Category: Ecommerce

A content management system or CMS is a tool that helps you create a website and manage content.

A CMS also helps non-techies to create a website with a professional look and feel without indulging in writing code.

What is the Best Content Management System(CMS) Platform for Your Website?

Out of the lot WordPress.org proves to be one of the best CMS platforms and tools that help you build a website. You will find more than 35% of websites on the internet built on a WordPress platform.

WordPress has all the features that make it an excellent platform. You can get started easily with just a single click to install WordPress. 

This platform offers plenty of plug-ins that help you integrate any function you want on your website. So, WordPress offers countless options to build a professional website.

If you run an e-commerce store, WordPress helps you set up an e-commerce store as well. Apart from being an online store WordPress also helps you set up 

• Auction site
• Online forum
• Membership site
• LMS (learning management system) and much more

WordPress allows you to add more space as your website expands. You can just upgrade hosting to managed WordPress hosting firm.

What is the most popular Content management system(CMS) platform in the world? 

When you know that the CMS platform you are using is used by thousands of companies online, that means you are using the right CMS software for your business. 

WordPress

Undoubtedly, WordPress is the best CMS platform that businesses and individuals use across the world.  It is free to download and use the software. The statistics as stated below speak for its popularity. 

• Live websites – 24+ million
• Websites (live) across the world using WordPress – 27,000,00+
• Websites (live) using WordPress only in USA – 10,190,000+
• %age of live websites built on WordPress platform that falls in the top: 37.59%

Interestingly, WordPress is leading the market with a market share of 50%. 

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Wix 

Wix is among the best website builders available in the market today. The software is ideal for beginners. It is a completely hosted platform and takes care of all technical aspects. Let us look at the statistics that speak for Wix.

• Live websites (across the globe) – 3,800,000+
• Market Share – 6.98% 
• %age of websites that appear in top 1,000,000 – 0.89%

Squarespace

Squarespace is an easy-to-use drag and drop platform for efficient website building and needs no installation on the hosting server.

• Live websites across the world – 2,200,000+ 
• Live websites in the USA- 1,700,000+ 
• Market Share – 4.17%
• %age of websites that appear in top 1,000,000- 1.44%

Joomla

It is one of the feasible platforms available for building websites. Just like WordPress, it is also an open-source and free to use platform that holds the following statistics 

• Market Share – 2.19%
• Live websites in USA – 400,000+
• Live websites across the world – 1,500,000+
• %age of websites that appear in the top 1,000,000 – 1.69%

Shopify 

Shopify is a SaaS platform that is a software as a service. It is one of the best platforms for e-commerce stores.

• Market Share – 2.8%
• Live websites in USA – 1,000,000+
• Live websites across the world – 1,400,000+
• %age of websites that appear in the top 1,000,000 – 3.74%

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Best Top 6 Ecommerce CMS Platforms 

Some of the best CMS platforms for e-commerce store owners that can help them run a seamless e-store are:

Shopify

It is a feature-rich e-commerce platform that millions of businesses use across the world.

Shopify is believed to be the perfect e-commerce platform for small merchants to establish their stores and manage the store through a single dashboard 

Features that could help run your e-commerce store swiftly

• Facilitate mobile commerce shopping cart
• Complete access to CSS and HTML of your store website
• Manage multiple orders with a single click 
• Enable Import/export products through CSV files
• 24X7 customer support 
• Equip users with apps that aid marketing, inventory, management, shipping, accounting, etc 

Magento

Magento is amongst the best open-source platform suitable for your e-commerce business.  The platform is ideal for all types of businesses irrespective of their sizes 

Features

• Flexible drag and drop features for e-commerce sites 
• Create, Preview & schedule your content easily 
• Make use of responsive ready-made themes 
• Unite with B2B functionality
• Offers multi-channel marketing
• Smart inventory & order management 

Hire Magento 2 Developer

WooCommerce

WooCommerce offers useful plug-ins that help integrate different features to your standard WooCommerce website just with one click.

Features

• Set up your store easily 
• Secure payments
• Supports multiple payment gateways 
• User-friendly interface to manage orders
• Supports mobile app for Android & iOS 
• Flexible product categories
• Easy to manage product categories
• Unlimited customization

BigCommerce

BigCommerce offers plenty of features along with easy options for customization 

Features

• Drag-drop features 
• Mobile-friendly website
• Faster site loading 
• Facilitate B2B functionality
• Supports multiple currencies 

OpenCart

Opencart is one of the popular open-source platforms perfect for e-commerce business 

Features

• It is free 
• Flexible shopping cart features
• Supports different payment gateways and processors 
• Easy to install and configure 

PrestaShop

Prestashop is one of the user-friendly e-commerce platforms that help your business grow

Features

• Easy to configure and install
• User-friendly design for users who are not tech-savvy
• Easily customizable features
• Supports reliable and secure payment gateways 

Conclusion

When there are plenty of powerful e-commerce platforms available, store owners need to do some homework to know about the features, performance of each CMS platform. The information stated above would indeed help you decide the right CMS platform for your business. You can easily determine the best features that would help your business run smoothly.

It entirely depends on your business structure as to what platform would be feasible to make your business a success. So, make sure you study and understand which CMS can give the right start to your business and support as it grows in the future to attain your business goals.

Headless React JS is the new buzz word trending in the industries and eCommerce world too. It’s a big step that allows you to build your storefronts indecently of your eCommerce platform and backend. Let’s see its definition.

