Tips to Prepare Your B2C Business for 2020 and beyond

Is your B2C business not performing well in the online world? Are you finding it difficult to cope up with the dynamic technology and trends? It is the perfect time to assess your last year's business performance and look at what 2020 holds ahead.

Years roll, customers evolve, technology advances and businesses have no choice other than adapting to these changes. To stay competitive in the industry, B2C businesses need to ensure that their initiatives meet the evolving needs of customers and match up with dynamic technologies.

To start planning for 2020, look back at 2019 and analyze your previous year plans, major business mistakes and learnings you can take from this year. Once you complete the analysis, remember that you are still in business and that is something to be proud of. This analysis is not to make you realize the mistakes but to gain maximum LEARNINGS and not to repeat them in the future.

Let's look at a few tips that can take your B2C business to the next level in the online competitive business and prepare you to build a sustainable business brand in 2020 and beyond.

1. Ace The Mobile Game

Mobile ecommerce sales are increasing and expected to rise to more than 71% of total ecommerce sales by 2021. Making a mobile-friendly website does not mean that the job is done, you need to focus on the Omni-channel experience of the customers. Another factor is the influence of mobile in buying decision of consumers.

Consider the latest sales figure for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it has already broken all the records. Mobile commerce accounted for over 65% of sales during this time. With the increased use of mobile apps, mobile shopping is at a very high pace and ultimately, increasing the market share of B2C mobile ecommerce. Progressive Web Apps (PWA) is another hot technology trend to bridge the gap between mobile web and native apps. It enables improved mobile experience irrespective of different devices and screen sizes.

The trends of mobile commerce suggest you could miss a lot of customer engagement, sales and loyalty if you fail to optimize your mobile commerce strategy. The online businesses need to adapt mobile ecommerce to sustain in the market and provide an unmatched user experience. Some more reasons to adopt B2C mobile ecommerce are:

•   Multi-channel engagement and shopping
•   Dynamic and personalized offerings
•   High Performance and scalability
•   Faster checkout and better conversions
•   Smart site navigation for enhanced customer satisfaction
•   Mobile image recognition technology
•   Direct sales from social apps

If you are missing out on this major segment of ecommerce sales, StoreHippo can offer you a seamless mobile experience for your customers, bring a larger audience to your online store and improve sales. We are one of the top ecommerce platforms and #1 platform for mobile ecommerce that provides engaging mobile experience to users.

2. Make your content for the customer (the spiders will follow)

To stay competitive in the ecommerce race, it is important to ensure that the content and marketing initiatives are designed with a customer-first approach. Rich customer experience should remain the primary focus of all your marketing campaigns. Some of the examples of trending content are video marketing, voice technology etc. 

Voice technology is making high sounds and is fast becoming one of the most disruptive technologies in the B2C ecommerce world. It provides a great scope for personalization as it connects personally with customers and makes relevant communications. 

Another important form of content is video because it is interactive and communicates with the customers in a fun way. The popularity of videos is giving a major boost to the branding activities for online businesses. The top ecommerce platforms like StoreHippo provides integrated content tools like product video upload, blog engine, ratings, product reviews, integration with social media apps to publish and market your content seamlessly.

3. Smart, Slick, Visually Captivating Design

Opening up an ecommerce store is a prudent solution but you need to make a lot of effort to build online stores and scale up your business.Choosing the right theme is very important for the B2C ecommerce store because the visual elements appeal to the visitors and lead to your online success.

For ecommerce businesses, "First impression is the last impression" as the customers judge the product, services, and post-purchase experience through the online store. And a poorly designed online store will not be able to attract the customer for the second time. So, the theme plays a vital role in leaving an impression on your website visitors. StoreHippo offers visually attractive ecommerce themes that are optimized for various devices. Also, you can easily create your own custom themes with the easy built-in drag and drop tools and feature to mix and match themes. 

4. B2C Painless Payments

We know that frictions in checkout cost us, customers. Implementing a simple payment flow is essential for B2C ecommerce success. Making the online journey of customer painless, smoother, and quicker is a crucial step to ensure that your customers keep coming back. And it is also important to keep up the trust of customers and provide liberty to your customers to choose their preferred payment method. 

When you offer multiple payment options to facilitate your customers, you ensure that not a single conversion opportunity is missed. Easy one-click, secure payment options gives your customers the liberty to order in no time, thus, reducing the chances of card abandonment. 

The payment gateway service of StoreHippo top ecommerce platform offers a host of advanced features like international payment acceptance, 40+ payment options through safe channels, automatic reconciliation, multi-order payment among different sellers, offline payment support for easy remittance through logistics providers, location-based gateways and support for store credit/wallet to maintain customer loyalty.

5. Take Your Business Beyond borders

The global growth of ecommerce is becoming a major retail growth engine and B2C ecommerce is looking for expansion and exploring international markets. Like, one of the growing regions is MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) as it is creating immense growth opportunities for online businesses. Taking your business to global scale leads to better growth but are you skeptical about the expansion process?

StoreHippo top ecommerce platform offers a host of features that make it easy to take your online business to global markets. The advanced features like multi-lingual website (support for 100+ languages), multiple currency payments, location-based pricing, global marketing make it convenient and profitable for ecommerce businesses.

6. Timely Delivery, the Timeless Formula for success

The rising expectations of customers and global expansion of ecommerce led to the increased importance of delivery concerns. Mismanaged logistics can drain the resources of your business and also cause major customer dissatisfaction. B2C ecommerce industry faces various logistics challenges, reachability being one of them. But one of the major challenges is related to the complexity and huge capital involved in the process.  In the ecommerce industry, time is equal to money because customers tend to shop and engage more when they experience fast delivery and hassle-free returns. StoreHippo provides a one-stop logistics solution, ShipKaro to provide an automated and simplified experience to customers. Some top features of ShipKaro include a partnership with zero setup fees, automated logistics process, discounted shipping, multiple logistics partners, and most importantly, sell and ship anywhere in India.

7. Excel with Efficient Operations

Ecommerce is one of the fastest-growing channels and naturally, every business owner wants a bigger piece of the ecommerce pie. At the same time, you need many pre-requisites like visually appealing and responsive website, secured payments, website analytics, customer tracking, ecommerce efficiency and a lot more. It provides seamless buying experience to customers and ultimately drives more loyalty and revenues. Integrating all of these in one solution is a very time consuming process but a one-stop ecommerce platform can support all your business goals. StoreHippo provide complete set of features and tools to start, market and grow your ecommerce business.

8. Think AHEAD, Think BIG

B2C ecommerce is not complicated but it just needs to be well-managed and automated to avoid unnecessary business hassles.  Getting success in an online business is not a matter of luck, but the right mix of business vision, rigorous plan and right technology. With the growing e-commerce competition, it is essential to prepare your ecommerce business for 2020 and beyond. By offering your customers a wide variety of products, seamless payment processes, quick delivery, hassle-free returns, and delightful shopping experience you can ensure that you are not only ahead of your rivals but also claiming a bigger share in the enormous growth of ecommerce.

Increase your customers and grow your business in 2020 with us. Schedule a 14-day FREE trial to capitalize on maximum ecommerce opportunities.