According to Adscholars, E-commerce or Electronic commerce is a digital method to sell goods, and conduct transactions using the Internet. Usually, a customer purchasing goods online and making digital transactions are known as the cyber consumer.
Since the arrival of e-commerce in the digital market, retail outlets have struggled to earn their bread. There are several reasons responsible for the widespread e-commerce business model.
In just a short period of 14-years, e-commerce has expanded its wings and overshadowed every other form of commerce business. The reasons being; the availability of products at customer doorsteps, a wide range of product selection, easy return, and many more.
These days it’s chaos, with so many options to choose from, options available for self-development like Shopify, Squarespace, BigCommerce, etc. They have populated the landscape of e-commerce. The techniques of SEO are changing rapidly, and the need for the custom build website is also changing. Therefore in these times of increasing demands and a continuously evolving world, one must play smart to get what they desire.
In the time of COVID, the e-commerce market has deepened its roots, attracting more customers every day. According to an estimation, the revenue of the e-commerce model will increase many folds, attaining a revenue benchmark of $638 billion only in the US.
The year 2021 is expecting an increase in the customers on the digital platform. It is estimated to reach up to 2.14 billion. Amongst all products, Footwears, apparels, and accessories will be the major contributors; contributing up to an increase of $123 million in the year 2022.
According to a survey, an average shopper is spending almost 36% of their budget on the online market.
There has never been an easier time in history to build a business PERIOD.
The cost of entry is lower than ever before. The ability to access & qualify experts is much easier. The ability to speak directly to your customers and make adjustments has never been easier.
– Eric Carlson, Co-Founder, 10x Factory
For the basic understanding of the terminology, let us say that e-commerce, also known as electronic commerce, is the purchase and selling of goods through the Internet.
There are several tools and technologies available on the mobile network which can help you to achieve this goal. It is much easier for mobile users to make the transaction using various transaction techniques.
The well-equipped E-commerce portals are utilized, to perform activities of online marketing, monitoring of sales activities, and even helps in overseeing the logistics and fulfilment.
While targeting the audience there are certain variations to the business, i.e. the business is divided into segments; these segments are mentioned below:
Before starting your own eCommerce business, you must have an understanding of these terms. Below is a brief description of the terms, their operational manner, and behaviour:
Business to Business (B2B): Any transaction made between two business entities comes under the category of Business to Business or B2B. The transaction could be between a retailer and a wholesaler or between the seller and the manufacturer.
It mostly consists of the raw material or bulk purchase of finished products.
Training your customers to use the new B2B tools is important for adoption.
Changing the way some customers do business with you can be a roadblock or a benefit.
Position the change in a way that makes your customers’ lives easier.
– Andy Etemadi, CEO, EYEMAGINE
Business to Consumer (B2C): It is one of the oldest methods in the online trade (E-commerce market). In this market, the customer is approached directly by the businesses. Some of the examples of this model of business are Amazon etc.
Business to Administration (B2A): This method is used for the delivery of goods like legal documents etc. from the businesses to the administration.
Customer to Customer (C2C): This business model is used, for the transactions of goods between the consumers. Examples of such forms of businesses are eBay, Olx, etc.
Customer to Administration (C2A): Here, the customer sells the product to the administration. The products can range from education to the online tax presentation.
Customer to Business (C2B): In this model, the consumer directly interacts or sells its products to the business. Such online business models are Istock, Pinterest, etc.
Although there is an ease in doing business online, there are certain crucial things that one should remember before getting yourself into the business. Let me help you by providing a few points that you can consider before getting started:
Here are the 5 best eCommerce tools that Adscholars suggest to its clients, which they can use to launch their eCommerce website:
Among all the E-commerce applications available, Shopify is the best. It is simple to launch, and their customer service is wonderful. Therefore, whenever you have any issues with the application, their representatives will be there to help you.