Headless Commerce:

Headless commerce is a segregation of the front end and back end of an e-commerce application. Its architecture describes the decoupling of the presentation layer of a website. It operates in such a way that modification on one end does not affect others and these two communicate with one another via API and tools like Heroku and Mulesoft.

In the backend, a plugin e-commerce solution that manages all commercial activities and frontend part can be well managed by developers to deliver high-quality content expressions. In this model, the e-commerce solution serves various purposes like fraud management and inventory management, PCI compliance, etc.

If we see it in other words, headless lessens IT dependency. This accompanies tremendous advantages including execution, customization and versatility. There’s a ton of reasons why large brands are rushing towards the headless worldview.

Why Headless Commerce?

Bigger enterprises are adopting this technology as it makes wider sense to separate the frontend from the backend. These organizations regularly have months-long improvement lines and aspiring inventive and advertising groups that are anxious to quickly test new plans, designs, and templates toward the front.

Moreover, headless trade opens up a universe of conceivable outcomes with brands that are searching for a content-based methodology regardless. There are presently really no restrictions to the customizations that can happen in the digital e-commerce space.

More customization

Brands looking to drive increased engagement on their sites through content experiences are often best serviced by a headless commerce platform and approach.

This gives you the flexibility of a CMS like WordPress or Drupal with the security of an e-commerce platform like BigCommerce, which manages PCI compliance and checkout uptime, among other aspects among different viewpoints

Employee Adoption

Some business clients can be hesitant to utilize new advancements because of steep expectations to absorb information. The effortlessness of headless business takes care of this issue since everybody in your group can undoubtedly access and update the front end without cutting edge aptitudes.

Increased Conversion Rates

As found in the infographic toward the start of this article, client obtaining costs are ascending for various organizations because of an expansion in paid promoting.

Headless is a viable method of decreasing these expenses in light of the fact that your image can utilize a substance or experience-drove technique to attract natural traffic as opposed to depending on paid promoting. Dynamic and smooth client encounters additionally help increment change rates.

Frontend Deployment:

Front-end web-based business site changes are steered through the IT group. Clients of headless trade can avoid that progression and convey their own progressions autonomously without needing developers.

Market

With headless trade, organizations can dispatch new front-end encounters rapidly. Responding to another market pattern should be possible quickly and with at least expensive back-end development.

Get started

The truth of the matter is that not all developers are designers so when you employ Headless commerce, you let your innovative groups center around what they specialize in, which is optimizing the client experience and interface to improve client commitment and changes. Also, you make it simpler for engineers to organize upgrades to the back end.

To move ahead of the competition soon businesses will adopt headless e-commerce and build their own headless applications. To stretch out beyond the advancement bend and jump the opposition, you might need to pick headless business pushing ahead, making it simpler for your architects to make convincing client encounters.

Headless With React js:

Combined with React JS, Headless Commerce are able to built conveying applications like, consistent and smoothed out experience that is non-troublesome to the client venture as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) as well as Single Page Applications (SPAs).

It’s thus that React JS and Headless frequently go inseparably in the eCommerce world, offering customers a responsive and portable first experience which is crucial for the accomplishment of an eCommerce store.

Few Examples of Commerce Sites with React Js:

Nike:

Everybody is known to Nike, the world’s popular retailer of footwear, however not every person realizes that Nike has gone headless. The company needed a mobile methodology that can best fit in with their general technique of increasing more deals on mobile users.

They have combined  React SPA with Node.js backend for frontend (BFF), which appeared their sensible following stage at that point. Nike began increasing more market share making their Headless crusade a greater accomplishment than at first idea.

Overstock:

Overstock is a model retailer for the Headless Commerce approach. By modifying their item research and browsing pages into intelligent SPA pages, Overstock saw a 36% expansion in income and another 8% increment in conversion. What’s more, things didn’t stop at simply that. The brand went from solidarity to quality and in the end turned into a main, billion-dollar online retailer in the promoting business who was as of late positioned as one of the best 100 dependable organizations on the planet.

Wrapping Words

It’s no uncertainty that the web is getting progressively responsive so as to address the issues of mobile users. As should be obvious from the examples above, Headless Commerce, joined with React JS, is equipped for conveying an application like encounter that works faultlessly on both work area and cell phones. With the proceeding with progress from receptions of the headless methodology, it’s not out of the ordinary that purchasing experience like these will be the future standard.

Christmas is knocking at the door and the shopaholics are already looking for the best discounts and offers at pre-Christmas sales by browsing various e-commerce stores. This adds up to the cut-throat competition amongst the top e-commerce vendors. With higher usage of online shopping applications, holiday sales are grabbing the eyeballs of the buyers on the eve of Christmas.

In this case, Magento has become the king of every commerce platform; that is the reason why Magento merchants are ahead in the competition. It is the Magento merchants who are gaining a huge ROI in this peak sales period. This is gained by extending their app’s existing features and functionalities with highly rewarding tasks and it is only possible with the implementation of Magento extensions.

How Magento merchants can leverage the Christmas sale?

The holiday season brings in increased website traffic, as the shoppers hook into the online e-commerce websites for purchasing gifts for friends and family. And to leverage this festive season, the e-commerce merchants are now implementing different types of Magento extensions to keep up their sales in the holiday season.

