A Digital Transformation and Modernization Guide to Help Your Business Outshine

If you have an eCommerce store, you know the mighty importance of conversions. It’s a basic survival need. High traffic. More leads. Are like a silver lining. But they don’t pay bills. Traffic has to be converted into leads and leads into sales. But between these lines of conversions, there is a complex web of teething troubles, challenges, fences, and visible-invisible knots that acts as a barrier to entry. But then again it has to be untangled to easily reach paying customers.

Thankfully, we have got easy to use and powerful platforms, solutions that take off your flight to build, manage, and grow business. eCommerce businesses or brick-n-mortar stores looking to go online, manage their multiple stores in an easier and faster way with a significant boost in revenue; from this point Codiant is at your disposal. For “Making Commerce Better For Everyone”.

Before that, we would like to throw light on the most common, unnoticed set of problems that as an eCommerce business you don’t pay heed to. And probably, start splurging your valuable earned money on marketing blindly.

The good idea is to check on these points that always stays unique business wise. Remember- it can’t be imitated looking at other brands.

Your finding is yours. So will be your outcome.

Knowing About Your Customers

The more you know about your customers, the better you will be able to serve them.

And plan your next marketing move with efforts that will actually matter.

So, it’s worth knowing:

• Who your customers are?
• What do they buy?
• Why do they buy?
• When do they buy?

Figuring out this 4Ws is like attempting to hit balls into each hole on a golf course while employing the fewest number of strokes.

Strong sales are driven by emphasizing on this bigger picture.

It’s also worth keeping an eye on your customer’s lives, their purchasing behavior, time they spent on the product, reason they make a buy or abandon the product. When they land to your eCommerce app or website!

Anticipating what they are going to need? When will they come to buy? What gender it would be?

And offering them all these things as soon as they need it. Period.

Have you ever wondered how the biggest online marketplace app and website Amazon shows exactly what you want?

Well, the market leader constantly learns about its customers and stores the behavioral data by identifying your product’s preferences and buying behaviors.

And then takes this information and shows the products related to items you have browsed.

This way all this information gathered by Amazon personalizes the shopping experience and guides (influences) you to buy more.

How Does This Help?

• Improves customer experience
• Increases brand trust and promotes customer loyalty
• Improves conversions and boost revenue
• Increases customer retention
• Strengthens customer relationship

Identifying Your Target Market

Now how do you get your product or service in front of the right people at the right time matching to their needs?

A quick and easy way to start identifying your customers is targeted marketing.

This type of marketing involves two different steps:

A. Identifying Your Targeted Market Segment : Like who your target customer is going to be?

B. Designing Your Marketing Mix : Packaging and positioning of wanted product, desired price, and promotions such that the target market buys it quickly.

A. How to Identify Your Target Segment?

Geographic Segmentation : Divides the market based on location, areas with specific population, climate languages, etc.

Behavioral Segmentation : Divides the audience based on their behavior, buyer readiness, usage, occasions, and knowledge of product.

Psychographic Segmentation : Based on consumer social class, attitude, personality, activities, interests, and opinions.

Demographic Segmentation : Based on Age, Gender, Race, Income, Religion, Occupation, Family Size, Geographic location, Zip Code.

Devising a marketing strategy without market segmentation means your target group is just a population.

For a clearer perspective, tell us what’s more profitable?

Nike targeting multiple segments of people to sell its sport apparel OR only targeting fitness enthusiasts?

The latter of course.

The better you focus on your target. The better your brand will be.

How Does This Help?

• Building a strategy on a particular segment increases focus and profitability
• Gives you an opportunity to scale and expand quickly. (Nike targets fitness enthusiasts and then can expand in similar fitness range like clothing and fitness watch)
• Increases customer retention
• Makes better communication

B. Designing Your Marketing Mix

Consider the Case Study of Titan Watches

1. Segmentation : Titan targets customers with low income as well as high range income.
2. Marketing Mix : Segments its exclusive line of watches for low as well as a high-income group. Offers Sonata to the low-income groups while offers Tommy Hilfiger to its opulent group.
3. Product Positioning : Visit a Titan’s retail store. It always maintains separate sections for its different classes of customers.

