Friday 7 December 2018

How to choose an e-Commerce business model

e-commerce business model

When we talk about e-Commerce business the first thing that comes in our mind is that it is an online commercial or sale transaction that takes place between the supplier and the customer. While the idea of the concept is right, there are more specific factors Involved that categorize e-Commerce into six major types. Each of these types has different features and attribute.

E-Commerce business models

i  Business-to-Business (B2B)
i  Business-to-Consumer (B2C)
i  Consumer-to-Business(C2B)
i  Consumer-to-Consumer(C2C)
i  Business-to-Administration(B2A)
i  Consumer-to-Administration(C2A)

Let’s discuss in brief

1      Business-to-Business(B2B)

If the nature of your products or services is geared towards meeting the needs of business, setting up a B2B strategy is your best bet. Networking and reaching out is a more significant part of this strategy. A big advertising budget does not help much. The most significant challenge you would face is convincing established business that your products or services are an excellent fit for their processes.
The benefit of this e-Commerce business model is that order size are usually large, and repeat orders are widespread if you maintain the quality of your products and services. As an example of a great B2B model is Media Lounge.

     Business-to-Consumer (B2C)

This is the model you should prefer if your products or services are targeted mainly towards individuals. The potential customer finds your website and determines whether your product could address their pinpoints.
After browsing the store, the customer may decide to make an order. As an epitome of a successful B2C business is Portugal Footwear.

Consumer-to-Consumer(C2C)

While B2B and B2B business concepts are familiar, Customer-to-Customer (C2C) is a concept unique to e-Commerce. This is mainly due to the most demanding applications. Such as OLX, Craigslist, and eBay.

These platforms provide authority to their users to trade, buy, sell, and rent products and services. In all transactions, the platforms receive a small commission. This business model is complex and feels the necessity for careful planning to operate. Many platforms are failed, generally due to legal issues.

      Consumer-to-Business(C2B)

Customer-to-Business (C2B) business model is another great concept that is popular mainly due to platforms that consider to freelancers. In C2B, freelance workers perform the tasks provided by clients. Most of these clients are belongs to commercial entities and freelancers are often individuals. In straightforward terms, consider C2B is a sole proprietorship serving the more significant business.

Reverse auction websites, freelance marketplaces, affiliated marketing all form part of this business model. Again, this model requires marketplaces, affiliated marketing all form part of this business model, Again this model requires planning due to the legal complexities involved.

             Business-to-Administration(B2A)

In this kind of e-Commerce transaction, there are dealings between companies and public administration. It encompasses different services, Such as social security, legal documents,  employment and so on.

Consumer-to-Administration(C2A)

 In this e-Commerce model, electronic transactions are carried between individuals and public administration. Some examples are distance learning, Information sharing, electronic tax filing, and many more.

The Primary objective of both the B2A and C2A types of e-Commerce is to Increase flexibility, efficiency, and transparency in public administration.

Conclusion,

As of now, you observed that there are several e-Commerce business models available, each with its own set of advantages. The right thing to do is to analyze all business model properly. Then try to find the best suitable model for your e-Commerce business according to your targeted audience.

Thursday 20 September 2018

Importance of Copy Writing in e-Commerce Business



eCommerce copywriting


An e-commerce business is all about leaving a long-lasting impression on your customer’s mind. And Web Copy plays a crucial role when it comes to leaving a lasting impression; be it bold, quirky, or cute. The type of copy forms the base of your brand. It is also equally important when it comes to conveying the product description. The customers are always curious in knowing how a product works. But unfortunately, many e-commerce sites focus on optimizing the design and layout; and forget about the important aspect of it and that is copywriting. This results in poor conversion rates.

How does Copywriting Affect Conversion Rates?

Copywriting is a skill through which one can:

  • Inform customers about the products, features, and services
  • Evoke actions from the visitors
  • Form a customer-client relationship for a better value to the business

There's a famous example in front of us where the changed copywriting for sales page increased conversion rates up to 103%. And the example is of Encyclopedia Britannica.
Hence, we can conclude the fact that there is a direct connection between copywriting and conversion rates. The better the copy; better are the conversion rates, be it a product description or landing page.

Copywriting for Persuasion

Products and services come with their own unique set of features and benefits. The only thing to do is highlight them for making a great description. For example, people might not be interested in buying a normal kind of wool. But if you say that it is ‘no-itch’ wool then it might sell itself. So, the mere usage of ‘no-itch’ goes a long way in persuading visitors for taking actions.

It is also in the best interest to humanize your e-commerce platform through compelling content. This means showing the uniqueness of your brand personality in your copywriting. It will create a positive vibe for your brand and people will feel better when doing business with you.