Pricing: There are different plans that you can opt for your business. These are Basic Shopify, Shopify, and Advanced Shopify. The price ranges from $29, $79, and $299 for a month.
A brilliant e-commerce product, available for a quick launch of your website is Woocommerce. It is an all-in-one solution for your business and is easy to use.
You can add the functionality of WooCommerce to your WordPress. It equips its user with functionalities to make payments using Stripe, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and many more.
Price: Woocommerce is free for its users. However, if you want to include additional functionalities, plugins in Woocommerce will cost you money. The plugins can cost you up to $300 per installation.
BigCommerce launched in 2009, and since then it has achieved great success across the market. It has its business across more than 120 + countries across the globe. The merchant sale recorded on the platform is more than $25 billion.
Pricing: The plans start from $29.95 for a month. The plus version will cost you $79.95/month and $299.95/month for Pro.
Magento, an eCommerce tool owned by Adobe. It is an all-in-one eCommerce solution. Every year its gross merchandise sale reaches up to $100 billion. The website supports models for all kinds of businesses. These include small business, B2B, and mid-market as well.
Pricing: The tool provides a free demo that you can use for a month. You will have to ask for a custom quote with the sales team to launch your business on the platform.
3DCart is one of the oldest tools available online. It launched in 1997, and there are more than 25,000 merchants who are using this tool to build their eCommerce store.
Price: Five different plans are ranging from $19/month to $299/per month.
Online marketing research is the most crucial step. You must perform thorough research before launching your eCommerce portal. It will give you a clear idea of the demand for your product in the market.
These are the steps that you can follow to conduct efficient marketing research:
Understanding the market is a crucial step to make sure that you achieve success. One of the most important aspects of a successful business is knowing your product well. To do so, you have to understand what your customers desire.
So, it is always better to conduct market research before you get yourself into the business.
There are a few points to remember, if you follow them we can assure you that you can achieve sales and satisfied customers.
Being transparent with the customer is crucial. It helps customers to trust your brand and will result in a long and fruitful relationship.
Well, to make sure that you are selling the right product that will earn you a profit and the customers will like it, look into the following factors which are indeed helpful.
It is good to have a model for your business which generates revenue. However, you must make sure that the model is also considerate about the views of your customer towards your brand.
If the price tag that you put with your products is not appropriate, there is a greater chance that you will lose the business of your customer and they might never return. That is what happens when you don’t have an adequate pricing strategy for your products.
If you are confused about how to price your product appropriately; a Value-based pricing model will be best for you to apply to your business. When it comes to putting a price tag on your product, you can trust the methods of Value-based pricing.
Following are the strategies that people usually follow while deciding the appropriate pricing for your products:
Here are a few things that you want to know about them before you price your product according to these strategies.
Cost-plus pricing: The Cost-plus pricing, is calculated by the formulae, Cost of production + Margin = Cost-plus pricing. However, there is a drawback while deciding the price of your product by this formulae.
Drawback
While deciding the price of your product using this formula, the customer’s perspective is unseen. As you can see, there is no space for the customer’s point of view, which is indeed a bad way for pricing products.
Competitor based pricing: Another way of deciding the price of your product is comparing it, with the product prices of your competitors. The formula for this is simple: Competitor’s price = Your price. Indeed, it is not a way of pricing your products. However, millions are following this formula to price their products.
Drawback
This formula is not a sure shot success formula as you are relying on your competitors for pricing your product. You may think that their prices are reasonable, and decided in taking the customer perspective into mind but you can’t be sure about it and end up losing your business along with your competitors.
Value-first pricing: After conducting in-depth research, Value-first pricing proved to be the best way(strategy) of deciding the price for your products.
If there is one success-proven strategy that helps you to understand the psyche of your customer, determine the price of your product and earn a profit; it is the Value-based pricing technique.
It is crucial to understand the mindset of your audience. You must look into the market research, analyze the prices of your product. At Adscholars we utilize the latest technologies to determine the ongoing trends and provide our customers with well-researched data which can be implemented for the growth of the business.