Once you have decided on the target segment, then you can work on the marketing mix strategy.

Your marketing mix having 4 Ps should be compatible with each other.

Like if you have a high-income group as a target, you should be having a product with premium pricing, good product placement and a marketing strategy boosting it.

Consider the Case Study of Titan Watches

1. Segmentation (based on income) : Here Titan targets customers with low income group as well as high range income.
2. Marketing Mix : Titan has parted its exclusive line of watches for low as well as high income group. It offers Sonata to low income group while offers Tommy Hilfiger to its opulent group.
3. Product Positioning : Visit a Titan’s retail store. It always maintains distinct sections for its different classes of customers.

How Does This Help?

• The marketing mix helps in creating a product chain holding a strong bond that can be elongated.
• It can help you in increasing the products’ portfolio vertically and horizontally.
• It helps in differentiating yourself from competitors.

Related Reading: How to Battle with the Most Common Challenges of an Online E-commerce Marketplace?

Are You Still Using The Old-School Way of Selling Your Products Online?

Take a quick quiz and answer yourself. If maximum answers are ‘Yes’, it’s high time to upgrade your eCommerce practices.

1. You don’t come to know which product sells faster and has a high demand.
2. Do you often run out of stock in high-demand time and lose sales?
3. Do you overfill the least selling products and deal with excess stock?
4. You don’t when it’s time to buy more materials or replenish products?
5. Do you fail to deal with your suppliers effectively resulting in delayed orders?
6. Do you have poor cash flows and not enough working capital?
7. Do you often face these problems? How do you deal with them?

Do you have data to find out of stack patterns? Does your eCommerce platform forecasts demand? Does your eCommerce solution pay attention to consumer trends and online store analytics?

Questions are even more.

But the answer is one. “You do not have your own data”. Your technology is limiting you.

Retailers wanting to achieve growth should gather insightful data and make informed decisions out of it.

For this, you must choose a good eCommerce development and marketing company that gets the right set of eCommerce platform solution, supply chain management software, CRM system, analytics, strategic campaigns and so much more for you.

Remember, a wrong agency could limit your growth. Make a very careful decision.

Solution Architecture

Getting the Prime Treatment with eCommerce Platforms

Retailers are result-oriented. So it shouldn’t be a guessing that our next focus is to jump on the solution.

There are many eCommerce platform solutions, both on-premises and cloud-based. That benefits your business in addition to providing scalability and protection of data.

You have Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Drupal, Opencart and many more.

These eCommerce Platforms Offer:

• A product management suite
• Search capabilities
• Merchandising
• Pricing
• Promotions
• Customization of services (like payments, marketing features, mobile apps, extension of add ons, etc.)

Picking one platform amongst them could be challenging but easy if you know your ultimate goals.

So, how will you make a wise decision in choosing the right eCommerce platform? Let us help you out in understanding these platforms and aligning them with your needs.

Shopify is the most popular and all-inclusive cloud-based hosting platform with an easy-to-use interface and low start-up cost that help users set up online shops in less than a week.

It is fully customizable and has robust analytics to help you track sales, no. of visits and referrals. A dashboard to view your sales, orders with product reports that helps you in gaining insights of your store’s performance.