Imagine that you own an e-commerce store that sells gift items. A customer may want to personalize or customize the gift that he or she will send to their loved ones. In such a case, the customers do not mind pain a few bucks extra for customization. The good news is that with the addition of product designer Magento extension, you can allow your customer to customize their products. In this way, the Magento extensions help you in filling these little gaps.

Prepare your Magento store for Christmas holiday sales with these top 10 tips

If you too want to become the next e-commerce biggie, then follow these 10 tips on boosting your sales. We have also covered some essential Magento extensions by Dolphin Web Solution, which you can utilize as you go for implementing these tips:

1. Homepage optimization- Your homepage is the identity card of your business. If you are offering an amazing and unique home page design that showcases the festive spirit, then you are definitely getting more traffic. By optimizing your home page with special discounts, deals, and offers you are making it even more interactive and attractive. You can use updated content relevant images and amazing designs that will pull in more users.

2. Using apt keywords- Optimize your homepage, you also need to get it updated with the right hashtags and keywords. For instance, if you are targeting customers for buying Christmas gifts, then identify the best keywords like cheap, deals, discount, offer, best, and so on. Once you have collected the list of keywords, optimize the URL, metadata, image alt tags, and specifically the website content pages. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner for finding popular keywords.

3. Mobile Optimization- Your e-commerce website should work flawlessly on various mobile devices. The reason behind this is that almost half of the global population is hooked on their smartphones, browsing online shopping websites. As per the CEO of Outerbox Justin Smith, almost 79% off of people make online purchases through smartphones. This kind of statistics shows how essential it is to optimize your mobile and make it user friendly for reaching out to a global customer base.

4. Inventory Management- During the peak season of Christmas, it is very much important to manage your inventory framework. You must have an organized warehouse to ensure more efficiency in your business. Everything should be streamlined and the delivery process should be faster. Also, you need to keep a constant check if any product is going out of stock. You should prioritize items that are garnering more purchases. If your inventory management process is systematic then you can ensure more buyers to your eCommerce site.

5. Revised payment methods- Get away from the hassles of revised shipping and payment methods. In the peak season, you cannot afford to delay delivery to your customer. If you do so you may lose a loyal customer forever. Hence, it is very much essential that you are having a good collaboration with the shipping carriers who can ensure you timely delivery. To be on the top, you need to be a step ahead of your competitors’. Go for offering free shipping and discount services to your customers. This kind of strategy will not only bring new customers but will also gain the trust of the returning customers. You can use the Wallet & Reward Extension of Dolphin Web Solution’s Magento 2 Store. Also, when it comes to the payment integration system, then make sure that you are offering the most convenient method of transaction. Only go for the trusted payment gateways.

6. Revise product return policies- Your customers will only buy products from your e-commerce site if you have a smoother return policy. The products which you are selling may not be up to the mark or may not be up to the liking of your customers. That is the reason why the top e-commerce sites are now coming up with the product return Magento extension. At Dolphin Web Solution, we have extensions like Auto Invoice & Shipment and Shipping Restriction extension, from where the merchants can manage their product returns and refunds. Return policy actually helps in building loyalty and trust in your customers, as they can easily return their product and get either a refund or exchange for it; thus ensuring repeat sales.

7. Use live support- Ensure that you are providing a live support system to your customers. Your customers might be facing issues with ordering products from your website. They might need help from your end and that is the reason you must have a chatbot service along with the customer calling service so that they can go for asking any type of order-related or generic queries. Ensuring proper customer service also helps in bringing more leads to your business. With Help Desk extension of Dolphin Web Solutions, you can easily handle multiple inbound calls and messages.

8. Give takeaways- You can also provide your customers with exciting and creative digital takeaways. As they share their mail IDs with you while they log in to your app, you can send them free takeaways like e-books, brochures, and other downloadable resources through which they can know more about your business and what are the exciting things that you have to offer in this festive season. Other than that, you can also give your customers small product takeaways for a minimum purchase of XX amount.

9. Get active on social media- Social media is a communication and entertainment platform for people of all ages and not just the millennials. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn can be used for the widespread promotion of your products. Talk about discounts, deals, and offers that you are offering in the festive season of Christmas and bring in more sales to your business. Various e-commerce merchants have already purchased Dolphin Web Solutions Customer Specific Discount for proper management of additional offers. Also, ask your customers to post a comment or review about your products on their personal social media profiles and blogs by providing a backlink to your site. Check out the Import Export Product Review extension to know more about the review management process.

10. Use retargeting ads- Driving more sales to your e-commerce business is not an easy job, as there are lots of competitors who are severely competing with each other and earning the trust of their customers. Also, in the holiday season, almost every eCommerce site is now coming up with different kinds of offer and reward-related strategies. Therefore, it is quite evident that your customers may switch to other eCommerce websites to find a better option. Use retargeting ads, where your brand or product will be shown on every website and social media pages that your potential customer is using. Your click-through rate will be boosted by almost 10 times. Have a glimpse at the Promotion Bar extension to have better knowledge.

Additional or bonus tips

1. Smart email marketing- A high-level strategy of email marketing is just the smart move that you are taking to bring in leads to your e-commerce website. Avoid sending plain texts as email. Rather go for creating a newsletter with creative assets that will showcase your products. With extensions like Product Stock Notification, you can let your users know about the stock availability of the products which they are looking for. This notification can be sent via email, SMS or any other push notification.

