With the increasing number of people opening up online businesses, it has become increasingly difficult in this tough market to stand out from the competition. In fact, one of the frequent problems that newer e-commerce platforms face right now is the difficulty in scaling up and reaching new customers.
So what is the solution? Well one way of going about it is to lower prices than the competition in order to get more sales. However, that is not a sustainable model and increasing your customer base through coupons and discounts has proved disastrous for many fledgling startups in the past. Burning through cash like that is just not optimal so businesses need a new way of attracting more customers their way!
The most effective way to do that is to offer unique services that makes you stand out from the competition. In today’s piece, we are gonna tell you about 3 secrets that would make you e-commerce platform grow rapidly without hemorrhaging a lot of cash!
1. Personalisation
An easy way to increase the number of recurring customers to your platform is to personalise their experience while shopping on your website or app. With the help of advanced analytics you can build up a pretty complete customer profile that is unique to every visitor on your website. Harnessing that data so that you can make their experience while using the user interface a little more personal can go a long way.
One of the easiest ways to do this to have a good recommended tab that is uniquely curated depending on the tastes of a particular individual. With the help of machine learning and targeted advertising, your e-commerce platform can help customise search results specific to a customer’s exact need! This means they spend less time in a frustrating search for their prefered product which at the end of the day leads to a much better online shopping experience!
2. Next Day Delivery
One of the reasons why customers might prefer online e-commerce platforms over brick and mortar stores is the convenience of being able to shop from wherever they like. However the shopping experience doesn’t really stop once the order has been placed. If product deliveries take too long to be fulfilled, it can leave a bad impression in the minds of a customer who may never come back to your online platform ever again.
This is where one day delivery services come in as they provide nearly the same instant gratification that a physical purchase does by giving the customer his purchase within the span of just 24 hours. Now choosing a courier that can reliably provide one day delivery services might prove to be a bit difficult at first but we recommend next day delivery service. You can check them out if they offer their services in the areas you operate in!
3. Chatbots
Now after sales support is one area where e-commerce platforms often fail miserably at. But if you want your customers to keep coming back for purchases from your online shop, customer service is of utmost importance. Now limited budget constraints often mean that in startup situations, customer care is delegated to a very small team. This results in increasingly long wait times and therefore aggravated customers.
All of this can be solved by deploying chatbots. Holding the conversation over a phone means one of your customer care executives can only handle one issue at a time but the chatbot means they are free to work on multiple requests at the same time. On top of that chatbots can be automated pretty easily so mundane issues can be handled directly through the chatbot without the need for any human intervention.
Technology in the e-commerce sphere is evolving at a rapid pace and if you can implement these 3 features into your platform, then you can quickly stand out from the rest without having to spend loads of money in trying to undercut your competition. Also most of these features are highly scalable which means that these new features will never be a thorn in your side when your e-commerce site goes through an expansion phase!
