E Commerce Marketplace blog

Category: Planning

  • Network Effect: How does it help E Commerce Business?

    Network Effect: How does it help E Commerce Business?

    In E Commerce parlance, Networking Effect means that more and more consumers of  products or services are joining a platform while at the same time, providers of those products or services are also joining it, in anticipation of sales.

    At the start of an E Commerce project, it is basically a supply side excess. You put a product or you sign up several suppliers ( in case of a market place)  and wait for their customers to sign up. In case the customers don’t sign up, the platform may quickly lose relevance.

    Thus, you would need to simultaneously also would need to attract the customer base . The larger the customer base, more products you can sell or more suppliers you can sign up.

    Positive feedback loop for your business

    This is called as Network effect and it is very important to understand the importance of it for your E Commerce business to succeed

    The Network Effect causes a positive feedback loop as can be inferenced from above. The larger your catalogue, the higher will be your customer base and higher customer base means more suppliers are attracted to your business.

    Spend money initially, enjoy later

    When your E Commerce business is new, you would experience a barren customer landscape. This is because you don’t have advertised your platform and how it benefits those who are signing up. And that may be a significant spending. But once you have a sizeable user base, you can utilize their data to help your suppliers target them with specific attributes such as gender, location or interests.

    In case you cannot grow organically (there is probably competition), you will need to use all available methods including running paid ads to attract as many sign-ups as possible.

    The funnel that is created out of those orders, can further be incentivised by using data analysis for higher customer satisfaction. You may also incentivise users by providing referral mechanisms, initial discounts or free shipping offers. The idea is to attract a growing customer base and then when once done, increase engagement.

    Utilize the growing network to better your platform

    Even if you are knowledgeable about your business, E Commerce can still spring a surprise upon you. You could be asked to provide your products in a different variant for e.g. in a different size or a different colour or shape. If offline world, you would rarely get an opportunity to collect so much requirement unless your network is huge. But in online world, your users’ behaviour can be studied in detail. The data you collect may not only improve your sales funnel but also help you give new product ideas or open the markets which were probably hidden from you.

    You can also improve your innovation based on the search queries on your platform and guide your suppliers towards creating new demand-based products.

    Getting more engaged user base

    Your users would be happier if they have multiple choices to sell their products or buy from your suppliers. They could even compare terms and prices in order to get a good deal for themselves.

    And you benefit from all these activities as well because the data analysis allows you to understand deep motives of your user base. You can further define strategies and personalized recommendations based on that data analysis.

    Thus, you would get highly engaged customer base which responds to your offers and promotions, and you would get to see more orders and referrals.

    Network effect is an important part of your E Commerce business journey and you need to keep in mind that it takes time and money to reach an optimal level beyond which network grows itself. Be patient and win.

    Photo by Pixabay

  • How can referrals help you get customers for E Commerce?

    How can referrals help you get customers for E Commerce?

    Referrals are one of the few ways an E Commerce business can reliably get more customers without expending a lot of advertising dollars. Referrals are usually provided to engaged customers. It is under the belief that a highly engaged customer, who is using your website or app, is more like to recommend the same to his friends and family, in turn earning some goodies for him or herself.

    Let us find out a few ways that referral program can be great for your business.

     

    Your customer does the heavy lifting for your business

    Normally, you as a business would need to advertise the feature, make interesting tutorials and spend money on explaining your product to your future customers. Wouldn’t it be great if it happens without your involvement and effort. Referral program helps you do just that.

    Your customers, if they are happy enough with your product or business are quick to suggest your name when it comes to suggestion to family members. Why, because it is an inherent need for humans to be known as authority on a subject. They would also do the job of explaining the features of your product. And that is great because they are using their time to explain your product to them.

    As an example, you would have seen people recommending restaurants, taxi services, or anything else they have experienced to their friends who are looking for information.

    You save on expenses.

    As indicated in the point above, it costs a lot of money to reach customers these days. There are too many things vying for their attention. So, you need to spend top dollars to occupy their mind space.

    Referral marketing reduces the cost that you need to create more leads. Your referrer does it for you, for a small amount of benefit to themselves or sometimes for no benefit and just their own belief in your product.

    Imagine if you were to create viral campaigns, run paid ads for them, how much would it cost to you. Search is getting expensive and keywords are difficult to rank for on internet. In some places, you are not even allowed to advertise for certain industry and rely exclusively on word-of-mouth tactic to attract more customers.