Codiant’s Tip

Shopify should be your first choice if you’re a new brand or a start-up looking for a quick go market solution. If you’re a brand:

• Having a relatively small and simple catalog
• Having products without a large number of variation
• With less complex B2C use-cases

Ideal for Start-Up Stores

Brands with SKU < 100

Hobbyists For non – experienced ecommerce practitioners

Online Storefront

• 70+ professional themes
• Brand and customize your online store
• Built-in mobile commerce shopping cart
• Easy customization
• Blogging platform

Store Management

• Learn about your customers and their shopping habits
• Automatic refunds on some or all orders with auto-update of inventory
• Customer Segmentation based on location, purchase history, orders, etc.
• Shopify app allows you to manage your store on your smartphone
• You can capture payments, fulfil orders, send shipping notifications

Products

Inventory Management Hide out-of-stock products	Product Variations Sell products in multiple sizes, colors, materials, prices, etc.	Optimize Product Pages Make your products search-engine friendly
Product Organization Organize and sort products by category, type, season, sale, and vendor.	Unlimited Products You can sell any number of products on your online store.	Multiple Images Show your product from different angles by adding multiple images.

Shopping Cart

• Automatic shipping rates (from carriers like UPS, USPS, and FedEx)
• Recover lost sales by sending emails to prospects by sending links to their abandoned carts
• Integrates over 100 payment gateways
• Flexible shipping rates (by fixed-price, tiered pricing, location-based and weight-based)
• Freedom to choose price point to which Free shipping can be given
• Multi lingual platform with over 50+ languages

Marketing and SEO

Search Engine Optimized (Be easily found on search engines)	Automatically Generates Sitmap.xml (For products, webpages, and blog posts)	Product Reviews (Engage customers to leave product reviews)
Targeted Discount codes (To boost sales and customer loyalty)	Sell on Facebook (Users can browse and buy products without leaving Facebook)	Social Media Integration (Sell on new sales channel like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter)

eCommerce Mobile App

Shopify App Development arms retailers and merchants to add extended functionality and custom integrations to their eCommerce stores.

Shopify App Development Features

Order Fulfilment	Manage Inventory	Email or Call Customers
Mobile Dashboard	Email Marketing	Loyalty Rewards Program
Web Push Notifications	Product Recommendations	Live Chat With Chatbot

WooCommerce is an open-source, fully customizable eCommerce platform built on WordPress. The platform is enriched with 400 official extensions, countless themes, built-in blogging capabilities and hundreds of other features like product ratings and reviews, sorting and filtering, unlimited images and galleries to show off unlimited products and several other that makes it the best eCommerce platform for creating a powerful online store.

Codiant’s Tip

Did you know? There are over 5 million active installations of WooCommerce WordPress plugin. And you can migrate your shops from other eCommerce platforms to WooCommerce?

Good for startups and small to medium business

Completely Free Platform

Remarkably easy to use

How Will A WooCommerce Platform Benefit Retailers?

• Cost-effective solution with a huge number of free and paid plug-ins to use.
• Best fits with WordPress website development.
• Fast and easy social media integration helps you in easily reaching audiences and also allows users to log in through their social media accounts.
• WooCommerce store is self-hosted so that you have full control of your online store and you can manage your operations easily and efficiently.
• WooCommerce gives you the ability to design a unique, beautiful website through Custom WordPress themes to make you stand out amongst competitors.
• With WooCommerce you can sell anything and everything. Be it physical products, virtual products, services, or urging donations. No limits to retailers and their innovative business ideas.
• Built-in payment gateways allow you to easily deal with transactions through PayPal, Stripe, Amazon Pay and many more.
• You can generate sales even when your products run out of stock. Your suppliers will receive orders and they can keep a record of the locations they were ordered from.
• WooCommerce smart analytic tools allow you in drawing insightful business decisions based on sales reports and buyer’s purchase history.

Magento is an exceptionally powerful platform or a solution architect that has both free as well Enterprise edition giving you the flexibility to self-host or use it as a cloud edition.

• Magento Open Source : It is a free platform offering SMBs basic functions needed to run an e-commerce store.
• Magento Commerce : A premium paid edition of Magento power-packed with rich features and an ability to tackle complex eCommerce operations arms very large eCommerce website making it a far more robust solution that meets rising customer demands.