2. Optimize site loading time- Nobody likes a slow or buggy application. Whenever someone is shopping, he or she will have a tendency to browse through different products and if your application takes time to load different pages, then you are definitely going to lose the potential customer. In this way, your customers will prefer shifting to your competitors.

3. Optimize thank you page- If you want to nurture your relationship with your customers, then thank you page is just the opportunity to do that. Keeping in mind the ongoing holiday season, you can go for adding coupon codes to entice your customers in subscribing to your newsletters for regular updates.

4. Use exit popups- If you are rightly implementing the popups into your website, then you can easily engage your visitors and promote your products and services. For the holiday season, you would not want to display any kind of regular popup, rather you will need some attractive popup that will make the customers share their email ID with you, thus making it easier for you to market.

5. Gear up for New Year sales- Soon after Christmas, people start preparing for the new year celebration. As the New Year arrives in a week’s time, people browse various e-commerce websites and the post-Christmas sales continue. Make sure that you have a preset January sales plan so that your customers don’t need to hunt for good deals or offers on other websites.

Conclusion

The ease of shopping a variety of products from e-commerce apps is something that has made the e-commerce giants climb the ladder of success today. However, things are also not that easy from the merchant side, as for running a website, a lot of maintenance, development and hassle has to be coped up with. Thanks to the emergence of Magento extensions which has made it possible for e-commerce merchants to overcome several challenges.

It has enabled the creation of functionally-rich stores and visually appealing websites. These amazing tools have not only facilitated the desired functionality into an online store but have also provided various customization features to both the merchants and customers.

Dolphin Web Solution is one of the best Magento extension service providers in the industry and provides complete configuration and installation services to meet its customer requirements. Are you also looking for a Magento expert help? We are just a call away.

We have just observed that web-based businesses changed the manner in which buyers find and purchase items and Mcommerce carried that usefulness to customers by means of the cell phone or tablet.

These are growing at a proven rate by making customers around the globe comfortable. It’s AI that is transforming the eCommerce web world with its innovative development. Truly, AI has been doing this for a long while now and with the rising of voice assistants, things have gotten all the more energizing. Organizations around the globe have now comprehended the significance of “Voice Commerce”.

Voice search shopping is the most recent pattern forming the eventual fate of today’s business. It’s difficult to consider voice and mobile shopping as isolated substances. These two encounters are perpetually interwoven.

Voice Commerce is empowered by advanced voice collaborators and assistants, which are anticipated to develop and grow more taking place in today’s era. We are going one step further.

Voice is currently a piece of a greater number of gadgets than some other computerized channel. In any case, even as it’s rapidly turning into an amazing connection point for some people, it’s despite everything flying under the radar of numerous associations.

Get started with a brief overview of Voice Commerce.

Integrating Voice Commerce:

It’s an alternative to a keyboard and mouse. All we need to do is through voice and commands we give instructions to voice assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa. Voice commerce is not just finding the products through commands but order and purchase are also involved.

It’s a faster process; Assistants can hear you, give results on the basis of your instructions and orders. Consumers prefer voice commerce because of its hands-free, provides results faster and allows you to do other things.

Below we can see a trend of voice search

How well we can use Voice commerce

It seems like the age of touch is giving way and making way “age of voice”. These are used for a wide variety of purposes like listening to music, getting any information, ordering food, executing home automation, and yes shopping of course.

Example: Amazon’s Alexa, use wake up a word as Alexa and order the name of the thing you want to purchase. Alexa checks a customer’s put-away purchasing history and proposes items dependent on past information. In the event that the past information shows no past solicitations like the present one, Alexa then initially recommends ‘Amazon Choice’ items.

Google lest you buy through voice using Google Express. Walmart, Costo has collaborated with Google to purchase through Google Assistant.

Some Statistics:

• In 2019, Voice-enabled digital assistants went from 69 million to 75.5 million.

• 30% of US users have used voice assistants to look for purchase items and information

• Major of users (57%) have enjoyed the experience with Voice Assistants

• 62% of voice-enabled speaker owners have bought items via voice commerce

• According to a survey, 22% of businesses have released a voice app, 29% of brands now offer purchases through voice, 71% of businesses agree that it can enhance the user experience, increase customer loyalty and engagement and 50% of all the searches would be through voice searches by 2020.

These statistics predict and convey how popular voice commerce is among the people. Indeed made the people starting to rely on these for most of the things

The focus should be on voice search/voice commerce

1) Invest in Voice:

From an innovation viewpoint, your conversational channel should be coordinated with a content platform. It is easy to deal with your aptitudes effectively from the content’s point of view and measure their viability and worth. The harder part is guaranteeing voice aligning with your general methodology. Voice is progressively open to an ever-extending segment. Customers ought to have the option to interface with your brand, which implies you have to get ready with content that makes space for contrasts across the environment, age, gender, and so on. Eventually, individuals come back to channels that are advantageous and simple to use. This is the guarantee of voice. To utilize it well, you have to convey that as a guarantee.

2) Integrate Voice technology into eCommerce platforms:

Integrating voice commerce through an eCommerce platform is a great consumer shopping channel. Almost all apps are featuring voice technology from voice ordering, voice payments, voice transactions, and voice inquires. With the increased adoption of this, people tend to buy devices with voice-based technology, retailers and marketers aim to expand and develop their brand and stay ahead of eCommerce competitors.