You can understand your customers better by looking into your customer preferences, their interests in other products, and their mindset towards deals and discounts.
The aim must personify your customer based on lifestyle and create different categories or catalog accordingly.
BigCommerce Analytics
BigCommerce stores can use their BigCommerce Analytics Customer Report to see which customers are buying which items –– and which prices. Then, you can easily create customer groups to personalize a cohort’s site experience based on their behavior.
In other words, do you have a group of people who only buy at a discount? Customize their experience to show discounted prices across the board. Do you have customers who only purchase new items? Send that cohort an email alerting them to new products before anyone else –– and use the customer group to give them a VIP experience.
Collecting feedback for the product will provide you with an insight into the customer mindset. It will also let you know about the reasons they didn’t complete their purchase for a specific item.
There are four crucial points included in this plan. If these points followed for pricing the product, they will benefit you, in providing the product at the best price.
The steps will provide accuracy in fixing the price of your product. You will be able to present your product with confidence, and your customers will also feel empowered while making purchasing.
Today, every merchant is looking for customers for their products. Everyone wants to earn their share of profit and sometimes wants the share of others’ profit too. In this stiff competition and the ongoing fight for the survival of the fittest, it is becoming tough to survive.
However, there is good news for the sellers! The market share of the customers expected to rise at a large scale in the upcoming years. Even for this year, the consumer share has increased tremendously.
But, there is a bigger and better demand generating sector, which only a few have recognized. At Adscholars we predict that the e-commerce market is going to be a big hit in the future and there is still an enormous empty space for new businesses to emerge and conquer the crown!
B2B is a fast developing, and high demand generating model of eCommerce. More people who are entering the business of eCommerce are paying interest in the consumer sector instead of concentrating on the business sector.
The model helps you to quickly create and launch, fulfilling the minimum or early requirement of the market. Initially, the feature on your platform will be limited, just enough to satisfy the current demand of the market.
Then, as you will gain experience in the market, your team of developers can enhance the functionality of your product. Also, the initial product that you are opting to should be simple and quickly acceptable by the customers. However, it is not a necessity that the product needs to be cheap in pricing, it could even be a luxury product, but portable which can be shipped easily to the location.
If you follow your customers carefully, the chances of failing are lesser.
Once the store setup completed, the product decided, and the pricing finalized; finally, you can start promoting your product.
Excited? We know you are!
Well, let’s get an understanding of what are the right marketing strategies that you can follow and how it will help your brand to grow!
Digital marketing is the best platform to market your product. The old conservative days of brochure and pamphlets are history. Now, everything is digital. You must be seeing at least 50 advertisements on your phone daily.
Therefore it is crucial to understand your options.
Ecommerce Advertising is a crucial part of e-commerce marketing. It is indeed an aspiring aspect of e-commerce marketing trends, followed by the leading brands.
Ecommerce Advertising helps you gather customers effectively with minimum efforts. The technique is highly effective, and you can easily create your own space in the e-commerce world.
As you can see, every day, billions of users are surfing on the internet for their needs. Eerie e-commerce businesses are trying to attract them to their website or online store. However, not everyone is following the right strategy or correctly approaching the customers.
Adscholars feels that the right strategy can help you take a leap into a brighter future, leaving your competitors behind. As T. Boonie Pickens stated, ” A fool with a plan is better off than a genius without a plan.”
Let us first give you a quick walk-through about Ecommerce marketing.
E-commerce marketing is broad in its stature. It has several elements or pillars which make provide effectiveness and strength to the model.
Social Media Marketing is a widely used trend for various purposes. However, it is advantageous for E-commerce marketing. As each of us spends a lot of our time scrolling through the social media feeds, it is always interesting to find a product that can be added to the cart while we are scrolling through our feeds.