Codiant’s Tip
Magento being the world’s most flexible platform should be your first choice if you are a brand having medium to the large online store and have a large learning curve. Magento offers one of the most powerful sets of features perfect for brands having big targets. It is way costlier and has typically higher maintenance.

Ideal for Medium to Large Business

Free Community version with premium seruices

Recommended for users with a basic level of web development knowledge

What does a Magento Platform Has to Offer Retailers?

• MVC framework for scalability
• Strong B2B eCommerce capabilities
• Supports unlimited number of products
• Comes with its own theming and layout system
• Integrates with payments gateways like PayPal, Authorize.net, etc.
• Magento is built for scalability and can handle large stores.
• The platform leads and outpaces other solutions in security

Drupal is a CMS and eCommerce platform with fully customizable options for your site. Drupal extends its core functionality with over 40,000 modules and new features. For normal websites, the platform has ready-to-go functionality. Thus, saving you from custom eCommerce development efforts. However, for large, complex websites you can leverage the benefit by accessing and extending the code.

Codiant’s Tip

Drupal serves as a solid foundation for virtually any type of website. However, its customization features are bit complex and can be managed only by advanced users and developers. Drupal is used by some well-known sites like Digett, Popular Science, Warner brothers Records, the Economist and more.

Ideal for Large Websites

Fully Flexible for customization and extensibility

Recommended for users with Advanced development knowledge

What Speciality Drupal Solution Architect Has?

• Open source for complete control
• Easily available support team
• Scales with your business
• Top rated in security and stability
• Creates consumer-focused digital experiences across multiple channels

Technology Platforms

UNDERSTANDING UNDER THE HOOD OF THE ‘WEB AND APP ARCHITECTURE’

Ecommerce Web Development : A Closer Look towards Frontend and Backend Technologies

Front end technologies make the website look great, with easy-to-navigate functionalities, and beautiful aesthetics. Additionally, the front end technologies also plays the main role in increasing the responsiveness and device portability.

Whereas, back end technologies are like the skeleton present behind the aesthetically appealing and smoothly navigating website. Leveraging a powerful back-end technology ensures the websites functions and runs smoothly without any drop in performance.

Some of the most popular front-end technologies used for building beautiful eCommerce website and back end technologies carrying robust eCommerce web development are given below.

That said, our eCommerce developers possess exceptional expertise in these technologies. So, if you’re planning to take your stores online, don’t miss to shoot us a mail. As at Codiant, we bring to your customers unprecedented digital experiences to take their shopping fervor at another level.

Ecommerce App Development : Mobile App Platforms for Developing mCommerce Apps

Next, we come to mCommerce app development. Developing an E-Commerce Mobile App can be planned for two different mobile platforms- Android and iOS. Both these platforms have an equally good number of user base.

If you are looking to capture a large customer base, we recommend you to get the native app for both operating systems.

Furthermore, if you are highly aspirant in moving with modern technologies and leaving no customer untouched with your app services, then you should not keep your brand limited to only smartphone platforms.

Wearable app development is the next step forward. This technology will enable your customers to place the orders from smartwatches as well.

Examples of Brands having Smartwatch Commerce Apps:

• Domino’s
• Hotels.com
• eBay

Augmented Reality (AR in eCommerce)

Improve customer’s shopping experience with Augmented Reality technology. AR improvises customer experience at all stages of shopping funnel. The technology merges virtual and physical world experiences together to bring comfort and convenience.

Through AR, Customers can not only browse a large variety of products but also technically experience the products on their physical environment and their own bodies.

The best example of the eCommerce brand leveraging AR is Lenskart. The ‘3D Try on’ feature let users to check how a frame looks on their face on both web and app formats.

Another example is of Sephora, the personal care and beauty legend has crossed edges in dispensing a rich and expressive experience. Users can virtually ‘try on’ almost every product range and be confident in making a purchase decision. Leading to increased sales and zero returns.

Some Overwhelming Facts of AR Probably You Didn’t Know

• AR spending is estimated to reach $60 billion by 2020.
• 61% of online shoppers prefer to make purchases on sites that offer augmented reality technology.
• 63% of customers say augmented reality would improve their shopping experience.
• 35% say AR would make them shop online more often.
• 77% of customers prefer to use AR capabilities to preview product variations.
• 40% of customers consent to pay a higher price for any products previewed by AR.

AI in eCommerce

AI Personalization in eCommerce revolutionizes the online shopping experience by generating and predicting the accurate forecast of the eCommerce business.

AI enables retailers to leverage cookie data and provide specific consumers with highly personalized offerings.

Wondering How?

AI uses NLP or natural language process to contextualize and improve the search result and uses visual search capabilities to match the product. Helping you to enhance the sales game and retarget the potential buyers.

How does AI in eCommerce Help Retailers?

• AI’s Automation capabilities tell retailers what exactly their customers are looking for.
• AI’s predictive data helps in Sales Forecasting.
• AI-powered search engine helps in making intelligent searches by tracking your customer’s browsing patterns and helping them find exactly what they are looking for.
• AI powered chatbot solutions helps customers by answering all their shopping related queries.

Also Read: Five Ways Internet of Things is Transforming eCommerce

Ready to Market or Digital Transformation Technologies to Open New Creative Avenue for Your Online Storefront

Winning the new age customers is not an easy feat. Changing consumer preference, purchasing behavior and evolving needs leaves no room for traditional eCommerce solutions.

To rise above the competitive losses, you have to upgrade and adapt tools and technologies that take you to express lane.

Here are a few powerful understated extensions provided by the eCommerce platforms like Shopify and others to help you drive front-end sales. Tactically.

(Not to mention, you can anytime ring us or simply drop an email to unveil and take a peek on our long-tail customer engagement strategies and sales grabbing tricks (that anyway we can’t mention it all here) crafted for a wide range of industries.)

eCommerce Digital Marketing Tools – A Personalization Engine

• Loyalty Rewards Program Create a well-composed enticing strategy for customer retention with a loyalty rewards program. This extension bundles all user sticky features like Activity Rules, Rewards, Refer A Friend, Cart Redeem Widget, Advance Activities Push Access, FB Share, Social Follow, Tier System, Point Expiry, POS Support, Manually Add/Remove Points, Free Product Vouchers, etc. to boost your growth and brand reputation.
• Product Reviews Make your prospective future customers more confident by gathering product reviews. Popular eCommerce platforms pack a punch of features like Review Request Emails, Additional Review Reminder Emails, Capture & Show Review from Product Form, Review Widget and carousel, import reviews, Approve / Unpublish Reviews, Reward Points for the Review Received and much more. All to take reviews empathetically in any possible way. The greater the no. of reviews, the more convinced a shopper will be that they’re making the right decision.
• Web Push Notifications Retarget your visitors by sending them personalized real-time notifications to mobile app and web apps. Tools like PushOwl by Shopify helps you in sending web push impression, manual push message, and abandoned cart push to unlimited subscribers. It also allows you to schedule push messages, track push impressions among other features.

• Smart Popup & Forms Increase visitor’s engagement, capture more leads and subscribers with smart tools that provide compelling active popups and forms. These stunning pop-ups also include other popup variations like newsletter signup, exit intent, review popup, abandoned popup, loyalty signup, pre-built popup templates, and customization using popup designers.
• Product Recommendations Increase revenues by 3X, improve conversions and boost average order value by the product recommendation engine. This clever tool presents only those products to online visitors that they might want to buy next. Also, these product recommendations tools include features like New Arrival Products, Any Page Widget, Email Widgets, Order Tracking, Bestseller Products and Recently Viewed Products. It also improves the shopping experience, boosts user stickiness and maximizes revenue.
• Other Important Tools Predictive Reporting and Analytics tools, Chatbots to boost live chats, Announcement bar (like sales motivator, order tracking bars, countdown timers, cookie bars), social media integration, etc. these features are pivotal in developing an online presence for your brand.
  

  SEO Campaigns: Monitoring the Right KPI with Search Engine Optimization

  Okay, so we are not at all talking here about traditional SEO practices, where you are not sure if your efforts and hard-earned money are driving tangible efforts or not.

  SEO strategies changes with dynamic search engine algorithms. And tracking the right performance metrics is the only way out to identify which tactic is working and which is not.

  With the right campaigns on a place not only you can drive branded traffic, increase search rankings and visibility but also drive measurable ROI.

  So, while you hire a digital marketing company for eCommerce your main criteria for evaluating the SEO results through KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) should have the following checkpoints:

• Specify Your Goals Like what do you aim for? Is it driving visitors, closing leads, or increasing search engine visibility?
• Declare Your Budget Keep your budget transparent with digital marketers on SEO before you kickstart.
• Select the Right Tracking Tools Make sure you automate the tracking processes and select the right monitoring tools that give you detailed reports of progress.

What strategies are crucial for effective eCommerce development and marketing?

Personalized marketing, strong technological integration, and purposeful consumer engagement will help you up your eCommerce game. Choose the best platform based on your business objectives, properly segment your market, and have a thorough understanding of your clients. Sustain long-term success in the digital economy by remaining customer-focused, data-driven, and adaptable.

Customer Engagement Strategies

No Less Than a Music to Every Online Retailer’s Ears

Customer Experience (CX) – The Blood Sibling of Customer Engagement. The better the CX the more will be customer engagement.

So, what can you do to a create customer experience that would be loved by your customers?

There are three simple ways to achieve:

• Offering them easy-to-use product or service
• Making valuable customer relationship
• Giving enjoyable brand experience

These 3 major goals have to be infused in every stage of the funnel that the customer takes.

Presenting customers the products/items even before they have asked for, making them happy so that they have a reason to make a comeback, communicating on their term, on their channel of choice (like emails, SMS, push messages) and there are dozens of other ways.

From promotional giveaways, product bundling, subscription models, session marketing to endless other options that save you from abandoned carts and triggers more sales.

Know What Ecommerce Retailers and Brands Are Experiencing By Implying Them

• 88% of companies now prioritize customer experience in their contact centers.
• 55% of customers are willing to shell out more for a better experience.
• Spending on loyalty programs has always proved to be a good decision. One loyalty program member spends up to 13% more than two non-members. (Forrester Research Paper).
• 86% of customers are willing to pay up to 25% more to get a better customer experience.
• Customer Retention strategies are equally important. Good to love and welcome your new customers, but never forget to appreciate your old ones. It is it’s 7x more expensive to get a new customer than to retain an existing one. (Invesp)
• Adding a chat bot is also a good option. As 31% of online shoppers from both the US and UK say they’d be more likely to purchase after a live chat.
• Upselling and cross-selling maximize the value of the purchase by two-fold. According to Forrester Research, 30% of online sales results are from either cross selling or up selling.

To make it happen either you can run strategy campaigns or heavily condition your app platform with latest tools, and technologies- it will all benefit customers.

But gaining this in-depth knowledge about customers isn’t something that happens in a flick.

You need to collect and act on data related to customer experience.

Rely on technology that builds better ‘listening posts’. And drive valuable insights from that data with full velocity and precision.

Executive Summary

There you have it.

All the ways to get done your eCommerce development and marketing the right way.

The first thing you need to do is just make a start.

Choose an eCommerce development, strategy and marketing company you find that greater matches with your brand requirements. And possess all the skill set, experience and knack to help your business thrive in the online marketplace.

Start here.

When you constantly hustle to provide functionality, interactivity, engagement. We’re here to help.

We will Supercharge and Simplify Your Customer Engagement Efforts. Rethink eCommerce with Codiant.

For this reason, we are hailed as a one-stop digital transformation company helping brands of all sizes soar and roar in the online marketplace unprecedentedly.