but also improves SEO ranking and eventually helps with better conversions.

Apart from a well written SEO-optimized content, add interactive content like images which spin and give a 360-degree view of the product. Load videos with clickable elements to enable customers to learn more about your products. 

This breaks the monotony of viewing only images and makes it interesting for a customer to browse products on the site. Also, this gives them closer to offline shopping experience where they can make a more informed decision.

StoreHippo helps you build an online store and experiment with different content formats. You can upload videos along with 360-degree product view, zoom etc to give a memorable and interactive buying experience that brings better sales.

6. Experiment With Popular Business Models 

Thinking out of the box and experimenting with successful business models like multi vendor marketplace and multi store can give an altogether new dimension to your business.  

The success of Amazon, Flipkart, Alibaba etc. has proven beyond doubt that customers love online marketplaces. The marketplace model helps you scale easily by adding more sellers who bring in more products and competitive pricing. Similarly, the multi store ecommerce model helps with targeted marketing and allows you to cater to the specific needs of your target audience.

You can even combine these two models to create disruptive business models that have the potential to establish your brand as the leader. 

StoreHippo comes with inbuilt solutions for multi vendor marketplace and multi-store. You can also build custom business models, not possible with other ecommerce platforms that require a host of additional plugins and apps.

Conclusion

We have given you an insight on how to differentiate your product or service and give a unique experience to your customers. Staying ahead of the race is easy when you get everything needed to grow your business in one place.

StoreHippo gives you all the tools needed to implement these ideas and strategies. So, what are you waiting for? Build your ecommerce store with StoreHippo to give your brand an edge over your competition. Start now!