That is how the SMM works. Therefore, it is very crucial to place your advertisement smartly, and portraying your products to the right audience, as every click counts.
Content is the zest of any marketing strategy. If you have the satisfying content for the website, nothing can stop you from empowering the world of e-commerce.
We discussed earlier, the description of your product plays a crucial role in branding your products and helping your audience to build trust in your brand. That is just one-simple step in content marketing.
Here are a few more things related to the content marketing that comes handy when you are using this tool.
Another aspect of E-commerce marketing is Search Engine Marketing. It includes the paid advertisement for your product as well as the part of Search Engine Optimization.
It includes content optimization according to Google’s algorithm, Pay Per Click (PPC), advertisement campaigns for your product, and the display campaigns.
Email is another effective way to market your product. It is a crucial tool while dealing in the B2B market for the other models of marketing. If used smartly, Email marketing can prove fruitful and providing results.
The technique work as a miracle! However, to achieve WOM, from your customers, you have to gain their trust. Once the customer’s trust is established, on your products, you can easily create a brand name.
There are some methods by which you can achieve this from the initial stages of your business.
Making your product famous and your brand visible to the new audiences can be a tough job. You can not just rely on the Word of the mouth of your customers, at least in the initial stage, for the growth of your product in the market.
It is crucial to gain positive reviews and testimonies from your customers. As it is necessary to make your brand visible to people and make them recognize the potential of your eCommerce business. Therefore, it is where you need the SEO for your website and products.
Google owns a large share of the search engine market. It consists of nearly 72% of the total market, of search engines. Every second, Google experiences 63,000 search queries, and every year this sums up to 2 trillion customers searching for their needs.
Hence it always beneficial to put your trust in Google. Advertising with Google is fun, and the tools provided by Google for SEO are highly efficient and technically outstanding. They let you experience the digital world and provides an insight into the Google algorithm.
Therefore, it is never disappointing to put your bets on Google when trying SEO. However, you will need experts who can help you run the tools according to your needs. That is where we step in!
Here are some features that we have already discussed, but we would like to revisit them as they are crucial to enhance the SEO experience.
Keywords are the key! We have said it earlier, and we will say it a hundred times more. The right keywords result in gaining the visitors, which turn in as customers. Not putting the right keywords will result in the total wastage of money and your valuable time.
There are two types of Keywords. The two keywords are head terms and the Long tail keywords. Let us summarize them for you so that you have an understanding of both.
The website of your company plays a crucial role in making the customer feel confident about your brand. A great website must be properly stacked and should be easy to navigate by the users. The information on your website should have a clear outline and must make the customer stay and explore.
Here we are discussing some points that will surely win the hearts of your customer if followed correctly.
As your product range grows, it gets difficult to arrange them. Therefore, if you follow a proper website architecture, the problem of the arrangement of products will not affect the quality and effectiveness of your website.
Walmart has nearly 23 million pages for its product on the Google domain. Still, they have them arranged effectively so that the customers can navigate through them.
Therefore, the following architecture is essential. Always remember that no matter how many products you have on your website, the user should be able to navigate back to the homepage of your website in just 3-clicks. Yes! That is the secret recipe for a great website.
There is no doubt in saying that Amazon is the whale of the e-commerce business. Entering in eCommerce world will put you in direct competition with the giant. Therefore, to make sure that you face the giant with bravery, and defeat it bravely, you must make sure that you follow some significant measures.
Nearly 44% of the people purchasing goods online prefer Amazon as their first choice. Half of the retail business, in the USA, is occupied by Amazon. According to Jeff, he is just getting started.
Even some of the great names in the market like Google, Walmart, Costco are finding it tough to beat Amazon in this game.
So you must be wondering; what are your chances to beat the unbeatable?
Well, the practical answer to that would be that; you might not be able to beat Amazon in this game!
However, you are independent to play the game with your own rules. Therefore, there are chances that without even defeating Amazon, you might be able to create a brand name for yourself.