Copywriting for Trust

Gaining trust among visitors and customers is not an easy task for any e-commerce business. A business needs to develop a trust in making a reliable and secure purchase, as well as making them assured that the product they are buying is going to satisfy them. The only answer for developing a trust is a great copywriting. And one way to achieve this is by providing testimonials. Although they are written by the customers, they form a great piece of information and source to rely on for the potential customers. 

A survey on product description suggests that a majority of the customers are influenced to make a purchase through quality content and descriptions only. Around 79% of customers never make a purchase if they find information incomplete or inconsistent. So, when it comes to an e-commerce, customers always crave for reliability and that is only achieved through quality copywriting.

Copywriting for Search Optimization

Search engines can make an e-commerce business soar higher and higher. But it can also break a business and it all depends upon the quality of content. Here is an illustration:
Keywordstuffing is bad for SEO. Why is keyword stuffing bad for SEO? Because search engines are too smart to fall for keyword stuffing; keyword stuffing is an SEO trick that doesn’t work. Avoid keyword stuffing for better SEO”. 

A keyword is over-used in the above paragraph. Never over-stuff a site with such keywords as it reduces the readability of the content. It may or may not help a business to rank higher but it definitely forms a bad impression. Such phrases and content are sure shot ways to lose many of your customers. Also, search engines follow some other metrics too to rank your website and that is through backlinks. One can achieve organic links toward a site through a good copywriting.

Another potential threat for an e-commerce business can be duplicated content. Search engines always filter out such content to make sure the search result pages are filled with unique documents. The catch is to write well-formed, unique products descriptions for better results.    

Takeaway:

Apart from design, look and feel, the quality of content and copywriting plays a crucial role in the success of an e-commerce business. One only needs to focus on creating unique pieces of copywriting. 
           
 

Wednesday 12 September 2018

Popular e-commerce platforms to select from for your next online store

 
ecommerce store banner

If you are looking for a popular e-commerce platform to select from for your online store, then you have arrived at the right place. Here, we have enlisted few of the best e-commerce platforms along with their benefits from which you can select according to your project requirements:

Shopify:

Shopify is one of the popular e-commerce platforms with around 5,00,000 online stores. Almost 93% of their customers are satisfied with their e-commerce platform. And there is a reason for these attention-grabbing numbers and that is its versatility in terms of benefits. It also allows its users to signup using a single email address for a free 14-day trial and also gets the store published within the next few hours.

1. Professional Themes

Shopify comes with 100 different professional designs to select for your e-commerce store. It is also open-source meaning several talented designers contribute to creating themes on Shopify. You get the option to select from the free and paid themes as well.

2. 24/7 Support

The best part of using Shopify is the 24/7 support that makes it unique. You can contact Shopify professionals through email, phone or LiveChat. You can even hire Shopify experts to make your store building process smoother than ever.

3. Diverse Payment Options

Shopify is leading in terms of options for the payment processors. It offers support to over 70 different payment processors including the popular ones like PayPal. One can integrate any of these within their store just by adding the details of account with the payment gateway.

BigCommerce:

BigCommerce is suitable for large online stores and the ones that are expecting to grow quickly. This is so because BigCommerce works in accordance with the growth of your online store. The bigger your store gets, the number of tools is available for use.

1. Unique Tools Support

BigCommerce offers several built-in tools to help you promote campaigns, add unlimited product variants, configure shipping and tax, accept payment through 60 different processors, and handle returns.

2. Large App Store

It has an App marketplace that comes second to Shopify. Hundreds of several free and paid apps are available to help your e-commerce store grow.
While BigCommerce is an excellent platform in terms of support for the tools and app store, it also lags behind Shopify in terms of themes. It has a large number of pre-designed themes covering several niches. Yet, it has to come up a long way to beat Shopify in this case.

Weebly:

Weebly is a popular drag-and-drop, user-friendly e-commerce platform. It has comprehensive features to allow you to build a full-fledged online store with much ease. 

1. Simple to use

Weebly allows you to build your e-commerce store in the simplest way possible. So, if you are the one who isn’t much worried about the advanced functionality of the store then this is the best platform for you.

2. Customizable Product Pages

Weebly offers impressive personalization to your product pages. For example, one can create a product page with the main image and add sub-images to it. Another example is its display option for the discounted price. The old price is cut-out to display a new near it. This is an attractive way to increase sales.

3. Wide Payment Options:

Weebly allows you to connect with several different payment processors along with credit card processors like Stripe, Paypal, net, and Square. Also, the process of setting up payment in Weebly is easy and smooth.

Squarespace:

Squarespace is best when it comes to creating image-rich websites. It allows you to create multiple product variants with unlimited support to add products, configure shipping costs and manage your customer mailing lists.

1. High-quality Visuals

Squarespace is the best when it comes to displaying high-quality visuals and images for your products. It also allows you to sell physical and digital products creating a beautiful storefront in terms of appearance. What can be better than a product selling itself through attractive visuals?