3) Customer Response:

Each business should know how their customers shop and what channels they like and map the customer journeys to incorporate voice to distinguish and ideate over where the customer stream can be improved with voice connections. Step into the customer’s shoes and try to think of ways how voice can help to improve our customer experience through purchase history, query solving, etc.

4) Align with Omnichannel strategy:

Voice Commerce ought to be aligned up with the shipper’s current omnichannel technique and permit flexibility in the customer experience. As an outcome, the customer ought to have the option to switch between devices, for example beginning the procedure with their voices and afterward checkout through their web or mobile devices, and the other way around. This sounds straightforward however it is probably the hardest structure with regards to the checkout. The undertaking for digital marketers is to give a consistent brand understanding to the buyer, paying little heed to the channel or device, this is Omnichannel marketing. 

5) Security: 

Privacy and security are 2 important processes that govern a customer’s viewpoint. Particularly with regards to the emotive component of Consumer payment. This will fill in as the structure hinders additional improvement of client trust. By utilizing voice recognition and adding code that must be addressed to complete the purchase, tech organizations want to ingrain trust in their clients. To make it a secure process we need strong customer authentication when making payments. Best could be don’t fully rely on payments through voice commerce.

Future Aspects of voice commerce

Voice commerce gives you an opportunity to reach customers in a smooth convenient way that is changing the way. It will include advancement and staying aware of the most recent innovation and patterns in customer reception. Voice Assistants are proving to be the new solutions for the eCommerce era and dominating the world with AI making consumer brand satisfaction equally satisfying and fruitful for retailers, marketers, and owners.

Shipping & Delivery is one of the most fundamental pieces of online business organizations here we discuss shipping options. On the off chance that your online store isn’t acceptable at the favorable conveyance of items and doesn’t have propelled dispatching highlights, it turns out to be too difficult to even consider selling through it.

Picking the most ideal approach to ship products online can be a major assignment. An eCommerce dispatching and shipping solutions permit you to pull your requests from your various selling channels into a simple, single, simple, and easy to navigate software that can help you track.

We don’t realize there are many people involved and responsible for shipping each item on time and make delivery fast. After the creation and development of the product, it’s the next essential step, and shipping options are an important aspect of the business.

If your online business isn’t good in the timely shipping of their products and items and doesn’t have propelled delivering highlights, it turns out to be too difficult to even think about selling through it. Customers would abandon right away and would never turn back to your store again. It takes time to regain trust.

Your online stores much have popular payment gateways or methods integrated with your store, necessary features, and functionality that make your shipment process easier and smooth. And doesn’t have propelled delivering highlights, it turns out to be too difficult to even think about selling through it.

Shipping Options & Strategies for e-commerce Business

There are a few fundamentals that set an establishment for shipping. these are the key choices and steps that make up your shipping techniques.

1. Shipping rates and methods:There are various methods to strategize the price for shipping. Here are a few:
2. Free shipping– Shipping is never, someone has to pay but offering free shipping is the best way to reduce shipping abandonment. It can be don’t this way:
3. Real-time carrier rates– Another way to charge is by adding real-time carrier rates. Shopify integrates real-time charges with a carrier like USPS, Australian Posts, etc to generate shipping options and live pricing from shipping carriers. This permits your customers to pick and pay for the specific assistance they need.
4. Flat rates– It works well if you have a similar product with weight and size and becomes complicated with varied sizes of products and less impactful. Just try you don’t undercharge or overcharge your customers.
5. Product Weights:  It’s imperative to update the weight of the product you sell so you are constantly mindful of how it will influence your expenses. This is particularly significant when you consider which delivering techniques will be your ideal fit. At that point, you can reasonably value your things so the entirety of your costs is dealt with while you give reserve funds to your customers.
6. Increase product price to cover the shipping cost
7. You pay the full price of shipping from your margins
8. Increase prices f product slightly to cover partial costs
9. Offer a discount cost.

Another approach is if you go by the zone-based approach of per product purchased where shipping price varies by your customer’s location not considering product size or weight also goes well.

If You are use magento for ecommerce Store so you must try our Magento 2 Best Shipping Extension

Make sure your product dimensions and weight are accurate so as to get an accurate rate from the carrier itself. For this, you may break the product into 2 categories heaviest and smallest. This has the best effect on shipping rates.

• Packaging:

Quite a while back, Shipping and packaging was just an approach to get an item bought on the web, however, an ever-increasing number of individuals are searching for packaging and introduction as a component of the eCommerce business experience.

Packaging and presentation the product is not just involved to ship the product but to deliver as a marketing strategy and to mark an impression on them. When you choose what sort of packaging experience you need to make, you can proceed onward to deciding the kind of packaging choices you have. The more you can save money on space and weight, the more investment funds you’ll create!

We suggest making an unpacking experience that leaves your customers amped up for something other than their thing and they would feel like showing off on their social media.

• Shipping Notifications:  

Setting up an eCommerce business is simpler than building decent notoriety and a customer base when you are selling online. It is intense in light of the fact that individuals, purchasing from your online store just because, might not have full trust in you. To maintain this, timely shipments may help you. 

By adding popular payment methods, shipping notifications alongside helps you track your order and manage them. Advance notifications extension is available that ensures eCommerce stores send up stock orders and notifications for suppliers, shippers, and third parties, etc. It updates you when an order is in stock, or low arrives back and helps you manage inventory and shipping well.