    Your referrer wants you to succeed post referral

    Can you imagine a deal gone bad after you have suggested it to your friend. You would be in an awkward position. So people who suggest your business to their friends need to be fully convinced that your business will serve everyone, you and their referred folks honestly and with full support. If your business fails to deliver, they might suffer a loss of reputation, and it is not good for anyone.

    So, it is in your interest to make sure that you honour your referral terms and conditions and put your best foot forward. In the end, if everything works out, you get your referrer for life and those referred too happily using your products or services. And who doesn’t need a happy satisfied customer.

     You get to learn more about your target

    Let us say you have a clothing store, and you offer referral discounts. Because of the authority of referrer, their friends and family pick up the discounts and start buying things from you. You now have a deep insight on multiple people including the original referrer if they are using your products. You can find what trends and what does not and you can have a good guess about what your targeted bases are is looking for. This insight can help you further refine your understanding of your base because the whole referral program generates large data.

    Even if you do not get many purchases, you can still find out how to better convert your leads into orders by tweaking your products and processes.

    Photo by Felicity Tai

  • How to resolve the challenging issue of E Commerce Business – Returns

    One of the biggest challenges faced by E Commerce providers is handling returns. The returns often cost a substantive portion of order completion and if mishandled can cause dissatisfaction with customer base.

    However, without possibility of returns, customers would not take the risk of trying a product, more so if the cost of product is high. This is evident mostly in consumer apparel industry where unless the product reaches the customer, it cannot be tried and only then it can be scheduled for returns.

    So how does an E Commerce portal owner solve this problem?

    Let us outline a few of the steps.

    Add as much fitment details as possible.

    Retail clothing, shoes websites face this problem. The size fitment expectation is often different when the actual product is tried on. An E Commerce portal owner thus needs to make sure that the size is as standardized and as accurate as possible. That means listing out all the attributes that are used when the product is created. It may include for example, fabric type, height of the clothing, the width of the person that it is suitable for in case of clothing.

    A good idea for example in apparel sales is to include a model wearing the cloth and attributes describing their height and width is clearly mentioned thus helping the buyer to understand the product details a little better.

    You can also add a live customer help (an expert) or a chatbot which takes the query related to product and provide answers either in real time or by other channels a little later.

    In case of other kind of products such as electronics, specifications should be clearly shown in a table. Also, all the salient points related to product should be mentioned in clear bullet points.

    Clear Return policies

    If I am buying a product, I sure want to look at the return policies mentioned in the website. If it is a costly product, I read through the return policies more carefully. By doing that, I avoid the heartburn that comes when I realize that policies prevent me from making a return.

    On the E Commerce website’s side, it is important that return policies are easy to read and not made deliberately confusing. By creating difficult policies, you are only going to end up in arguments with a customer. Keep it simple.

    Design a policy like

    • what can be returned and what cannot be
    • In what time return window closes (can’t keep it open forever) . PS: It should be reasonable
    • In what condition the product should be returned (For example, unopened, unworn, untried etc)
    • What will be the charges if any for returns pickup?
    • Are products allowed for exchange only or refunds?

    Having clear policies often help achieve a good ratio of return to ordered and helps in better profitability.

     

    High resolution images

    Have you ever felt the frustration when you pinch zoom a product image on the website and all it leads to is a blurry image. That is frustrating because the details than can be seen with eyes now is not clearly visible on the image. It may not be intentional to put up a low-resolution image that does not scale well but it tells the customers looking at your page that you are not professional enough to take good photographs of your product.

    Use bright lights and good quality camera to take good photographs of your product preferably from multiple angels possible.

    If you decide to add a video where you show the actual usage or assembly of the product, that aids the buyer decision in your favour.

    Data Analysis to help reduce returns.

    A scenario may be where a customer habitually orders a product use it and return it within the return window. While legally in their right to return, such customers may misuse the return process and cause you losses in your order delivery.

    Another scenario may be that customer reports that your orders are not delivered in right condition or at agreed upon times.

    Yet another scenario may happen that customers frequently report damaged or defective goods.

    All the scenarios provide useful data that can helped to identify which part of the process needs tweaking. Is it an issue with production, shipping, website or customer themselves and return policies can be tweaked to made it easier and more effective.