2. Cost-effective

Squarespace is less costly and it is a cheaper option than both BigCommerce and Shopify. This platform is best suitable for businesses who want less sophisticated but more straightforward e-commerce solution. 
Squarespace has a limited number of tools available to customize your store. However, if your business requires a simple store to start with, then this platform will cater to your needs. 

Conclusion:

Although the above-mentioned platforms come in the category of being popular e-commerce platforms for your online store, there are several other options too. It depends upon your requirements and factors like mobile optimization, scalability, ease of use, payment options and apps support; to choose the right one.

Saturday 18 August 2018

5 Reasons Why Store Visitors Not Completing a Purchase



E-commerce business is a getting boosted day by day. Increase in the number of mobile and smartphone users plus the advancement in technology have contributed towards the growth of e-commerce. Today, we have an online store for most of our needs. However, not all e-commerce stores can make up to the mark and they lose their sales. Here we are going to discuss 5 most common reasons why store visitors do not complete their purchase. The advises following will help decrease the rate of visitors not making a purchase.

Reasons Why Store Visitors Do Not Complete a Purchase:

1. Unexpected Costs

Most of the time, visitors do not make a purchase owing to the shipping charges or any other extra costs like the tax. 

This is the reason why most of the leading online stores display shipping charge details on most of their pages. Ideally, it should be available on the very first page of the store itself to be viewed by users. However, visitors jump from one page to the other and so it is mandatory to show shipping price on the product listing page or the product page as well along with other pages. This avoids throwing unexpected price to the visitors at the time when they are just about to make the purchase. Most of the stores today use a separate template highlighting ‘Free Shipping’ or ‘Free shipping on order over $xyz’. 

2. They are just browsing

Sometimes, visitors land up to your online store while window shopping. And it may seem like you cannot do much about it. But this is the point where the true power of e-commerce comes in. This is what can be done with online window shoppers:
  • Give them Smart Product Recommendations based on their behavior like what items they are searching for or what similar customers bought. And this can actually help stores for future sales.
  • Keep your customers engaged even if they are not making a purchase presently, they might in the future or recommend your online store to a friend as well.
  • Remind them that they are being ‘missed’ through a short email.
  • Use a subscription email pop up to fetch as many emails as possible. Even though you did not receive a sale, you did capture an email address to market your products in the future.

Got better price elsewhere

The pricing policies vary from store to store. And it may happen that your store visitor finds a similar product with less price at your competitor’s store. Thus, they leave your store cart without making a purchase. But there is a way to avoid this from happening.

One of the best practices adopted by stores to avoid this is offering products with some added benefits like getting it delivered within a few days or more agreeable shipping. Thus, your products may have higher prices but they must be worthy of it.

Too Expensive Product

Well, customers may leave their cart without purchasing the product as they find it too expensive. It does not mean that the product is available somewhere else at a cheaper price. It just means that the customers did not find the product they were looking for.

One way to increase sales, in this case, is offering some promo coupons or a ‘Buy One, Get One Free' offer. Another way is to switch visitor over a similar product with less price. Amazon has efficiently managed this. It shows a ‘similar products’ list at the bottom of a product page so as to reduce the chances of visitors leaving the store without making a purchase.

They decided not to buy

This is another common reason for not making a purchase. They just dropped off the idea of buying. But this is not a thing to worry about. Probably, if they came to your store and liked it, they are likely to come again in the future. They may even buy the product in the future. So, it is necessary to fetch their email id for future use. This helps you to send them emails regarding special sales, discounts, or coupons.

Conclusion: 

So, now you know that visitors coming to your online store and not making a purchase is not as bad as visitors not coming to your store altogether. Even if you are not getting sales right away, you have some amazing alternatives to drive them again to your store and improve upon your marketing skills.

Do let us know if you find this article interesting. Stay tuned for more tips.

Wednesday 20 June 2018

UI/UX mistakes should avoid while building an eCommerce site


Ui/UX Design banner

Through this eCommerce platform, many developers and web designers earning huge amount of money for their creativity and uniqueness, while there are many of developers and web designers are sitting ideal and earning nothing because they do some common mistakes in eCommerce development.

I'm here to describe some common mistakes that restrict developers and web designers to succeed. So, we are here with some common UI/UX mistakes to avoid while designing and developing the eCommerce websites. Let's begin...

1. Complex Navigation System


In the eCommerce site, the best thing is that customers should easily find the products or service which he/she is looking for. While they surfing the site and finds any complex search option or complex navigation, it will irritate the person in searching for any product unnecessarily and they leaving your site page. So, make your site design simple for better user experience.

2. Less focusing on product details


User trust website more when the product page offers a full description of a particular product. It helps the user to make a decision when multiple images of product included and detailed review of that product are provided. If you do not provide detailed description about the product then even if your store price is low, the user will avoid purchasing a product from your site. If you provide related product details and sharing option, there is a greater chance of diverting more traffic to your site.