Currently, Amazon is an undefeated champion of the eCommerce world. It has nearly 310 million customers, and every day more are getting added to its database. Also, Amazon is selling more than 353 million products on its website. Hence you can not develop a system with such a humongous user base, and capital investment, at least you can not do it overnight. Therefore, the bottom line is that you can not compete with Amazon in infrastructure, discounts, and even when it comes to shipping.
The only segment that is left is an essential factor of service. Most of the merchants suffer to provide it to their customers. The factor is good customer service.
Even Amazon struggles to address this problem for its customers. So, if you will address every issue of your dissatisfied customer, you will be able to build a great user database for your company.
There is a study which shows that nearly 68% of customers leave the company due to the poor customer service provided to them. Therefore it is crucial that you pay undivided attention to your customers if you do not want to end like others.
The game is all about how well you know your customers. Even Amazon keeps records for all of its customers. Using this information, it tries to make sure that it provides its customer with everything that they desire.
By keeping a record of your customer’s movement, you will be able to suggest them with similar, desirable, and relatable products. That is the current phenomenon that is trending, technically known as the Internet of things (IoT).
A former Amazon employee once said that Amazon “has the ability to track both what people are buying as well as what they search for and can’t find.”
If your product range consists of items that are perishable or consumable with time, you can always ask your customers to purchase a subscription for your product. You can even offer them discounts on a monthly or yearly basis.
Research shows that not only this helps in increasing the sales of your product; it also helps to build a strong user database, and gain their loyalty for your brand.
If you succeed in providing satisfactory shipping service to your customer, the customers will always order from your website. The best service factors include fast service (taking minimum time to reach the customer) and a free shipping option.
The people don’t want to pay a shipping fee while purchasing a product online. Therefore, providing a free shipping option is a great step towards better customer service.
E-commerce is the most trending Digital marketing sector and as per the experts’ predictions, it will be the most promising field of business. Therefore, if you are planning to start your own eCommerce, the time is most opportune.
You must make to do in-depth research before you start with the business. As there are different models of eCommerce businesses, you must choose wisely.
The important aspect to make your business visible to the audience is the advertisement strategy. You must implant your advertisement in the market with precision. At Adscholars we believe that a well-placed advertisement can do wonders and bring numerous positive customers.
The field of marketing and advertisement is broad and it has a lot of versatility in its offering to the users. However, if you are new in the field of eCommerce and haven’t decided yet about where to advertise, Adscholars suggest the usage of social media as your first advertisement option. We recommend social media platforms for the advertisement as it is easy to use, and provide wonderful results to the advertisers and marketers.
An effective website will provide you with the strength of your online business. Therefore, you must design your website as an effective tool to attract more customers. The website must be easy to use and should provide customers with clear options and guidance throughout their journey on the website.
The product delivery has to be perfect, and you should think of it as an important aspect of your business. Try to provide multiple delivery options to the consumer. Adscholars recommend their clients to provide the free delivery option to their customers.
Taking feedback from your customers can help you learn your shortcomings in your business model. You have to be upfront to ask your customers to provide feedback. This will not only help your customers to build trust in your business but will also help them to share their experiences with other users and customers. This is the most effective way to win the trust of your customers. You must not fear the bad reviews, the bad reviews are the best teachers, hence embrace them and grow.
Stay available to your customer’s query, providing effective customer support will make the customers believe in you even more. Resolve their issue and make them understand things that they might not be able to understand. As not all the customers who pay are tech-savvy and know how to shop online. You must step into their shoes and understand their requirements and needs. Make sure that your customers don’t feel disregarded or ignored, as this is one of the major reason several businesses lose their valuable customers.
Therefore, if you will apply the right strategies, understand your strength and shortcomings, apply your experience to the business and work with a plan, no one can stop you from being the next Amazon.
Adscholars wishes you the very best for your business and is always there to assist you in every possible way!