  • Types of E Commerce Businesses

    Types of E Commerce Businesses

    E Commerce is a very broad term. What initially started as Commerce between a business and end consumer initially on internet now has encompassed multiple branches and diversifications.

    E Commerce refers to selling/buying goods either electronically (they are available as downloads) or physically (they are shipped in boxes) . It can also mean transfer of money from services such as IT services, BPO solutions, legal and even CV preparation.

    Initially, most of the E Commerce used to be performed through desktops while in new age, E Commerce is conducted on desktop, TV, laptops and most importantly on mobile devices.

    Let us have a look at various types of E Commerce types that currently exist in the world.

     

    Business To Consumers

    Business to consumers is inarguably the most known type of E Commerce business. Dell computers for example, sells its configurable computers online. The customer just needs to customize and place the order and make payment, everything online. Then the computer is shipped to the home.

    Another great example is Amazon. Amazon is one of the largest E commerce companies with millions of products and customers as well.

    But there are millions of small other companies and businesses running their business online often in competition to the giants. The companies sell niche products.

    In case of service Industry, one can think of companies such as Fiverr, Upwork, and many online education platform which provide services and not products as their main offering. The customer pays a subscription and in return they are provided with the services related to their needs.

    There are some businesses that outsource part of their business to vendors while they focus on taking orders. Such example of drop shipping, T shirt and Mug printing services fall under this category.

    Business To Business

    Commerce just does not happen between consumer and businesses. It can also happen between two businesses. A truck company for example can entertain applications for electric component manufacturing, online instead of offline. Even the process of bidding for the tender may happen online.

    Then there are bulk buyers, which supply other companies with the required raw materials. Things such as inventory level replacement, shipping dates, payments can be integrated within the two companies leading to smooth E Commerce transactions.

    Even for services, a business can buy online from the B2B arm of a company while the company also serves B2C customers. An example is Stock photography companies. While the individual customer needs only one or two images at a time, a business can make multiple image purchases from the stock photography companies.

    Consumer to Consumer

    In this type of E Commerce, the consumers talk to each other, buy and sell using a company providing listing services. The payment is handled mostly by the consumers themselves. Companies such eBay and Etsy allow consumers to directly buy from other sellers on the platform. The company providing the services thus generally neither produces anything, nor ships   anything to customers. It is left to the sellers and buyers to agree on the price and terms of shipping. The intermediatory though takes a cut of sales value or charges a fee for providing extra details such as phone number or email id of the buyers/sellers.

    Direct To Consumer

    If a company not just lists its own products but also sells it online on its own website, it is supposed to have performed the Direct To Consumer sale. It is different than Business to Consumer that here the manufacturer is directly selling products or services and is often providing even service guarantees. The manufacturer can also list products on other B2C sites such as Amazon to increase the reach but often will give you the best price and guarantees if you purchase things from their own website.

    Examples are electronic consumer good companies that manufacture and sells them through their own websites. They typically cut the middlemen and often have enough flexibility to manage the customer service requests, complaints too.

     

    Photo by Pavel Danilyuk

  • Key Components of E Commerce

    Key Components of E Commerce

    E Commerce has a number of moving parts and often the success of an E Commerce venture depends on integration of all these parts to achieve the targets either in terms of awareness or profitability.

    Some of the parts are common between E Commerce and offline business, such as products and customer service. However, there are some parts exclusive to E Commerce as business which are vital to success.

    Let us understand both the parts that form a complete E Commerce business and also contrast them with offline businesses

     

    Website

    The most important component of E Commerce business is of course that it has something that can be accessed over internet. With an offline business, you can just walk up to a store or call up your neighbourhood grocer to deliver your grocery. But the real E Commerce concept kicks in when you have a website that has a store front, a product listing page, a cart page and way to place the order. The website is designed often to help you browse and move the products to the cart just like in physical world but just online.

    Sign Ups and Login

    Sign ups and login form an important part of E Commerce ecosystem. People signing up either for ordering or just receiving your email newsletter are a stamp of approval for your website and brand. Sign ups means that people have moved one step into the sales funnel and with enough encouragement ( such as social proofs, promotions running at the time) or your brand image, they are now inclined to make a purchase.

    Logging back indicates that users are still willing to buy from you and want to understand if something in terms of pricing or delivery has changed.