• Local Pickups:  

These are those order which doesn’t require online delivery. Best suited for one’s who have both online business and local store in parallel. You may order online and collect their order from local. Thus, getting free from shipment charges and may even get discounts from the store owners.

You can integrated local pickup in your eCommerce store. Enter details by picking up an appointment, lodging details about a warehouse that the customer has selected, pickup, etc. It notifies the respective warehouse manager/person about the booked appointment and other details.

• Invoice & Payment Slip:

Though we have a digitalized solution in this ers, still business relies on printing invoices and slips. Business purchasers need printed receipts to show the evidence or buy while normal buyers put stock in getting payment slips as well. These slips likewise help them later on the off chance that they have to trade or return the item. So it becomes crucial to include it.

An automated option for printing slips and invoices helps in getting it done. You can add an extension or plug-in related to it in your store. You can email invoices to purchasers, customize your invoice according to your need. No need to waste paper.

•  Shipping to Multiple Addresses:

Sometimes customers have a need to ship products to multiple addresses. Most of the eCommerce stores don’t have this option available. S you need to add an extension. Yes, making this feature available n your store can make you ahead of the competition.

This extension lets you set different buyers, multiple addresses for different it within the same order if they feel like it. They can easily partition the same order for different addresses.  One-step checkout for’ n’ no. of shipments. So if your online business actually needs this component, don’t postpone in introducing it to your store.

According to the research, In US B2B eCommerce sales have reached $1 trillion till 2018, and by 2020 B2B sales will be more than 2 times higher than global online retail sales. The share of eCommerce in US B2B industry is expected to grow from 9.7% to 13.1 % (from 2015-2021).

Over the next coming years, it’s likely to cross 1.2 trillion dollars. B2B eCommerce market s rapidly rising. The E-commerce rage at long last hit organizations all around the globe, and without precedent for history, a larger number of individuals made B2B buys online than they did through other conventional techniques.

It’s like adopting new technologies, a technological revolution. As the industry is growing so fast, some methodologies must be developed and adopted to match the market needs.

What is B2B Ecommerce?

B2B Ecommerce encompasses the online platform. It involves sales/ transactions of products and services between two companies or in other words it involves manufacturer, wholesaler and retailer, and transactions taking place through an electronic medium. Or we can consider it according to the new era as a business taking place through a website/mobile apps, where the purchase decision is affected by-products, reviews, ratings, and product researched.

So we are clear on the definition terms. Presently B2B dealers are progressively going online and developing new and repeat business. It has been found B2B sales are growing rapidly through websites and other online marketplaces at a very high pace.

Generally, B2B transactions are quite complex and have to manage substantially more in terms of tax and regulatory impediments because the volume of products and services is higher.

Hence, these complexities faced in business make the online process much demanding.

The companies leveraging B2B Ecommerce have 3 basic categories. However, according to companies, there can be several categories formed addressing their business needs. But these are just on a basic level to provide you a satisfying eCommerce business.

1) Volume Products:

It gets clear by the name itself, these are large in quantities and tend to have lower-priced items. It’s primarily centered around making the order process simple, smooth, and easy. It enables customers to order to place an order in the least no. of clicks. Orders can be in the form of pre-order, re-orders, or custom order formats.

2)Subscription Products:

With the development of digital transformation, a large number of products are offered as a service.  These can be purchased monthly, yearly, or by automated reorders. You don’t need to particularly buy a product and check out with the items but instead signup for a service. As a result, they support a unique purchase flow and process.

3) Configurable products:

Products like manufacturing equipment, medical devices, networking products, telecommunication solutions, etc may be dependent on other offerings and services and need to be combined together with other products as these often have a high price and before thinking to buy customers usually want to get a quote for purchase.

Why People are focusing on B2B?

Taking over the young generation

Google report says, nearly half of all B2B buyers are millennials, they are taking up the business as entrepreneurs and reaching at the point where they could lead.

As everything is digitally focused, this generation is more focusing on getting everything they require online and enjoying unmatched customer service. Now the drift has occurred where it’s not just the case of making profits but to target customers, secure and retaining them by your value-added service. The ideology has been now more customer-oriented

Customers are more likely to give away the cheap prices if you offer them convenience, faster delivery, 24*7  eCommerce support and other such services. This builds trust and retains employees being more loyal to you. In the next 3 years, the competition will increase, and the deciding factor would be customer service.

B2B eCommerce self-service

As the major aspect of strategy, B2B companies offer self-services to their customers and visitors. On an average above 50% of B2B buyers view self-services feature as necessary one when analyzing and accessing a brand’s online experience. Companies believe offering customer’s some kind of personalization should be a priority as it has room to grow by personalizing the customer experience.

Provide buyers to access their traction history, payment methods, delivery options, and that too easily available. 

Product Recommendations: These display recommended products on individual product purchases which may fulfill specific business-related needs of suppliers in a user-friendly way.

Custom Price List:  You can customize the list according to the deal set and each buyer can get a view of it. The same could be done for shipping costs and order in quantities.

Custom Catalog:  lets you customize the product catalog for each buyer.

B2B buyers focus on getting a B2C-like experience as it individual services for customers.

Omnichannel Sales

Omnichannel not just gives a boost to sales but also provides opportunities for businesses to capitalize on marketing and consumer services on different platforms. Envision how simple the lives of customers will be in the event that they can do all their business at the straightforward dash of a catch on their cell phones or laptops.