3. Don't take Customer on priority


Most of the designers do this common mistake these days. While designing or developing an eCommerce site, first thing is to put yourself in what customer think and how would you feel when you visit the website the first time? If you want to sell any product, then you should first focus on customer market and then publish into the market.

 4. Confusing Content in Call to Action link


If you want to need your customer to visit your site and do shopping, then you have to show them what to do. Not to do mistake in content for Call to Action. Tecocraft provides the best eCommerce Website Design which give a natural feeling to the buyres about that where they have to end their shopping experience. Call to Action button should be separated from content using whitespace, size, and colours. Call to Action links should not have difficult title instead of that it should have accurately described the next step in short (For Ex. pre-order). Primary and secondary call to action links like 'Checkout' and 'Continue shopping' be clearly differentiated.

5. Lengthy and Complicated Checkout process


In any eCommerce site, the checkout process should be simple. A user should be able to see the shopping cart button in every page of the site. Shopping Cart should include all fees including shipping. A checkout process should be protected standout among the customers. Not any customers would like long checkout process. Your checkout process should have max. 3 steps and that is too easy to complete the whole payment process. And make sure that the whole checkout process should be designed to ensure fastest compilation time.

6. Upload the irrelevant Content


Before publishing the site in the market make sure that your site has content that relates to the product. If possible, then upload the video that related to your product. A video should be showcasing its working and other principles so that your customers can easily see the usage of the product in a better way. Irrelevant or meaningless content send a negative impression to the customers and it might possible that he/she might leave your site's page. So, make sure that you put relevant content relates to your product before publishing.

7. Missing Shipping & Return Policy and Contact Information


If we provide shipping and return policy details, then they give trust signals to a user. And also if a customer has any problem regarding the product, they can easily contact the company support to resolve the issue when we provide the contact information is in the right place of the website.

So, at last, but not list, no matter how much amount of money you spent on SEO, SEM, and other Marketing initiatives, if your website does not follow above mentioned common tips it can starting failure from the beginning. The best UI/UX design can help any entrepreneur to achieve success. 

Sunday 26 November 2017

iOS vs Android app development infographics

here is the mobile app development infographics for a better understanding of iOS and android app development flow. you can just get the clear idea how iOS apps get developed and how it differs from android app development. 




click on image to see large view. 

Monday 21 August 2017

Marketing mistakes to avoid for e-commerce in 2017

marketing mistakes in ecommerce

Marketing is an only unchanged thing in e-commerce business with changed channels. e-commerce success is depended on the marketing.

here are some mistakes failed e-commerce business boo.com made and you can avoid for your business success.

1) not investing to understand targeted audience


the very first matrix is the targeted audience for your e-commerce business. are they women? are they under 18 ? are they parents?  you need to spend time understanding and investigating the targeted set of audience's habits.
you need to go beyond the geography, gender, and age. after spending too much behind the audience many businesses failed to analyze what is worked and what not. go with the sharp data and numbers to analyze the trends and audience mindset.

2) not focusing on SEO

search engines are the best and most important source of traffic to your e-commerce business. site structure and site content must be SEO friendly to grab maximum from the search engines.
according to marketing land's report, 34% of traffic comes from search engines organically. if your site is not already SEO optimized and you are not spending time and money on SEO, you are leaving money on the table. you can focus on the long tail product related keywords to rank on the search engine and grab some traffic for free.

3) not having right tools for marketing and promotions

in the marketing, many businesses don't have enough tools to support the e-commerce marketing and many exceed that need. marketing tools are very useful in automation and it drives solid statistics data to analyze from the customers. many tools come with great features that are very useful in optimized and converting marketing campaigns.

promotional channels are another great way to target and rich to the targeted audience segments. you need to invest and utilize this channels for your marketing efforts.


4) failing in retargeting customers

retargeting is the best way to engage with past customers and it is proven way to increase the conversations. you can use different media channels and tools to retarget audience. according to kiss metrics, it is 74% likely to get purchased by the retargeted audience using banner ads. in the e-commerce web development re-targeting is very important. if you are not retargeting your users buy anyway, you are missing the potential amount of sales. users are likely to trust the brand if they have used it in past for any purchase and that is the best way to get them back on your store.

also read how to reduce eCommerce returns rate...

5) investing in wrong marketing channels

if you have not invested in the right channel for marketing, you will end up losing the big amount of time and money. each type of business has different needs and different audience set. if you failed in the selection of right channel you will definitely loose the business. suppose you have cloth store and you are advertising on LinkedIn it will cost you high without any conversation success. there are many channels for each market, like online shopping ads will not work well on billboard compared to a social site like Pinterest.


here the ultimate goal is to increase conversation and boost the sale from different marketing tactics. you need to focus and revise your marketing strategies if you are not getting much out of it.