    Online marketing and newsletter

    People may find your website from the search results on the search Engine page or if they happened to browse on social media and come across content related to your website. The important part is that this type of marketing is directly integrated into your E Commerce website and purchasing decisions can be very quick. A user seeing an impressive ad, clicks on the suggested link, where they can see the product. They then add to the cart and make the payment. This can happen in a span on minutes.

    Newsletters are another way to integrate E Commerce marketing. Newsletter helps your customers stay update with your offers and often they make purchases right after clicking on the links in newsletter.

     

    Shopping carts and Order process

    There is marked difference between an offline store and E Commerce. Even though you are not physically putting products into a cart, you are essentially ordering them still. The order process involves checkout which is like any offline store just that you are making a payment, adding address, checking discounts happening in real time on website.

    If you decide not to complete the order, the system may retain your shopping cart even if you decide to logout and close the browser. A good E Commerce system may even inform later by email that you have certain items in the system that are waiting to be processed and ordered.

    Analytics

    In an E Commerce setup, you can analyse the customer’s behaviour in real time and correlate it to their purchasing habits at a much granular level compared to offline stores.

    You can also use Search Engine Optimization to learn more about how your individual product pages are performing.

    Data analysis of user reviews and feed back from social media can help in understand more details about product issues which can help improve your overall offering.

     

    Expectation matching and Customer Service

    In terms of expectations management, E Commerce needs more work than an offline shop. E Commerce often involves viewing products and guessing their attributes to some extent. It is possible that there could be a colour mismatch or size mismatch or even features that are not visible before purchase because user ignored the associated text.

    This may lead to higher returns affecting the profitability of the store.

    Photo by Connor Lucock:

  • Pros and Cons of getting into online E Commerce business

    Pros and Cons of getting into online E Commerce business

    E Commerce is probably the most important trend in the timeline of human business endeavors. E Commerce exploded once the internet became ubiquitous and faster than before. The advent of giants such as Amazon and eBay led to a number of small businesses taking their business online.

    If you are planning to take a business online or just want to understand if you should even consider doing it, it is a good idea to understand the pros and cons of going online.

    Let us look at some of the pros of doing online business.

    You have global reach

    If you can fulfill the need, the world is your oyster now. People searching for that special product that only you can manufacture can find from beyond your country’s border. You get orders from distant places and being online just exploded your reach. You have more data to analyze about global audience and chance to explore markets that may be more profitable than your local demographic.

    You are online all the time

    That is the dream of every business, to be running even when the owner is asleep. The orders can keep flowing while you are busy with other aspects of the business. You don’t have to pay your employees to be at the store all the time. The website acts as an interface, the chatbots answer customer queries and even make sales on your behalf. The customers are browsing, checking out your products even when there is no personnel around to show the products to them.

    Your costs of operations are reduced for the hours you are open

    Of course, there are costs associated with operating an online store. However, if you are using large companies such as Amazon, Etsy or eBay to list your product, you may just add the products, set up details and forget about them. These companies will do the job of keeping the servers running and even marketing products if they fit their own criteria. You will just need to fulfill the orders. You can even outsource the product in case of the dropshipping business, where someone else will fulfill the orders on your behalf.

    Even if you run your own website, the cost of running it is far less than operating a physical store with all whistles and bells such as electricity costs, rent, hiring employees, providing physical security and dealing with store theft.

    Enhanced Data analysis and tracking

    You collect the information the moment a visitor lands on your site. You have their IP, their browser type, the mobile phone they are using, their geographic location etc. The granularity of data can help you understand customer behavior in more detail. You may find it easy to target a particular demographic based on the data collected and analyzed. This level of detailing is not possible in a physical store where the data collection is often minimized to phone number or email address.

    But not everything is hunky dory. As is everything in life, good things come with a cost and that cost cannot be avoided. There are obvious cons to selling online.

    Faceless ordering leads to poor interactions and personal connections

    Yes, you are aware of the customer’s geographic location and other attributes, but you can never replace the value of a customer that you know personally. A good shop owner knows their customers often by name and understands their buying patterns and motivations to buy something. The relationship leads to lifetime customers who come to them for repeat purchases and even for suggestions. Online doesn’t establish such connections easily and thus cannot replace the value of personal connections

    Product fitment problems

    Can you ever imagine going to a clothing store and just buying an item of clothing by reading the size label. You won’t, like, ever do that. But online, you are often forced to make an educated guess about if the product is really going to fit your needs.  The site selling the product may have policies that a return is not allowed.