36% of B2B companies have started implementing omnichannel initiatives. For this to be effective your brand needs to be present, active and consistent on all channels. Failure to do so can d a loss of your customer’s trust in you.

Voice of customer

B2B is customer-oriented, what they want. If you are focusing on the long term then you must carefully listen and analyze their feedback, understand their requirements, improve customer experience, develop processes and strategies that work on these. These are the key areas.

Some commonly used methods to gather information are through conducting surveys and interviews, focus groups, pay attention to social mentions of your industry. Further, use this data to improve products and services and create customer-facing content.

This guarantees results and retains your customers.

Augmented Reality and Artificial intelligence

Ecommerce is utilizing the power of AR and AI aiming to provide better services and lives to people around. Thanks to AI software that can predict stock levels, relevant orders in advance. On other hand, AR can help you visualize what a product will look like before buying it.

This is how these technologies are making a change in the world and the customer service sector. The future relies on those that are taking over humans and solving our problems.

Want to shoot up your sales with minimal effort? You heard it right with minimum endeavors. This is done by Visual Commerce. It’s important to understand what Visual Commerce is.

We start with an example, You see an anonymous person on your way, wearing a shirt you like the most. Through visuals, you brain conceived it, but now how to find it on the web, what to write, how to describe to get the same thing you saw. Seems burdensome? And you have no idea whether you’ll get the same result in your search queries. Do we have another way to get the same shirt we perceived through our eyes?

The answer is Visual Search, rather than wasting our time on inaccurate search keywords and results.

What is visual search?

Makes the process simple, easier and results in a short time. It permits them to imagine themselves utilizing their camera to do what they’ve been longing for, the thing which provoked them to bounce on the web and quest for it.

Ecommerce retailers and marketers have found their way to reach out to more audiences, build their trust through Visual commerce. The rising importance of visuals in the eCommerce world has amplified search, awareness, and conversions.

These visuals interpret the pictures either through visual clues or the image’s metadata. Incorporated with AI, it shows you the most relevant search result possibilities.

Studies say about visual search

• Currently, only 8-10% of retailers have incorporated the visual search in their respective sites and when integrating eCommerce sites with UGCs (User Generated Content), revenue has increased by 82%,
• Retailers reported a 40% increase in purchases when featuring video.
• Compelling images are getting more views say 94%
• 64% of millennials demand visual search capabilities than any other technology.

The data reveals this is becoming a need of an hour and marketers are seeing the value in Visual Commerce. Big Brands are hustling to make it in action soon as it pays off well.

Capabilities Of Visual Commerce:

Transforming content into Infographics:

The way of representation changes always with time. Written content has its own importance and there’s no denying fact but gradually visual content is becoming more engaging. It makes you free from adding relevant keywords for particular items as the persuasive power of visuals takes over.

This is what infographics do to us, it’s self-explanatory. Gives a clear, precise meaning to everything. When enhanced with branding, attractive visuals and data can influence the customer’s decision.

User-Generated Content: User-generated content or brand-related content and both useful, colorful and vibrant at the same time. UGC’s boost marketing and sales and focus rely on making a content strategy that can be striking and engaging with customers. You can play more with UGC by giving them reasons to choose your brand by telling them what’s special about them and their products. It actually adds the human essence to it. It has become a sales channel. You can create separate galleries to host images for your customers.

Target audience through social media: Through visuals, it’s possible to deliver without writing much content and to do that in just a fraction of minutes, you don’t need to spend hours finding the right content, which will be done by UGC, sounds great!

The impact it creates is direct, very engaging and expands your reach. Social media ads are made for this only to reach a target audience through promotions and build a network. IT inspires them to be loyal customers. You can also embed visuals from other social platforms as it could help you to create social proof, increase conversion rates, brand value and support claims.

Ambassadors marketing: One of the best uses of visuals is for marketing and promotions, increasing sales and brand name for your website. Through ambassador marketing, it’s easy to influence fans and other folks to promote your brand friends, associates and users directly to your site.

Increase Website Vibrancy: Through the name, it’s clear, colorful and vibrant. Visuals are the main essence, the compelling and vibrant visuals have a very good impact on the visitors. Work with beautiful shoppable galleries to increase website vibrancy and keep the users engaging with your site.

Visual Commerce is turning into an indispensable piece of marketing. Hence it becomes important to choose a platform that fits a company’s needs and has scalability. A Visual Platform has a variety of aspects that ensure seamless flow and helps in increasing sales, drive conversions and maintains engagement. The visual platforms are made to provide a superlative consumer experience and support business. We have accumulated a few best visual platforms.

1. Photoslurp: Photoslurp is a stunning visual commerce platform analyses, investigates and publishes user-generated content in an innovative way. Ensures high engagement and conversion rates, gathers UGC images/videos, and integrates with your eCommerce store.
2. Curalate: An advanced visual commerce platform incorporated with artificial intelligence that links images/videos to products of your store through image recognition. It enhances product discoverability and collects visual content from other social media platforms also to display its, users.
3. Adsmurai: Another helpful visual commerce platform implying the use of machine learning to deliver you the best visual content. This platform provides user-generated content for marketing campaigns for sales and social proof.
4. TaggShop: An advancement of Taggbox. It converts visual content from other social media platforms into a shoppable feed. It amplifies reach and reduces the bounce rate. Here you can tag products shown in the form of images and add links to buy directly from visuals by converting visuals into shopping instantly.

