How technology is helping online sellers to reduce their daily struggles?

With big companies making most of the profits, small and medium-sized eCommerce business owners lack growth opportunities. But, instead of neglecting the ingredients to their success did you spare time and understand how?

The success of any eCommerce business owner depends on how they manage their daily business tasks. They allow easy access to products, offer insightful information, and ensure a safe product delivery, and much more.

Like most of the sellers if you think success depends on the size, then let me tell you, technology has surely an important part to contribute to their ever-growing success.

Technology is seen to be adopted by leading online stores as it can allow them to save time, effort and improve conversion rates for their eCommerce business.

Considering technology, you may worry about the cost and hassle of adopting it in your daily business operations. However, today, technology is available for every eCommerce owner’s budget to encourage more and more sellers jump online and boost revenue for their business.

Major areas that every eCommerce business seller should consider using technology:

1- To improve product visibility

Multi-channel selling can surely earn you new opportunities only if you allow customers to easily gain access to your products.

Instead of spending hours to come up with the correct keywords for your products, why not adapt and experiment with those trending keywords that can improve the ranking of your products in search results.

Example:

Google Keyword Planner is allowing many online sellers an ability to save time in finding those winning keywords that can improve their product visibility. Sellers can also access historical stats and traffic forecast on search volumes to understand which keywords are performing and what can you be estimated conversion rates using those keywords.

2- To build trust

With big names selling over the web, it can be difficult for other sellers to compete with their pricing strategy. Hence, most of them still struggle to attract the audience for the products.

Instead of spending months and days to design a competitive pricing strategy, which in turn, may not work for long; why not focus on building trust factor to gain a competitive advantage even if your product price is slightly higher.

Example:

Yopto Reviews is one of the popular review generators for sellers; its signature in-mail format allows customers to leave feedbacks from within the body of the review request email that is sent. You offer coupons to increase more and more positive reviews for your products.

3- To enhance shopping experience

Great product line and excellent reviews can encourage your customer to add products to the cart, however, not being able to run a smooth payment transaction will increase abandonment rates for your eCommerce business.

Many sellers no doubt try and offer the most common payment methods; however, a poor payment gateway can lose your customer’s trust for your brand.

Example:

Authorize.Net and PayPal are considered to be the most popular payment gateways among eCommerce sellers, as it allows customers to pay via their debit card, credit card, and other forms of Internet transactions like e-checks.

4- To retain customers

The key to a successful business depends on the retention rates. Yet, many still overlook the importance of this factor, while others may not be doing in a right way.

Frequently offering discounts on your websites will not make your customer feel valued, and some may consider it to be a sales-generating trick. Instead, approaching them with a special discount on special occasions can help you boost retention rates and sales orders from your existing customers.

Example:

Email marketing tools are helping many sellers to easily target their existing customers with customized offers and content for each of them, separately. Understanding the needs of your customers, smartly personalize offers and content to convert them to your loyal ones.

5- To analyse demand

To increase sales for the business, many sellers expand their product categories. However, unable to receive orders for even one of your categories can eat up cost and space that you’ll spend behind maintaining stock in your warehouses.

Like many other sellers if you are still not getting the best optimization out of all your product categories, then technology can help you understand the demand for each of your product category and make the best out of them.

Example:

Contact Management Software can help you to track your customer’s transaction details in real-time. This way you can instantly analyse stock requirements and ensure accurate stock levels always. Having an ability to do so, will help you make the best optimization out of each of your product categories.

6- To impress on social networking sites

Social media sites being one of the most popular platforms among online shoppers, it is important for any eCommere business owner to be present on it. However, to manage content and information for multiple social media accounts can be time-taking.

Expanding your eCommerce business across leading networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram will need automation to help you successfully manage them.

Example:

Hootsuite is allowing eCommerce sellers ability to not only make their products visible across multiple leading platforms but also view metrics to analyze and optimize activities on the most used platforms by online shoppers.

7- To speed-up delivery experience

With the increasing number of orders, many sellers may find it difficult to cope up with fulfilment tasks that include packing and shipping for each of their sales orders when done manually. The hassle of printing each shipping label can be error-prone too.

Automation is allowing sellers an ability to perform fulfilment tasks with simple clicks of the mouse, therefore eliminating the worry of delaying in delivering your customer’s orders.

Example:

Shipping software can be an ideal solution to enhance the delivery experience and simply fulfillment tasks. Without much hassle, integrate with leading shipping solutions from one place and perform order processing tasks in minutes.

8- To answer every customer’s concern in time

Like any brick and mortar store, online shoppers would have few questions in mind during the purchase experience and if not assisted on-the-go, they won’t take time to jump to one of your competitors. And, such mistakes can lead to negative reviews of your brand across the web.

Sellers, who still offer their email address as their contact mode, should adapt the latest technology that can help you instantly gain access to your customer’s concern and reply and assist on the go.

Example:

Chat support tool can be an effective customer service solution for start-ups and small sellers. Allowing sellers an ability to automate their chat support process, this tool can also help you gain powerful insights via customer feedback reports.

9- To manage returns

I’m sure managing eCommerce returns is still an ongoing issue for many sellers, however, still adopting the old technique of managing returns can eat up your and your customer’s time and effort.

Delaying returns can immediately spread a bad impression in your customer’s mind, hence to avoid such situation create and customize returns rules for your unhappy customers.

Example:

Shopify users find themselves lucky enough to have a Returns manager app that helps them gain access to their customer’s returns request on-the-go. This way, it becomes easy to quickly take actions and avoid further delays. On the flipside, your will be able to create multiple returns request in one go, saving their time instead of requesting them separately.

10- To track ROI

With the increasing growth your may find it difficult to keep a track on those sales order revenue, which in turn, may not allow accurate insights on profits and losses at the end of the year.

Instead of playing with multiple accounts that can lead to costly mistakes and hamper growth opportunities, having a single access to all your suppliers and customer purchase transactions will reduce struggle.

Example:

QuickBooks compatible to multiple payment options, is allowing sellers to simplify a number of accounting requirements as per their needs. What’s more exciting, it is easy to integrate with eCommerce platforms running on Magento, Shopify, etc. This platform will not only offer insights on sales transactions but also, include details about refunds, chargeback and other financial aspects of an eCommerce business.

Summing up

Technology has two sides of it, they offer opportunities and risks. However, the type of technology you’ll use will determine the success of your eCommerce business.

Cheers 🙂