    As a store owner, this could be a problem as customer expectations are hard to foresee and it is always a guess work even for you to correctly resolve fitment issues.

    Security and data protection issues

    Well, you may ask, if there are no storefronts, why do you need security. It is because you are custodian of the customer data and often that data is sensitive. You wouldn’t want the world to know what any customer has ordered. The expose of such data may lead to loss of reputation, hurt brand reputation and open you up to lawsuits. And the data stays in the world forever, ready to be used time and again by hackers.

     

    Photo by Jan van der Wolf

  • Challenges in Logistic for a Small Business E Commerce project

    Challenges in Logistic for a Small Business E Commerce project

    Small E Commerce ventures often have multiple challenges that cause hurdle in running the business smoothly. One of the prime challenges is logistics. The logistics involves procuring raw materials and then shipping the finished good to the product. The company that running the E Commerce business is the sole customer check point and is responsible for smooth delivery of the product. However, due to multiple challenges, the delivery of the product is delayed.

    Let us look at few of the challenges faced by a small-scale E Commerce venture.

    Last mile connectivity

    In a number of countries, last mile delivery is probably one of the most challenging aspects of E Commerce. During the last mile delivery, i.e. to the home address of the customers, there could be multiple roadblocks to delivery.

    For example, a customer may not be available at the time of delivery. The address may not be complete or correct. The customer location may be farther than expected. The weather may play truant. It may not be possible to leave the package at the door due to possible theft of the package.

    In case of international shipping, customer may be asked to pay extra to the customs. In the worst case, they might not have permission to import a particular product into their country.

    Customers may not be understanding enough about the issues leading to overall bad feedback about the services in general.

    Inventory management

    Small businesses are often low on resources. That means one can only have limited stocks of the relevant items. It might take some time between stock depletion and then further replenishment. It depends on a number of factors, primary one being the availability of raw material and in time shipping to the E Commerce vendor.

    When there is no stock, the product shows out of stock status in E Commerce website. If that goes on for a long time, the customer may be tempted to look for other websites to buy the product. It leads to loss of hard-won customer loyalty and can lead to customer turnover. The inventory of top products needs to be stocked all the time.

    However, too much of stock also has its own set of problems. If the stock is perishable like food or flowers, it needs to move before expiry date. If for any reason the stock lies unsold, then the cost of the spoilage has to be borne by the business.

     

     Multiple vendors/ systems

    A small business usually sources its products from a single vendor. However, the complexity of logistic increases if there are multiple vendors. There could be issues with software systems that are too primitive to handle complexity. Often small businesses depend upon spreadsheets to keep a track of inbound delivery, production and outbound goods movement. This is very error prone. And with more vendors it gets more difficult to keep all the things working.

    Ever Increasing Transportation and material costs

    The inflation around the world is up in recent times. It has caused an uptick in both manpower and material costs. The constant wars around the world does not help with the oil prices.

    Due to this, the cost to deliver the goods increased rapidly for small business E Commerce companies. If the transportation charges are too high, the customer does not want to buy or make repeated purchases that frequently.

    Excessive returns

    The fundamental problem with E Commerce business is that it is impossible for a customer to try and then buy. Often the order is based on the appearance of the product’s picture on the E Commerce portal, and any misunderstanding may result in dissatisfaction with the delivered product.

    In retail for example, issues could range from colour, size, fabric, fit etc. In that case the logistics need to work to pick up the return requested by the customer.

    In a few cases, customers frequently return the products leading to high return costs for the E Commerce business.

     

    Photo by Marcin Jozwiak

  • Top wordpress plugins for e com business

    Top wordpress plugins for e com business

    WordPress is a world-famous project for managing your content. It has been dominating the internet for quite some time. With its advanced functionality and ease of extension, no doubt WordPress is a very popular software. Also, a primary feature is that it is open sourced and free to use. What more can one ask for?

    Do you know that you can run your own E Commerce Project from a WordPress installation? Not only this there are extensions (known as plugins in WordPress) that can connect with other useful utility sites such as MailChimp and payment vendors to set up complete E Commerce suite.

    Let us examine a few of these plugins that can help you with E Commerce journey.