Conclusion

As you could see, these take the world of commerce to another level. It’s a trend that benefits store owners, as well as customers, who can also take advantage of it. It’s the future of the eCommerce industry.

The power of the visual commerce platform is its cost-effective, resourceful, strengthen relations by building trust, and adds value to your brand.

Artificial Intelligence, brief as AI; a word is known and on everyone’s lips. Has changed the world in terms of technological enhancements and the way we live today.

Touched every field and area and made its name worldwide. The system is smarter than humans. We couldn’t imagine doing work much like never before. It’s going to be our digital partner for the long run when used wisely.

Now, how it’s affecting Ecommerce world, is a matter of subject.

Ecommerce and retail are taking full advantage to understand customers, clients in a much better way, their preferences, to reach the target audience, delivery, promote sales, and much more relying on AI solutions. These sectors are making huge profits.

It’s creating a revolution!

AI is benefitting the e-commerce industry in multiple ways. To understand customer’s experience and perspective a few things we have listed below:

How did Chatbots use using AI?

Ecommerce is now focusing on giving personalized approaches and building good user experiences. The needs of an individual rapidly change and keeping up with them becomes difficult to analyze. To cope up with this, these Chatbots came into the picture. Chatbots are used to simulate human conversation when used with AI through any messaging application.

Because of this online assistance to customers has become possible as they could understand issues of the visitors coming to the site.

• First, these can be used to execute operations and marketing by offering assistance,
• Can help automate order processes by providing customer service via speech, text or both,
• Integrating them with shopping carts can bring you, potential customers,
• Provides the most convenient & valuable support for online business with decreased response time.

How to improve CRM using Artificial Intelligence?

CRM is used to maintain the bulk of data.  Earlier by manual practices, it used to take lots of effort to gather and evaluate data in order to provide the services. Through AI large volumes of data help to analyze which customer will be able to make a decision to buy.

With CRM enhancements, everything goes right, predictions made easy with accurate results and this helps in maintaining healthy relations with the customers, generate new leads through the use of data and revenue gets increased.

CRM’s are becoming sales friends, as they no longer need to do any monotonous task and just focus on tracking the purchase patterns.

How Artificial intelligence give you Product Recommendations?

It has become possible through AI to predict customer choices and display personalized product recommendations based on the choices they make. These have been found to be popular and increasing by conversion rate by 915%. The data is displayed on the basis of previous purchases, searched products, online browsing history and creates vast possibilities giving personalized kinda recommendations, hence increasing chances of buying.

Recommendations are either through pop-ups, emails, or text messages. It even shows ads related to products according to the user’s interest with the same AI algorithm or social media platforms and search engines. Auto Product recommendations are useful in the sense of creating ROT (Return On Investment) for most of the brands by providing them the best solutions.

Reviews and recommendations have always favored the chances of shopping more.

AI Used for Virtual Assistance?

If you are focused on providing a real-time interactive experience to your customer, then this is the best use of AI, Virtual Assistants. Ecommerce retailers have started moving towards digital assistants for 24*7 support. To interact with customers and providing them with a much better experience.

AI assistants like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Assistants can process native languages and easily interpret the messages by the customers and respond to them in a language they understand.

They are completely transforming the purchasing process by carving a niche. Since AI clears insights through a careful analysis of data they gather, hence they are able to make the right decisions at the right time.

Customer-Centric Search Approach:

The best thing any eCommerce website could provide is the use of customizing their search in a way that it displays relevant search results that motivate them to stay. Else customers would leave the site there itself. With AI it’s simple and easy to deal with such stuff.

It implies the use of natural language to narrow, contextualize and enhance search results. By utilizing machine learning (part of AI), websites and applications can make use of visual elements, use voice recognition, advance images to present search elements just as users do.

Thus AI technology has been giving a competitive turn to online businesses through its customer-centric model be implementing VR technologies, advanced images which help to tag, organize and search by mages or video traits.

Filtering Fake Reviews using AI

We all believe and check online reviews and feedback before making a decision to purchase. For quality, genuineness of the item it is important and people do rely on this. But there are few cases where some fake spammers add fake reviews published by either competitors or other brands which impacts the reputation of retailers and owners. AI is helping to identify and filter such fake reviews and help customers through genuine comments. AI uses behavior and sentiment analytics to find suspicious activities and protect users from scams.

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Optimize Inventory management with the help of AI

It deals with the demand and supply of the market and maintains inventory so efficiently to fulfill market needs without adding to idle stock.  With the conventional practices of inventory management and to know how much stock should be available to maintain demand and supply was a difficult and monotonous task.

AI-enabled inventory management is analyzing historical data, finding & designing trends out of it, projected changes in product demand, potential supply issues that could impact inventories, etc, all these to come upon precise decisions.

AI’s future will rely on automated robots and other innovations for warehouse management and production in the e-commerce sector.

Privacy and Security using AI

An important concern in e-commerce platforms is to secure customer data at their site. Brands and retailers are striving hard to tackle this issue and find solutions to maintain the levels of privacy and security and they rely on AI for this.

By integrating AI solutions to your e-commerce site, your customer information will stay safe and secure with you and hoodlums at the bay of your store.

Summing up:

AI in business is intended to enhance customer experience. In the coming years, it’s going to bring huge beneficial changes in the eCommerce industry. Empowering sales, helping retailers to implement more structured models with AI and scaling the human capital.