    WooCommerce

    WooCommerce is a plugin that extends your WordPress installation into a full-fledged E Commerce Solution. WooCommerce is designed and developed by the same company that developed WordPress, so be rest assured that you are getting the same power of open source and freedom that comes with it.

    You will get a full store front design that you can customize for your requirements. The theme store is full of themes that you can use for your own needs.

    In addition to the themes, you get well tested shopping cart system that as per their documentation helps convert more shoppers. They also provide integration with multiple payment vendors, taxation calculation and shipping options a breeze.

    Because it is hosted on your own server, you own the data and it is not shared with any other entity until you explicitly provide permission to do so.

    Like any other open system, you can interact with WooCommerce using their APIs and extend it using hooks.

    In addition, if you have the required skills, you can even contribute to the development of WooCommerce product.

    MailChimp for WooCommerce

    What is E Commerce business without marketing? A great tool that I personally used for my own business was MailChimp. It is a great way to automate your Campaign processes.

    You may need to send email when a user signs up or buys a product from your website.

    You may also need to automate your campaign processes as to what happens on a periodic basis with your existing contacts or customers. Do you send them promotional offers, or do you just like to send them tips related to your product usage. OR would like to find how much they are satisfied with your product that they have purchased. All these things are automated using MailChimp website.

    However, wouldn’t it be better if you could do this from your WooCommerce based website? That is where MailChimp plugin comes in.

    Using the plugin, you can automate processes related to signups. You can show them sign up popups that directly add them to a Mailchimp account. Check out more features at their plugin page

    SureCart

    SureCart is also a WordPress plugin that even though it provides an E Commerce function, outsources intensive operations such as tax calculations and payment processing on its own server rather than your own.

    The idea is that your server may not be able to handle excess loads during peak times and performance because the database may not be optimized. It is because often scaling of E Commerce solutions comes with additional problems of database management and server performance during peak times, for which you do not want to spend time and resources.

    Also, it is a common problem in any WordPress based system that some plugins interfere with each other because of the way they have been coded and cause breakdown in the site.

    SureCart plugin avoids the above issues because your E Commerce system will use infrastructure provided with the SureCart cloud solutions.

     

    Photo by Markus Winkler:

     

  • Tips to make your E Commerce site mobile friendly

    Tips to make your E Commerce site mobile friendly

    Mobile is the place where most of the content is now being consumed. What it means for your  E Commerce business is that a lot of signups and purchase decisions are going to made while the user watches their mobile while lying on the bed or watching videos on it.

    You may not be able to use the design that you use for your Desktop based E commerce website on mobile. Yes, with responsive design , you can definitely make the needed changes but mobile themes are to be carefully thought as themes designed for another device different in league from desktops.

    Here , I list a few things, I have personally felt that can be done to mobile themes which make the users not click away.

    Yes, use the responsive design

    It is possible that your target audience does not use the same resolution as your desktop. Maybe they are surfing your site from a tablet, a laptop with different resolution or simply a mobile. Without using a responsive design, which takes into account these parameters, you would see non responsive website, often overflowing the screen space and the buttons and links gone haywire.

    The idea is to define the size buckets based on the trends in the screen categories and refine your theme’s styles based on common minimum features for that bucket.

    That means you will have to let go of some of your buttons that you see on a large screen and often club them together under a menu box. Also you will need to ensure that there are no horizontal scroll bars that take the screens out of the screen area.

    Optimize your images

    It is quite a possibility that your viewer is not only using a mobile to view your website but also they are on a patchy connection because they are sitting in a remote corner where internet services are slow.

    In that case, you may not want to serve them the images that are so large that loading your website becomes only an endless wait forever.

    So the images not only have to be optimized for screen resolutions but also for the fact that they have relatively less size to be easily transferred on a mobile device on a bad connection.

    Cut down on non-essential items

    Yes, you would like to keep all the bells and whistle items that you have on a desktop screen on mobile as well. Unfortunately, they are a big distraction to the mobile user. The digital assistant that keeps cropping up and cannot be closed easily and takes 5-10% of the screen is a big no-no. The user will be distracted to focus on the assistant because it has annoyingly crept in while they do not look at the main offering.

    Also , you would like to cram in as much details as possible in the mobile screen as well but remember there is only so much before the user gives up on the product.

    I have seen the sites where the offers keep popping up on the screen and they cover about 80% of viewing area. They are a distraction and should be minimized on a mobile screen.

    Keep the focus on the main item, reduce the clutter. Try to give your message in words or videos that easy to digest and doesn’t take forever to read.

    Testing on variety of devices

    Normally we tend to think of the devices that are in our vicinity and we feel good when it works. But remember there are operating systems and then there are many screens running them. Also there are screens with different resolutions.

    This makes it difficult to test for all kinds of devices . But there are specific tools and websites that help you test your website as much as possible.

    One example would be Chrome Extension for mobile simulator that imitates multiple devices.

    One tip is to find out the most used devices on the vendor website and test for them. Automation in testing may need some budgeting but generally pays in the end with a good usable website /

     

    Photo by Sanket Mishra:

  • Top E Commerce Business ideas for your Small Business

    Top E Commerce Business ideas for your Small Business

    So, you have decided to venture into E Commerce field to make money. E Commerce is one of the profitable yet also a competitive space. With newer technologies ever coming into E Commerce space, the opportunities are expanding too. However, this all may lead to confusion as to where to start. Here, we have compiled list of items which you can use to learn more about your preferred choice of E Commerce venture.

    Print on Demand

    The idea of Print on Demand is simple. You are a designer and want to sell T Shirts, Mugs, Key Chains with your designs. However, you do not wish to add a service where you also need to physically print the product and ship it to the customer. There are services to do that are called as Print on Demand.

    Some services even allow you to create designs using Generative AI tools, while also giving you an option for your customers to print and ship products to them.

    These print on demand services also may provide integration into your own E Commerce software so that upon ordering of the product, the product is processed by the On Demand vendor. Later, the same vendor ships the order to your customer.

    Digital Products

    Digital Products are mostly software products such as manuals, books, letter formats, software. They do not exist in physical world when compared to physical products such as automobiles, laptops, shoes. However, physical products may be sold using hardware carriers such as USB, CDs, and dedicated hardware. The world of digital products is large.

    There are plenty of items you can sell as digital products either on your own website or if you don’t want the hassles of maintaining it, on a well-known publisher such as Etsy. The advantage of digital products is that once they created, they can be sold without any large overheads of physical handling. However, this advantage may also cause problems such as digital piracy.

    You can create digital products like eBooks, games, courses, arts, and many others.

    Affiliate Marketing

    Affiliate Marketing has been one of the ways to start small and slowly scale up larger revenues. Affiliate Marketing describes promoting someone else’s product using your digital property. You may utilize your own website, your YouTube channel, or other social media channels presence to attract audiences and then at some point in time promote the product that either you are using or you feel would provide value to them.

    Affiliate marketing usually involves sharing links provided by the product or service companies that intend to promote their product using your property. Then a special code is attached to the URL, making it trackable that the visitor to their website originated from your property. Based on the agreement, you may receive a commission either if the visitor signs up to become an opportunity for the company or if they make a purchase.

    Affiliate marketing is challenging work as it involves creating content and building an authority before some companies allow you to promote their products. However, sometimes a sales page too is sufficient to send traffic to the product company. That though needs to be market well enough so that the visitor is enticed to buy the product.

    Personalized Products

    If you have a flair for designing products that are hand crafted can appeal to your customers on an individual level, you can be successful in selling them. Personalized products include perfumes, candles, greeting cards with messages, videos with birthday messages. There are endless number of things you can create and sell.

    Personalized products if market and packaged well, can expect a premium over generic product. To create a personalized product, you will need to deeply understand your user market and create campaigns to understand their motivations for buying your personalized product.

    By focusing on their needs, you can sell your products much easier over time. The disadvantage of this kind of product is that most of the time they cannot be bulk produced and quality controls need to be much stricter. Manual labor may be required and thus cost of production may be higher than a mass-produced item.

    Subscription Services

    Subscription is a fitting example of E Commerce product (or service) that can provide a sustained income with time. Subscription can range from subscription of products such as food items, groceries, personal health or services such as educational courses, entertainment videos for select audiences.

    The obvious advantage of such a service is that you will get predictable income, and you can plan better to become efficient with time. However, the disadvantage is that you will need to provide the service all the time despite any roadblock. Some of the services like food and personal health are very essential and thus their supplies on time are must. If you already have such a service, you can take the process online and encourage users to sign up online.

    Photo by Markus Winkler: