5 E-Commerce Business Ideas to Make Money in 2019

March 1, 2019 by WisdmLabs Leave a Comment

This is a guest post by Hamas Hassan. If you’d like to contribute to our blog, feel free to get in touch with us.

E-commerce businesses are on the go with technology revamping traditional businesses. More industries are jumping on to the digital wagon. Starting an e-commerce business requires a lot of research to understand trends and a detailed understanding of what technology can offer – but given all the benefits the investment is worth the effort. If you don’t believe it, take a look at the following stats. Statista confirms that in 2017, e-commerce was responsible for around $2.3 trillion in sales and is expected to hit $4.88 trillion in 2021. Alone in the US, e-commerce represents almost 10% of retail sales, and that number is expected to grow by nearly 15% every year! E-commerce is a growing domain with no signs of decline for 2019 and the upcoming years. The e-commerce industry would be the preferred choice for businesses and investors, and this continuous growth will promote higher competition in the field. However, as the market for popular domains is saturating, the need of the hour is to come up with creative business ideas to exploit the e-commerce world. This article explores some exciting ideas for e-commerce businesses in 2019.

#1 Automotive Industry

Automotive e-commerce is becoming a very profitable online business. The automotive industry is a vast online market that involves buying and selling car parts and accessories. This industry is likely to succeed in 2019 as Daily News confirms that by 2020, millennials will make 40% of new car buyers and 88% of consumers will use the internet to research their car purchases. These figures are an obvious conclusion that the automotive e-commerce business is one of those profitable e-commerce business ideas that you can execute in 2019.

#2 Women’s Accessories

Women’s online clothing is one of the most popular e-commerce niches. According to StoreYaBlog, the online clothing store is an $80 billion-a-year industry; therefore, a great idea to follow in 2019 would be to build an online store that accents the clothing industry – women’s accessories. Women’s accessories usually feature as a category on several apparel stores but having an entire store dedicated to accessories such as jewelry, handbags, belts, etc is a business in demand.

#3 E-commerce Service Provider

E-commerce service is the process of managing the back office, infrastructure and IT aspects of running an e-commerce business. The target market is online store owners who focus on selling their products and growing their brand. As a service provider, you will have to deal with IT operations including building and maintaining the e-commerce website, taking care of servers and warehouse management. You will be a one-stop-shop for inventory and storefront management, marketing software, order fulfillment, and shipping. You can add mobile design to your services to help clients build an app for their store and build your profile as a credible technology partner for enterprise businesses. Remember that you need excellent knowledge of IT and other related services to jump into this field.

#4 Pet Products

The retail pet market is getting hotter every day. One of the most significant trends in 2019 is the growth of spending on pet consumes. Several records show that there are 8.5 million dogs in the UK and 7.8 million cats. indicating the growth of the pet industry. There are 20,000 monthly searches related to pet products, indicating an interest in e-commerce purchases of pet products. Retailing online pet products is a great business idea and 2019 is the best time to get started.

#5 Health & Beauty

Health and beauty are among the fastest-growing e-commerce categories. According to the estimates from the US Department of Commerce, Health and Beauty is a $300 billion industry and is likely to grow more. Everywhere we look – be it Facebook or Instagram, we see retailers selling health and beauty products. People are showing interest in the online purchase of personal care items. And 2019 will witness health and beauty among the top emerging trends.

Taking things Forward

The drastic shift in consumer interests is an enormous opportunity for businesses to improve their relevance and expand their market in the online world. But before you dive in, you need to know that running an e-commerce business requires some essential steps, which include:

Identifying a Product:- Start by identifying the products you want to sell. You can choose trending products or based on your analytical skills.
Selecting your Business Name:- Remember that your business name should be unique and yet memorable. Perform a corporate name search to ensure if it’s available. Once you have selected your business name, it’s time to register it.
Securing your Domain Name and Website:- Having your business name as your domain name is the ideal case. If not, choose a URL that’s easy to pronounce and spell and relates to your business. For example, if your business is Jaren’s Craft Creations and jarenscraftcreations.com isn’t available, try something similar like craftsbyjaren.com. Don’t forget to pay attention to your website design as it is the most significant expense for your e-commerce business. Make sure your site is not only visually appealing but functionally responsive as well.
Determining your Business Structure:- When it comes to your e-commerce business structure, you can choose between Sole Proprietor, Partnership (if you have a business partner), LLC, or Corporation.
Creating your Employer Identification Number: An employee identification number (EIN) is required to open a business bank account and file your business taxes. Your EIN identifies your business and helps in filing the necessary paperwork. Every company requires EIN whether you operate with or without employees.
Getting Your Business License:- E-commerce businesses require certain permits and licenses to move forward. Entrepreneurs are expected to check their country, city and state policy to verify the kinds of sales tax license or home business licenses are applicable. Once you find out the required permits get them approved before you start running your e-commerce business.
Finding Your Vendor:- To be competitive in the e-commerce world, you constantly need to source the best quality products, prices, and materials that are required to create your products. Thus, you need the right vendors. You can choose your suppliers by determining how you would like to fulfill your online orders. For example, some companies prefer dropshipping: the supplier takes care of everything from storage to packaging and shipping it to the customer. Many online retailers choose self-fulfillment option that allows a company to stock products in a warehouse and deliver to the buyers. You can also choose third-party fulfillment in which a third company manages both stock and shipments.

Wrapping Up

Thanks for reading these five e-commerce business ideas that can make you money in 2019. We hope that now you would be able to make an informed decision about what to sell online from the following business ideas. To get started on the next stage, be sure you focus on product quality and customer service above all else. That’s about it from our side. Let us know your thoughts and ideas. The comments section is open for discussion.

Author Bio

Hamas Hassan is a Digital Marketing Executive at Cubix, a leading software development company in Washington DC that specializes in E-commerce, On Demand Apps, Mobile apps and Blockchain apps. He is passionate about helping businesses to increase their brand presence on the internet via content marketing.

Taking Your eCommerce Cart International: The What, Why, How

January 18, 2019 by Shreya Reddy Leave a Comment

You know it’s time.

Your business is ready to go beyond borders.

And to successfully make it global, you need a concrete plan for everything – right from identifying your niche and planning your market entry to the execution of all the minor details involved. Once your strategy is in place, you need technology that supports your goals. This involves scaling up your backend ERM and POS systems, identifying international payment methods that suit you best, optimizing your website and everything in between. Now, your shopping cart can go above and beyond just facilitating a purchase. If done right, it can turn out to be a great tool in your marketing arsenal that helps you significantly boost sales. If you’ve decided to take your eStore global, there’s some tinkering that your shopping cart simply cannot escape. Let’s dive right in, and find out exactly what I’m talking about.

Localization

The terms ‘website translation’ and ‘website localization’ are often used analogously. Consequently, most people often mistake them to be the same. The key to effectively globalizing your store lies in understanding exactly what sets these two terms apart. While translation is meant strictly for bridging the language barriers between you and your customers, localization involves curating your brand to ensure it meets the cultural, functional and lingual expectations of your global audience. It’s not really a big task to translate your entire website using some online tools and translators. However, this may involve translation of product descriptions, marketing copy, reviews, legal and technical information, geographical references, humor, images, and graphics. If you really want to get it right, it’s best to involve a trained linguist at some stage. On a more tactical level, you need to have a concrete localization strategy in place, especially for the initial one or two countries you want to target. You could have targeted content marketing strategies, cater to national or regional market interests, and ensure your content is geared towards maximizing cultural appeal. Naturally, your shopping cart needs to adapt. You’ll need to make sure you translate everything from the product descriptions and product attributes to the form fields and in-cart suggestions. Things get a tad bit complicated when it comes to ‘form fields’. Addresses, phone numbers, and postal codes vary in length and format in almost every country. So, you’ll have to really get down to the minor details and make sure you localize your cart in the true sense and not just translate it. Another thing to keep in mind is that support requests in regional languages may start trickling in eventually and your team needs to be equipped to handle them.

Currency Conversion and Dynamic Pricing

Let’s break the two aspects down. Currency Conversion is one of the most basic tasks your cart needs to handle. You can’t have your customers calculate and convert every price tag they come across on your site. They’d rather just buy a similar product from a local store. Also, you end up creating a perception that payments and shipping are going to be a hassle if they buy from you. And Dynamic Pricing? Well, you can’t expect the same prices to work in every economy. Do you remember the first time you came up with the pricing strategy for your products or services? Did you just directly slap on a price that you felt would work? Of course not! You spent time on market research, calculated every aspect in play and only then did you finalize a price point. That’s exactly what you need to do when you’re expanding into new markets. Every market is different, and to have a competitive edge, you need to adjust your prices and marketing strategies based on your audience. For example, you can have a ‘Thanksgiving Sale’ for your customers in the US, but for your Indian customers, it only makes sense to have a ‘Diwali Sale’. How do you get it done? Once you have your pricing and marketing plan in place, you get your shopping cart on board – the discount coupons, promo codes, credits, gift vouchers and every other feature involved. When a customer visits your website, you can track his/her location and accordingly display the appropriate version of your website. Based on a website user’s country, you can lay out relevant website content, product costs, discounts, offers and all the other bells and whistles you have to offer.

Implementing Country-Specific Taxes

You’ve set out on a route that’ll need you to deal with currency fluctuations, unfamiliar banking structures, regulatory and compliance differences and of course, the various tax regulations. Taxes work differently in every country. There’s the EU VAT, US Sales tax, Canadian VAT, Australian GST, New Zealand GST, Indian GST etc. In case I haven’t made it clear already, ‘focus’ is key when it comes to going multinational. No matter the size of your business, unless you have a dedicated team that is centered towards expansion in one country at a time, you’re bound to find yourself muddled up in the process. Coming back to the topic -Tax Calculations – you have two ways of getting it done. You can either use a Tax Table or you can have your cart customized. Now, tax tables are easy to implement. The basic concept behind these tables is that each time a transaction is being made or a product is added to the cart, the tax calculations are carried out based on the data in the table. One drawback of tax tables is that they don’t take into account all the local taxes (taxes charged by the various states, cities, and counties). If you choose to customize the tax calculations, you can have fine-grained control over the calculations. However, even though you automate the entire process, you need to keep a regular check on the change in tax regulations and accordingly update your system. The main advantage customization gives you, in this case, is that you don’t have to account for the missed local taxes and remunerate each tax jurisdiction at the end of a quarter (assuming you’ve considered them since the beginning of course!). Also, your cart needs to handle the calculation of the shipping charges as well. Depending on the carriers you choose to work with and the delivery locations of your customers, the costs will vary, and your cart needs to be able to handle it all.

Time-zone Consideration

Vey important. This seems like a minor technicality if you’re selling products online. But honestly, it’s something you can’t do without, especially in the case of services. There are two main reasons you’d have to take time-zones into account – support and order tracking. Now that you’re going global, you can expect support queries to keep coming in round the clock. Depending on the size of your business, you can consider having a 24-hour team that is dedicated to handling support requests. If you feel your business can do without one, you can easily set up auto-responders informing your client that your team will get back to them in a couple of hours. Your buyers are a curious bunch. They need to know where their order is at all times. The absolute least you could do is tell them when they can expect delivery. This is again something your cart needs to do. It needs to calculate exactly when a product will arrive at its destination by considering the total distance, the time taken to process an order, the time required before a product leaves the warehouse, the time taken by the shipping carrier, and if you’re shipping overseas, the cart has the time-zone differences to consider as well. Based on all of these factors, the cart can give out a rough estimate of the products’ delivery date. Let’s talk about services. Assume you’re running a consultancy firm in the US. In this scenario, you don’t have to worry about the shipping part of it. However, you need to allow clients from all over the world to book an appointment with you. Now, you can’t expect a client in Europe to calculate your business hours and check which time-slot syncs with his and then schedule an appointment. Some of your clients may put in the efforts, but a lot of others will just bounce right off. Displaying the bookable time slots in your clients’ time-zone may be a minor functionality tweak on your part, but it makes for excellent usability at your clients’ end.

Redirect Traffic

This isn’t really a feature for your International eCommerce cart, but I believe it definitely deserves a special mention. When you’re working with multiple sites, you can basically detect your visitors’ location and direct them to the right store. For example, if an Indian customer visits your USA shop, you could display a message that says, “Looks, like you’re in India. You can visit our Indian Store to avail cheaper shipping rates and offers curated just for you!” You can either ask them this in a popup or just push them to your Indian store automatically.

Conclusion

When you’re taking your business overseas, you’re essentially scaling it. Before you jump in and begin with strategizing, marketing and implementing the necessary features on your existing website, you need it to analyze if your current platform can support your requirements. You need to analyze the traffic that you’re expecting, the customizations your business needs, the changes in your backend system and any other software tweaks required. Depending on what you come to find, you need to make a decision about continuing on your existing system or migrating to a custom solution that is made specifically for your business. Now, although a custom build always comes with a heavy price tag, it’s a great investment for businesses that are looking for a solution that’s nothing less than perfect.

Death to Complexity: Building Your Custom eCommerce Cart

January 14, 2019 by Shreya Reddy Leave a Comment

You’ve figured out exactly what you want to accomplish.

You know that an off-the-shelf software solution is just not good enough for your business.

It’s time for you to invest in a custom eCommerce Cart.

Tailor-made software is great, right? I mean yes, it comes with a hefty price tag and will take up a lot of time, but in the end, it’ll deliver. You’ll be handed a solution that perfectly fits the bill, your sales will start to soar, business will increase significantly and your revenue is going to multiply by leaps and bounds. That’s how things would work in a perfect world. In the real world, however, you’ll have to put in a great deal of time, efforts and research. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for a custom-build if that’s what’s needed. I’ve recently written about how some businesses just cannot rely on off-the-shelf eCommerce carts. If you’re one of them and you’ve decided to invest in a tailor-made cart, you need to have a clear picture of exactly what your eCommerce cart needs to turn out to be like. Customization gives you the power to substantially expand the functionality of your cart, and so you should. Your cart is capable of taking your online business to a whole new level. Let’s find out how!

The Simple Bare Necessities

You’re right in presuming that the primary objective of an eCommerce cart is to facilitate the purchase of your product. But there’s so much more to it than what meets the eye. I’m going to quickly go ahead and list down the basic tasks your eCommerce cart needs to carry out for you.

Adding a product to the cart along with its attributes

That’s the Shopping Cart 101. When products are set up on your website, each of them is assigned a set of attributes. The most basic example would be that of a garment. The ‘color’ and ‘size’ of the outfit are known as its attributes. When a product is displayed in your eCommerce cart, you need to make sure the relevant information is also fetched. In some cases, products have a lot of data associated with the backend software that doesn’t need to be displayed to the user. So that’s one thing you need to keep in mind.

Wishlists

Wishlists allow your customers to store some items in their cart that they can choose to buy at another visit. Now, I can’t stress enough on how important wishlists are. When your customers save a product in their wishlist, they’re already halfway into making a purchase. It clearly indicates their interest in the product and gives you immense opportunity to retain your audience. From the user’s point-of-view, a wishlist saves them quite some amount of time and effort. They don’t have to search for a product that they like all over again, they have the products handy when they’re looking to purchase at a more convenient time and they’re prepared for an upcoming sale or offer. This makes for the user-friendliness of your site and significantly increases customer satisfaction and of course, the sales. Think about it. You wouldn’t want to lose out on a sale because your prospect couldn’t find the product they were looking for, would you?

Tax and Shipping Calculations

In addition to the cost of the actual products, your eCommerce cart needs to calculate the sales tax and shipping charges, manage the exemption certificates and carry out address verification. Generally, your customer enters the delivery address and based on the type of product and this address, the sales and shipping charges are calculated. Hence, the address verification. In the U.S. alone, there are over 11,000 taxing jurisdictions. In Texas, the state tax rate is 6.25%, but tax charged by the various cities and counties in the state may add up to an additional 2%, making it a total of 8.25%. So, how do off-the-shelf eCommerce carts handle the complexity of the local tax rates and keep up with the continual tax changes that occur throughout the year? They generally use tax charts or tables. The problem here is that these tables don’t consider the local tax rates. Consequently, at the end of each quarter, companies must account for the missed local revenues and remunerate each tax jurisdiction within each state in which they have sold their products. Your custom cart solves this problem by taking into account all of the local tax rates and the international taxes applicable – EU VAT, US Sales tax, Canadian VAT, Australian GST, New Zealand GST, Indian GST etc. Yes, it’s a tedious task, but you’ll come to find it’s definitely worth it, especially at the end of a quarter. As far as the shipping is concerned, you may be working with multiple different carries – USPS, FedEx, UPS, and DHL – each of which has their own specific packaging guidelines and shipping rates which need to be considered.

Payment Processing

Since we’re talking about custom software here, I’ll just go over its immediate advantages. Building a Payment Gateway from the ground up gives you complete control over your transactions, allows you to implement unique business-specific features and relieves you from paying the processing fee that comes with Integrating a Payment Gateway. Most payment gateways charge for the setup, a recurring monthly cost for support and transaction fees. However, building a custom Payment Gateway from scratch is going to cost you exorbitant amounts of money. It’s great if you can afford it, but there’s a ton of other factors to consider. The most important being, the security. You need to carefully plan out everything from the ease of the checkout process to the financial regulations and PCI compliance. You’ll need a hosted payment page, a well-documented API, as well as the administration and merchant dashboards to add the Payment Gateway to your website. If you think you need a workaround when it comes to accepting payments, a ready-made Payment Gateway like PayPal or Stripe will work out just fine. A Payment Gateway checks the validity of cards and encrypts all the sensitive information like the Credit Card Number, its expiration date and the CVV. The best part about them is that there’s great scope for customization and implementing industry-leading features like enabling Express Checkouts, Setting up Payouts, Integrating Adaptive Payments etc.

Guest Checkout and Merged Accounts

Can you put a number on all of your accounts online? Personal and work email accounts, bank accounts, social media accounts, your Netflix account, a cab booking app, a food delivery app, a restaurant finder, an Amazon account, and the list goes on. Almost every app or website you visit asks you to either ‘sign up’ or ‘sign in’. Naturally, a user’s reluctance towards entering their details time and again on online websites has vastly increased. This is precisely why a lot of online stores enable Guest Checkouts. Guest Checkout allows your customers to make a purchase from your store without logging in or saving any information such as their username, password, phone number, shipping or billing address etc. When a purchase is made, only the details that are absolutely necessary (such as the email ID, Shipping address etc.) are collected and are not stored for further reuse. While this can prove to be extremely effective in increasing conversion rates, it takes away a momentous opportunity from you in terms of building meaningful relationships with your clients. Also, managing reorders, refunds, exchanges, and returns can be a real nuisance. And from your clients perspective, having an account saves him/her the efforts of entering their details for every purchase on your site. So, the perfect middle ground here would be to merge a guest account with a verified user account. You can accomplish this on account of the email addresses provided by the buyers. When you detect purchases made by the same email address, you can verify the account and seamlessly merge all of the user data (orders, addresses, carts, and other information) together. It’s a win-win for you and your customers!

Order Fulfillment and Tracking

Order fulfillment is the entire process that begins with an order being placed and ends when it is delivered to your customer. Here’s what happens when delivering physical goods:

Order tracking allows your customers to stay on top of their order at any given point in time. Your customers are a curious bunch. And keeping them satisfied needs to be at the top of your priority list. Hence, your eCommerce cart needs to be up-to-date throughout the entire order fulfillment process. The most basic information your eCommerce cart absolutely needs to provide is the ‘estimated delivery date’ and the ‘Status’ of the order. The status of a product could be as follows:

If you really want your eStore to stand-out, you can go one step further and allow your customers to track exactly where the product is after it has been shipped. This can easily be done with an API or other integrations with the shipper’s back-end systems or by providing a link to the order tracking page of the carrier’s website in a confirmation email.

Real-Time Inventory Management

It goes without saying that you need to have a robust Inventory Management Software as part of your backend arsenal. Most organizations periodically update their inventory at predetermined intervals. Real-Time systems, on the other hand, record every transaction instantaneously. As soon as an item is purchased, the product is debited from the stock. Similarly, an item appears ‘in stock’ as soon as it is sourced and ready for shipment. In addition to the accurate sync of stock levels with the front-end portal, real-time inventory management also extends to order tracking at all stages of its movement until it reaches the customer. It could be a great asset to your accounting and finance system and could help keep your warehouse organized. You can leverage this to offer transparency into your accurate stock position and motivate reluctant buyers to make a purchase. For example, a message that says ‘only 2 items left in stock’ can be that extra nudge your customer needs. Another great functionality you can implement is the ‘In Cart Item Sellout’. This would basically mean that you hold a particular product that an account holder has added to his/her shopping cart, for a set period of time. Once your stocks dwindle, and this user doesn’t seem to be making a purchase, you can choose to sell it out to another customer. You can also automate the reminders and warning messages before you sell out an item from the user’s cart.

Import and export tools

If not right away, you’d eventually want to sell your products from multiple online stores or from marketplaces like Amazon or eBay. One obvious thing to do in that case would be to synchronize your inventory across all these stores. In order to get this done, you’ll need to equip your backend with some import and export tools. This list could just go on and on. Having said that, these were the most fundamental features your custom eCommerce cart should ideally have. Let’s move on to,

The Discounts, Coupons, and Offers!

There are numerous different ways to leverage discounts, offers and sales to get new customers on board and ensure customer loyalty. Your shopping cart plays a huge role in the execution of your marketing strategies. I’m just going to quickly touch upon a few examples:

Promo Codes

Promo Codes or Coupon Codes are computer generated alphanumeric strings that you can provide to your most loyal customers. You could also use them to lure new buyers. There are a number of ways in which these promo codes could work. They can be used to provide a fixed amount of discount on individual products, free shipping, a percentage off the entire purchase, or any other kind of discount you want to offer. And where does your cart really come in? During the Checkout process. Your customers can enter their promo code and avail the discount on their purchase during checkout. Your cart needs to check the validity of the codes and then approve and execute its use accordingly. These conditional coupon codes have to be assigned, limited and curated based on your marketing strategy.

Store Credits

Store Credits are issued to customers when they return merchandise that can’t be exchanged or isn’t eligible for a refund. The cost of that product is stored in the form of ‘credits’ in your shoppers’ account which can be used by them on their next purchase. So, your eCommerce cart needs to process these credits when your customer chooses to use them up. While store credits don’t really count as an offer or a discount, its execution definitely makes for a great way to retain your existing customers.

Gift Vouchers

Gift vouchers essentially entitle the holder to receive products or services of a specified sum from you. As they’re personal proposals of your satisfied customers, the vouchers are extremely targeted and the receivers of the voucher are a highly motivated bunch. Implementing Gift Vouchers in your eStore creates a great opportunity for you to reach out to prospects that you wouldn’t otherwise get to directly.

Flash Sales

Flash sales are discounts that are offered for a short period of time. In addition to being a great stock clearance tactic, Flash Sales serve as a valuable marketing gambit that drives impulsive buying. Once you determine the goal of your flash sale, the target audience, and the execution strategy, you need to market it using social media, emails or other promotional means. Now that you’re creating a hype, you need to ensure you can service your customers without any glitches. This, of course, translates to getting your cart on board.

The Marketing Nuts and Bolts

What’s a custom eCommerce cart without some marketing apparatus, right? Here’s a list of some aces that you should definitely have up your sleeve:

In-Cart Product Recommendations

In-Cart product recommendations are already pretty popular with major eCommerce stores. If implemented right, cross-selling or upselling from your cart could be a great asset that helps increase the average order value.

Cart Abandonment Recovery

That’s the age-old eCommerce issue that your cart needs to tackle. Every minor detail involved in the execution of your entire eCommerce cart plays an important role in reducing your cart abandonment rate. Having said that, there could be a couple of primary reasons that may lead your prospects to abandon their shopping cart. It could be a long and confusing checkout process, an unexpected shipping cost or maybe you aren’t offering sufficient payment options. Once you identify such pain points, you can automate your retention email marketing campaigns depending on their intent.

Reserved Cart Timer

You can choose to display a timer which indicates how long you’re going to hold the product for the user. In the event of a sale or the release of a new high-demand product, this timer could be a great way to encourage your customers to make the purchase soon. Furthermore, you don’t lose out on business from shoppers who are keen on making a purchase because the product is being held up for an unsure buyer, which makes it all the more essential to implement a feature like this.

In Cart Item Sellout

When products in your user’s shopping cart are sold out, a simple message informing them of this sellout isn’t sufficient. The fact that a product is in their cart indicates interest, making it extremely critical for you to retain that particular sale. You can do so using a simple pop up that offers to notify the buyer once the product is back in stock again. You could also choose to automatically restock the users shopping cart.

Promotion Reminders in the Shopping Cart

Again a great tool that can be used during an on-going sale. The trick here lies in finding the perfect balance between promotional content that’s too pushy and subtle reminders that prompt your users towards making a new purchase.

Internationalizing Your Cart

Now, that’s a whole other ball game. Internationalizing your eCommerce Cart involves everything from localizing it to enabling country-specific pricing, taxes, and marketing campaigns. If it’s the right time to take your business global, you’ll need to run campaigns that are tailored to a specific set of audience and your cart needs to be absolutely ready for it.

Summing Up

Building a custom eCommerce cart that’s effective can create synergies if implemented well, and mountains of additional work if not. The key lies in deep-diving into every little detail of your project before you set out to build a complex enterprise solution like this one. Although we’ve touched upon about a majority of the necessary tasks your cart needs to perform, it’s also important to make sure you optimize the checkout process and ensure your site and shopping cart are mobile-friendly. At the end of the day, all of these features within your cart are only meaningful if they leave your customers with a positive perception of the company and being mobile-ready is something you cannot afford to overlook. What’s your Game Plan? How do you plan on Supercharging your eCart? Let’s talk about what else we can do to get the most out of a custom build. Over to you!

6 eCommerce Mobile App Trends to Transform the Retail Industry in 2019

January 10, 2019 by WisdmLabs Leave a Comment

This is a guest post by Nirav Shastri. If you’d like to contribute to our blog, feel free to get in touch with us.

From food and clothes to furniture and gadgets – there is a demand for every kind of product across the globe. As the retail sector meets people’s needs, it is expected to grow even bigger this New Year. The reports by Statista clearly state that the global eCommerce sales will continue to shoot up and are expected to reach nearly $5,000 billion in 2021! eCommerce has changed the way we shop and created a valuable source of revenue for product vendors. And in today’s era of smartphones, mCommerce is the most convenient mode for shopping online. This makes it imperative for you (as an eCommerce business owner) to create a platform that can differentiate your business from your competitors. You have to put in extra effort in order to stay at the forefront of innovation.

The mCommerce market: An Overview

With significant transition noticed in the behavior pattern of both – the businesses and the consumers – in the last few years, the expectation is to see a totally different ‘shopping’ process now. The presence of mCommerce has given shoppers the convenience and comfort of getting whatever they want – at any time, at any place. And, retailers like you, on the other hand, can reach your customers directly and get to know them and their needs intimately. As per Statista, mCommerce is expected to grow even more, accounting for over 50% of all eCommerce sales by 2021. You can clearly see this in the below-mentioned chart.

ecommerce-predictions

Building a mobile app has become inevitable for leading retailers. And what’s more, is incorporating the latest trends to beat out any competition. So, what are the latest trends in the mobile retail industry that you should be following to make sure that you don’t fall behind? Let’s find out!

Must-Follow eCommerce Mobile App Trends in 2019

1. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

These are the most visually stunning technologies that you can use in mCommerce. Augmented reality (AR) is a technology that allows you to see virtual things in the real world by means of a smartphone’s screen. And, virtual reality (VR) is a technology that simulates our real or completely imaginary world with the help of high-performance equipment. So, how does it help? When it comes to online shopping, customers are unable to test the product personally. They have to imagine how the product actually is or what it must be like. AR and VR technologies fill this gap by helping customers transform their imagination into reality. For instance, fashion brands experiment with virtual trials allowing customers to see how the apparel would fit them without having to step into a store. Certainly worth considering for products customers need to try on before they buy.

2. Chatbots

Unfortunately, online stores don’t offer the feature to directly contact a merchant in case of a query. Even if you hire an online support team, it’s difficult to cater to a global audience considering time differences. But, now it has become possible with the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. With Chatbots coming into the picture, they have provided assistance to shoppers like never before. Chatbots are one of the greatest ways to automate your communication with the customers. They can understand as well as answer the typical queries of the customers and can further connect to human support managers, in case they aren’t able to answer something. So, not only these chatbots help in closing a deal but they also help increase your repeat customer base.

3. Geofencing

This is an interesting feature to consider using which your mobile app can use location-based marketing techniques. Here, the technology can send the customers personalized messages with the help of location services when they are near a physical store location. This feature can work best for online shoppers who are wary of online shopping and want to purchase things only after visually experiencing them.

4. Gamification

Gamification is one of the growing trends in the eCommerce industry. It is based on the concept of connecting incentives like points and badges to actions with an aim of influencing consumer behavior. In short, gamification is a creative way of getting users engaged with your app. If consumers participate in games, they are rewarded with discounts, promotions as well as free merchandise. Many eCommerce apps have already started using this marketing tactic. A recent example of gamification can be seen in the NikeFuel program. Nike capitalizes the competitive nature of its target audience by allowing them to post their workouts, track progress while challenging their friends. And in return, they get interesting perks like free shipping and early access to products. This way, you are not only keeping your customers engaged, but also boosting your eCommerce sales by providing them with lucrative offers.

5. Voice search

Some experts believe that soon voice will take over the Touch ID and Face ID feature when it comes to identifying a person. So, when increasing aspects of our lives will be conducted by voice, how about mCommerce adapting and integrating this feature into their retail mobile apps? With the accessibility of voice search feature, you can provide your customers with an enhanced level of comfort and convenience in searching and choosing the products of their interest. For example – voice assistants like Alexa are growing in popularity. Considering this, the voice search feature will not only enhance the customer experience in online shopping but will also help you stay on the competitive edge.

6. Search by picture

As soon as the machines became competent enough to recognize images, the trend of ‘search by picture’ kicked off. This is quite simple to understand. The customers can search for similar products by uploading a picture. Needless to say, this feature is beneficial to both – you as well as the customers. Let’s take an example of ASOS – a prominent retail eCommerce store that has adopted this feature. Customers are finding it simple to upload a picture and find the products that they really like while minimizing their time to search. On the other hand, it helps you to boost up your selling process because as soon as the customers find similar products, they will close the deal by ordering then and there.

Uplift your eCommerce business with these amazing features

Mobile eCommerce is expected to grow in the future with new technologies like AI, AR?VR, Big Data analytics will influence the way customers shop with their mobile apps. So, this makes it essential for you to identify which features can attract your target audience while giving them an enhanced shopping experience. Just remember, customers expect more from retailers like you, so in order to emerge out victorious, you ought to stay abreast with the latest mobile eCommerce app trends. We have done our bit – by providing you with these must-follow trends. Now, it’s your turn – to actually implement them in your retail apps. Are you ready?

Author Bio

Nirav Shastri has expertise in eCommerce business enhancement and B2B lead generation. He has 7+ years of experience in the IT industry and is currently working as a Business Growth Strategist at Space-O Technologies, a leading Mobile App Development Company. Nirav also works with a team of experienced creative digital strategists to generate unique and data-driven campaigns. In his free time, he likes to read about information technology trends and watch motivational videos.

6 Signs You Need a Custom eCommerce Cart

November 15, 2018 by Shreya Reddy Leave a Comment

When it comes to eCommerce, there are loads of options for you to pick from. Platforms like WooCommerce, Magento, and Shopify are some of the leading off-the-shelf solutions out there. You don’t just have the best software solutions to help take your business forward, but also a vast community around each of these platforms and the best of technical partners – freelancers and reputed development agencies – to choose from. But then again, a ready-to-use solution can in no way compete with a custom solution for your business (assuming you’re investing in the right technology and the right resources for the job, of course). Even though building your custom eCommerce Cart can turn out to be quite an investment in terms of time and money, it’s definitely worth considering. And in some cases, you might not really have an option, but to custom-build. The buy vs. build depends entirely on the volume of transactions and other situation-specific needs. If you can relate to any of the following situations, it’s safe to say that building a custom cart for your business is inevitable.

#1 Your Business Outgrew The Current Software

You’re probably aware that your sites’ performance and page load speeds have a direct impact on the customer experience, SEO ranking and consequently, your sales and revenue. Now, maybe your website performs just fine. But what about peak traffic periods? Let’s say you whip up an amazing marketing strategy and execute it effectively. The campaign worked, your sales are about to skyrocket and business is going to be booming! But wait. Do you know the kind of traffic you’re expecting? The number of clicks per second? Is your platform really equipped to handle what’s coming its way? You’ll come across a lot of such examples or rather ‘epic fails’ wherein the retailer’s ads drove in so much traffic that their platform just couldn’t keep up. The sudden spike in traffic could bring down a server to its knees, mix up orders, mismanage inventory, and worst of all – it could mess up the payment processing! Imagine the number of lawsuits and civil fines this could trigger. If your business has constantly been scaling, it’s probably best to take out some time for a little self-reflection. If your business warrants the need for a scalable solution, you should definitely consider migrating to a more suitable custom-made cart.

#2 You Have Unique Shipping and Inventory Concerns

Shipping a standard type of product via carriers like USPS, FedEx, UPS, and DHL is pretty simple. But once people start getting acquainted with your brand and multiple orders start trickling in, managing product shipping gets a tad bit challenging. Furthermore, if you have a wide range of products to ship, you need to have a solid product shipping strategy in place. For example, products like pharmaceuticals, and perishable goods such as fruits, vegetables, meat, and dairy products have to be refrigerated. Fine Art, antiques, ceramics, and glass articles have special packaging needs. Each of the shipping carriers mentioned above come with their specific packaging guidelines, shipping rates, and features. Some carriers prohibit certain items. Picking the right one for your business will require you to spend time investigating and evaluating all the options. Or in some cases, you might have to work with multiple carriers. Also, if you’re shipping internationally, you have customs to worry about. After you’re through with creating your perfect shipping strategy, you need your cart to perform seamlessly, irrespective of the complexity of the back-end process. Order tracking and estimation of delivery dates cannot be messed up under any circumstances. Requirements like these would easily overwhelm a ready-to-use eCommerce Cart.

#3 You’re Looking to Create an Omnichannel Experience

We all know that modern-day customers are finicky when it comes to buying products. One person will tell you that they won’t buy a single piece of clothing before they try it on first, while another would refuse to step foot into a physical store after the surge of eCommerce. Omnichannel shopping extends from a physical store to mobile-browsing, e-commerce marketplaces, onsite storefronts, mobile apps, social media, retargeting, and everything in between. Implementation of omnichannel eCommerce goes way beyond ensuring seamless inventory management. You need to stay on top of the latest e-commerce trends, allow flexible purchases and ensure your physical workforce is kept abreast of your omnichannel strategy. You need to create a digital roadmap, enable cross-channel Integration and provide hassle-free transactions to your customers at each stage of the buyer’s journey. All in all, you need technology that’ll help you effectively execute your plan. Do you really think using an off-the-shelf software solution is the way to go?

#4 You Want to Sell Custom Products

If you want to allow your customers to design or customize a particular product based on their preference, your cart implementation gets a whole lot more complicated than it is for a regular product. Let’s consider a clothing store. The cost of a custom garment would change depending on the color, material and the design chosen by the customer. With so many options and permutations in play, it’s difficult to come across an off-the-shelf shopping cart that could work perfectly in this scenario. Also, your cart now needs to take into account the variations in user credits, coupons, discounts, and the estimated delivery dates based on the numerous different possibilities of a selected product. Not to mention the fact that your Product Preview display needs to be able to effectively showcase a tailor-made product. When it comes to customizable product websites or carts, the ‘easy way out’ is most definitely not the ‘best way out’.

#5 You Want to Work With a Product Distributor

Product distribution is one of the most important aspects when it comes to expanding a business. While a distributor handles the shipping regulations and allows you to expand your customer base, managing inventory may not be a straight-forward affair when you have a number of entities involved. In some cases, a distribution channel may involve you – the manufacturer, the distributor, a retailer, an agent and then the end customer. Yep, an inventory management nightmare! If there is a hiccup in the distribution network, your team needs to be able to glide past it with ease and maintain a consistent presence on store shelves, keeping distributors, retailers, and the customers happy. Under such circumstances, your Cart is not just responsible for facilitating the purchase of a product anymore. You need to synchronize it with custom back-end software and be able to establish clear lines of communication across all channels of the network.

#6 You Don’t Wanna Be ‘just another eCommerce Store’

Let’s face it. You’ll find umpteen variations of the same offering, that claim to be extremely customizable. But are they, really? When you’re using an existing eCommerce platform as opposed to building one from scratch, you have access to some run-of-the-mill features that every other eCommerce store owner would. As far as carts are concerned, you’ll be able to assign promo codes, a few types of discounts, synchronize it with your inventory management system, enable payments processing, but that’s about the long and short of it. The truth is, you can accomplish so much more using your shopping cart! You can track the buyers’ journey and enable product recommendations accordingly, use the data for retention marketing, enable top-drawer order tracking and updates, enable Country Specific Pricing, run Flash Sales and a lot more! If this sounds like something you want to accomplish, what you need is a custom-build and technology that can deliver.

Hiring The Right Technology For The Job

Now, you’ll find that platforms like WooCommerce and Magento come with a plethora of plugins and extensions that’ll tend to all the major eCommerce requisites. However, when an organization goes from being an SMB to an enterprise, investing in a software solution that can perform becomes a must. The technology you rely on plays a major role in paving your way to eCommerce success. If you’re sure a custom-build is what you need, you could use frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Django or the technology that we openly advocate – Laravel. There’s a reason Laravel is the go-to PHP framework for developers and business owners alike, that’s because it is cleanly coded, and guarantees security, customizability, and scalability, making Laravel an ideal platform for enterprise solutions. Are you looking for a custom e-commerce cart? What challenges are you facing with your existing cart? Do you agree with our take on Laravel? Drop us a line in the comments section below!

The Best Open Source Platforms for eCommerce Compared

October 27, 2018 by WisdmLabs Leave a Comment

This is a guest post by Henry Rise. If you’d like to contribute to our blog, feel free to get in touch with us.

Looking for the best ecommerce platform for your store? You’re not alone. As per InternetLiveStats, in 2017 the number of websites doubled as compared to 2016. Wonder how many online stores are there among these numbers? To get these stats we’ll have to refer to BuiltWith to find data about all CMS and website engines for statistical or outreach purposes. When you do a quick search for e-commerce you’ll notice the big players in the open source e-commerce platforms genres are Magento, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, and OpenCart.

In case you’re trying to figure out which eCommerce engine will be the best for your store, it’s likely you will not find the best one, simply because there isn’t one which is “the best”. Each eCommerce engine is best on its own, each one plays well for every store, product, or use case. It’s the subtle differences which matter. If you want to understand which eCommerce CMS you need, first of all, you need to think ahead what your store will be like in a year or two. If it’s something seasonal I’m pretty sure you don’t need CMS at all, some SAAS solution like Shopify will be your perfect choice, 3-4 hours of work and store is ready to accept payments. But if you need something robust, a store that can be easily transformed into a marketplace than you need to look closer at open source eCommerce platforms I’m going to talk about in this blog.

The Contenders

Luckily for you, there’s a number of open source eCommerce platforms that are either free or have an attractive price tag, with the majority being free. Each of these engines offers great customizability and scalability, as well as community support that isn’t always found in enterprise solutions. Opting for a free open source eCommerce platform to sell your goodies online might be the easiest option for you. However, choosing the best open source e-commerce platform may not be as easy. To make this a bit better, we have a list of 4 of the best open source eCommerce platforms which stand out in terms of popularity and utility. As a proof popularity statement, here’s a graph from Google Trends.

If you change the time frame you will see that long before September 2015 Joomla was a lot more popular than other engines, but due to some circumstances, other engines outperformed it. Now let’s have a closer look at each of these, on their strengths and weaknesses.

#1 WooCommerce

The first example is WooCommerce, I’ve placed it on top of this list because a WooCommerce-based store is the easiest solution you can opt for. If you have a WordPress website you can transform it into a store by downloading and installing the WooCommerce plugin.

After the installation, you will get several new sections (WooCommerce, Products) in your WordPress dashboard where you can create new products, manage orders, finetune your store by adding payment methods, shipping options, currencies, and so on. With WooCommerce you can sell both digital and physical products without having to install additional plugins for digital downloads. Here you can refer to the WooCommerce documentation to find more about WooCommerce store setup.

How Easy is it to Use WooCommerce?

For installation, I can give 5 points, for managing and maintenance 5 points, for sales reporting 3 points. Among all the rest items this eCommerce platform will help you build any store in a short timeframe. When combined with a powerful WooCommerce theme that can be edited with a page builder like WP Bakery, you will save lots of time and efforts customizing your store. If there’s a category where a WooCommerce store will be an undisputed winner, it’s the design. As you may know, the number of WordPress themes available today is really astonishing, and most of them are WooCommerce compatible meaning that you can get any WordPress theme and build a store on its basis. For example, here’s how a WooCommerce store would look with the popular theme Ozisti. P.S. I’m not getting into the design capabilities of other eCommerce platforms because they will lose immediately unless they are Shopify. Installation – 5 points. Managing & maintenance – 4 points. Sales reporting – 3 points.

#2 Magento

Launching an online store with Magento CMS can be a little bit more complicated. Luckily for you, the CPanel (in any hosting provider) has a 1-click engine installation. This option will remove all the headache you may have had while installing Magento.

Just for laughs, I’ve Googled “how to install Magento 2 cms”, and most results had a remark “without errors”. That’s because Magento installation can be a bit tricky. If you visit the official Magento website you’ll notice that there’re two versions of this engine Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source. The first one is an enterprise level engine that will cost you 2K+ per month, the second one is free and this is the option to go for. I won’t recommend installing this engine manually because I’ve never met a living human being who was able to install Magento manually in the first try (Magento developers not included). After installing Magento engine you will get access to its admin panel which is a lot clearer than installation process. All CMS features are neatly organized and can be easily accessed.

How Easy is it to Use Magento?

Compared to WooCommerce, Magento engine installation is easy when it’s automated. In terms of admin functionalities, Magento is tuned to giving you all eCommerce features possible letting you decide how of them you need. The sales reporting tool is super awesome, it’s insanely detailed that even WooCommerce stats + Google Analytics will hardly give you as much data. Installation – 3 points. Managing & maintenance – 4 points. Sales reporting – 5 points.

#3 Prestashop

When you’re using a 1-click installation you won’t face any difficulties handling the PrestaShop engine. And once it’s installed you will get access to a handy admin panel.

All store elements and features are placed where you may expect to find them, which implies, navigation is easy. Using this handy menu you’ll be able to configure product features, create product packs, product variations, sell digital products without using third-party extensions, and so on. The Stats section will give you access to extensive reporting data, which is a lot more comprehensive than one WooCommerce will provide you with. But there’s a thing you might find a little bit strange. If you want to have a blog on your store you will have to install an additional module to make this happen.

How Easy is it to Use PrestaShop?

Unlike WooCommerce, PrestaShop is a lot more comprehensive and powerful in terms of features. Somehow it resembles Magento, especially in sales reports. Overall PrestaShop deserves the following points: Installation – 5 points. Managing & maintenance – 4 points. Sales reporting – 5 points.

#4 OpenCart

Unlike previous contestant you won’t be able to find OpenCart in the quick installation in your CPanel, you need to go to OpenCart.com download the archive, upload it to your host and install it. Unfortunately, OpenCart doesn’t have as many details in sales reports as previous two contestants but still, you can get a lot of information about your clients. In case you want to have a blog on your store you will have to install an additional module to turn it on.

How Easy is it to Use OpenCart?

Unlike Magento, you can install OpenCart in a few clicks with the help of a semi-automatic installation. The admin panel is quite intuitive you won’t find it difficult creating and managing products. Still, OpenCart deserves the following points: Installation – 3 points. Managing & maintenance – 4 points. Sales reporting – 4 points.

Features Comparison

	WooCommerce	Magento	Prestashop	OpenCart
Website integration type	Part of your WordPress website	Self-sufficient eCommerce engine	Self-sufficient eCommerce engine	Self-sufficient eCommerce engine
Order management	+	+	+	+
Payment gateways support	+	+	+	+
Customer management	+	+	+	+
Themes / Designs	1000’s of themes	1000’s of themes	1000’s of themes	1000’s of themes
Sales reports	Good reports on sales and store activity.	Advanced and in-depth reports on sales and store activity.	Advanced and in-depth reports	Great analytics module, with reports, purchase funnels, abandoned carts stats, and much more.
Discounts, gift cards, and coupon codes.	+	+	+	+
Plugins / Extensions	+	+	+	+
Multilingual	Built-in	Built-in multilingual support	Built-in multilingual support	Built-in multilingual support
Multi-Currency support	Via third-party plugin	Built-in multicurrency support	Via third-party module	Via third-party extension
Pricing	Free	Free/Paid	Free	Free
Handling	Easy	Hard	Moderate	Easy

Overall Points

	WooCommerce	Magento	Prestashop	OpenCart
Installation	5	3	5	3
Managing & maintenance	5	4	4	4
Sales reporting	3	5	5	4
Average	4.3	4	4.3	3.6

Final Words

Now, it’s entirely up to you which platform you want to use. Each of them is perfect for selling online, but they all have their strong and weak sides. All in all, if you already have a website, which I’m pretty sure is WordPress, it’s best for you to build a store on its basis. This will save you a lot of time and will give a lot more freedom in terms of customization. But if you’re starting from scratch or want to have something more scalable, I advise you to opt for PrestaShop. For an enterprise business, Magento is the definite choice. Rock your store with the perfect design and you’re all set. What are your thoughts about these ecommerce platforms? We’d like to know.

Author Bio

Henry Rise is the CEO of ThemeRex, and a ThemeForest Power Elite Author. He loves to help people build their business online. Every business begins with the right choice of a micro-niche WP Theme.

WisdmLabs is now a System Integrator Partner for PayPal!

August 21, 2018 by Shreya Reddy Leave a Comment

From getting accredited as GOLD Woo Experts to becoming Certified Event Espresso Experts, our endeavor to build innovative and scalable client-centric e-commerce solutions has always kept us pacing forward. When it comes to e-commerce, we understand the importance of a reliable Payments Solution for your business. Accepting payments from customers online is a crucial part of any business and choosing the right payment gateway is a major contributing factor in making lives easier for both- the customers and the business owners. Owing to the unmatched superiority of PayPal in terms of its ease of use, fraud protection, ability to accept International payments and huge Potential Customer Base, it has been our preferred Payment Gateway Solution for numerous Projects over the years! And now, we’ve finally reached a new milestone in our e-commerce escapade as- PayPal System Integrator Partners!

Why PayPal?

PayPal is a robust end-to-end payment solution that can connect your business to over 179 million existing PayPal users worldwide and hence, vastly increase your sales potential! Here’s a gist of what PayPal brings to the table as your primary online payments processor:

It’s easy to set up and use.
You can create and send invoices right through your account.
Your clients/customers don’t need a PayPal account to pay you.
You can set up recurring payments.
It allows you to accept debit card, credit card, and bank account payments for a low fee
You can manage users and give separate access rights to each of your employees.

PayPal offers a wide range of products and services, and choosing a suitable PayPal account structure is not a straightforward resolution for most people. For small business owners, PayPal offers ease-of-use and simplicity. It is a great option for those looking for quick set up, limited customization, and minimal financial paperwork. While adding a simple ‘Buy Now’ feature is all that a small business may be looking for, bigger businesses generally have some more complex needs. PayPal allows you to tailor the online payments process according to the specific requirements of your business, and that’s where we come in!

What can WisdmLabs do for you?

In addition to all the benefits that you are entitled to as PayPal users such as, PayPal Checkout, PayPal for Marketplaces, PayPal Working Capital, PayPal Credit, PayPal Here, we can help you get fine-grained control over your transactions by Customizing Checkout, Enabling Express Checkouts, Setting up Payouts, Integrating Adaptive Payments, and much more! No matter how basic or complex your requirement is, we’re here for you. We’re extremely pumped up about this partnership, as it opens up better opportunities for us to create value for our clients and there’s nothing that motivates us more! If you want to know how this partnership can benefit you, or want to get started with PayPal for your online store, drop us a line.

DISCLAIMER

In the spirit of complete disclosure, we would like you to know that, as a part of our System Integrator Partnership with PayPal, we are entitled to commissions when we set up PayPal for you. We also emphasize on the fact that, we’re only recommending PayPal because we genuinely believe it’s an extremely versatile Payment Gateway.

Future of E-Commerce: How Technology Will Change 10 Years from Today

February 12, 2018 by WisdmLabs Leave a Comment

This is a guest post by Sohail. If you’d like to contribute to our blog, feel free to get in touch with us.

It’s exciting to see the constantly evolving e-commerce world move forward. The online space has now become a haven for buyers. Products that you wouldn’t find online a few years ago, for example, groceries, medical equipment, taxis, are now easily available. E-commerce is changing and will continue to grow and thrive as the market moves along. Let’s take a look at what the experts have predicted will happen, in the next 10 years.

Automated Shipping Vehicles

Get ready for automated shipping vehicles to transport shipments of various sizes without manual intervention. Drones are among the more prominent small shipping vehicles to check out; Amazon is working to build its own drone delivery system. Such drones could help deliver items to your home in just a few hours after you order them. There is a potential for self-driving cars to work as delivery vehicles too. A self-driving car can alert you when it comes to your property so you can pick up an item that someone is trying to ship out to you. But as intriguing as this sounds, such cars are still in development. They would require extensive software programs and sensors to work as expected. Plenty of testing is also needed to ensure they don’t cause wrecks or go off of their designated routes.

The Value of Virtual Reality

Virtual reality is a huge aspect of e-commerce that deserves to be explored. Virtual reality devices can be used to give people a closer look at products they want to buy. You could feel the impact of a product or see how it looks from many angles, albeit virtually. Looking at stuff through a VR headset is surely more realistic and immersive than just looking at two-dimensional images of something online.

Know What’s In Stock

The days of having to drive from one store to another to pick up something will be a thing of the past thanks to the evolution of the e-commerce technology. While you will have the option to get something delivered to your home, you could also find out where a product you want to buy is located, in a physical store. You may have the option to reserve a product at one of these stores after you find it online. This saves you the trouble of having to check individual places for something you want to buy.

Interactive Mobile Apps

Mobile apps will help you find details on everything you want to get in a store. Such apps may be designed to display information on things and how they might look. For instance, a beauty store might offer an app that works with your camera to give you a simulated look at how some makeup product might look on your face.

Automated Customer Service

While many businesses these days use customer service departments, they will switch over to automated systems in the future. This would entail machines being used to identify certain keywords or concerns that you have. You could enter details on questions you have into a website. The site would then analyze your content and produce an answer based on the words found and how they are laid out. When you add artificial intelligence to the mix, this proves to be a fail-safe solution for online vendors. Shoppers would have to take care of being as specific as possible when trying to get the answers, to get the expected results in as little time as possible.

Cryptocurrency Support

Cryptocurrencies have become increasingly popular in recent time. Some of these currencies can make it easier for people to perform online transactions quickly and with lesser fees. The potential for more e-commerce sites to adopt the bitcoin and other related cryptocurrencies as payment options is something worth looking into. But you will have to watch for how well such currencies evolve and how their values change. These investments have become notorious recently for having extremely volatile values that are impossible to predict or figure out.

Endnote

You will be surprised by what you might find in the technology sector in the next few years. There is a great potential for technology to evolve and change over time to make shopping a little easier while giving you more options for everything you wish to work with. Stay tuned for more updates. Until then, it’s over to you!

About the Author

Sohail Khan is passionate about traveling and exploring new places. He also loves writing articles that motivate students to live a better life. Currently, he is associated with smiletutor.sg a private tuition agency in Singapore.

5 Tips to Choose the RIGHT Online Store Builder for Your eCommerce Business

January 22, 2018 by WisdmLabs Leave a Comment

This is a guest post by Binny Joseph. If you’d like to contribute to our blog, feel free to get in touch with us.

Several entrepreneurs are following the latest trend of building online stores using e-commerce platforms. You might also be thinking of taking your business to the next level by creating an online presence. Choosing a platform to create an online store is always more beneficial and economical as compared to creating a complete solution from scratch. Online store builders can do this task faster and include numerous features which work as stepping stones towards your success. But selecting the apt platform is a challenging task. You may come across many options but choosing the best depends totally on your requirements. So, once you come up with your business specific requirements, here is a list of some of the vital tips to consider while choosing an online store builder. Do not miss these key points while making a choice.

1. Security should always be a priority

Security is a pivotal issue and it should be considered with extreme care. Online business is a virtual interface, hence trust is a necessary factor for your customers. Purchasers prefer secure payment options since they to need share sensitive information like bank details and passwords. Picking a web-based shopping basket with integrated SSL encryption is important to guarantee security. Online store builders that provide total security until the time a customer checks out, needs to be your first priority always; as any harm caused by intruders may have major side effects.

2. A platform ready for mobile commerce

E-commerce has shown tremendous growth with time, proving customers prefer it over brick and mortar shopping. But now is the time for m-commerce. Stats say the revenue generated from m-commerce is projected to reach 37.96 billion US dollars by 2020. These figures clearly show the necessity of having a mobile-ready platform for the progress of the online business. Online store builders that provide the amazing function of building a mobile-ready platform as per the choice of users comes with benefits like better sales and customer satisfaction. Google also prioritizes websites which are mobile-ready by giving them a better ranking and a chance at getting higher traffic and sales. Hence a mobile-ready platform is a necessity to survive and thrive, in the e-commerce domain.

3. Make search and checkouts easy for customers

Navigation plays a key role while a customer is purchasing any item. An online buyer may come to your store looking for a specific product or exploring the variety of your store. Customers are likely to abandon your shopping store if they are not able to checkout easily. Hence online store builders that provide an easy way to buy and checkout are highly preferred by customers because getting redirected to a number of pages just for completing a purchase is a time-consuming task.

4. Facility of product reviews and ratings

Customers trust products on the basis of experience shared by other customers. Product reviews and ratings which were considered as an add-on feature initially have become a necessity now. It attracts more online purchasers who are influenced by the good reviews posted by other buyers and hence place their orders. So the facility of product reviews and ratings is one feature that your chosen online store builder should definitely have.

5. Flexibility and Scalability for the long run

Modifying a website according to the changing trends and business needs becomes difficult as it takes a lot of time and cannot be declared as a bug-free solution till it is thoroughly tested. This may take a lot of time if the online store is not developed with the help of online store builders that are flexible. Customization should always be considered when you have to become better than earlier. A completely scalable and flexible platform that allows you to do so with ease can be a good option for a long run and helps you compete in a better way in the online market. With all these ‘Must Have’ features, your online business is likely to progress soon, earn a profit and become a popular choice for the customers.

Conclusion

Several brick-and-mortar retailers who wished to build their online stores either chose marketplaces for listing their products or struggled to build up their store from scratch. Since the evolution of online store builders, numerous small and medium businesses have progressed by creating their own brand name. While you always have the option to choose a developer with ecommerce expertise, online store builders are apt for small to medium scale businesses. Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

About the Author

Binny Joseph is an e-commerce marketing strategist with 5+ years of experience, working with StoreHippo. He writes extensively about the latest e-commerce trends and encourages people to take up the new ways to make their online business a better one. His articles regarding online store builders come from the rich experience of strategizing and handling online business across industry verticals.

5 Creative Examples of eCommerce Personalization

January 15, 2018 by WisdmLabs 2 Comments

This is a guest post by Nera Cruz. If you’d like to contribute to our blog, feel free to get in touch with us.

Tell me if you’ve heard of this story before. You are browsing a shopping website who just happens to greet you with your name and suddenly in the recommended items list, you see the exact pair of yellow underwear with the duck print that you were looking for since last week – and it’s on discount. You quickly whip out your credit card to buy it right away.

It’s personalization at work. You see, all your customers do not come from a single mold. Every one of them has their quirks that make them unique and that’s why you need to personalize to sell better. It’s also a good part of your marketing plan.

In any case, we collected some of the best examples you can use personalization to supercharge your website.

Being on a first name basis with your client

personyze-example-ecommerce-personalization

Image source: personyze.com

It is nice to get called by your first name. Try this when you are ordering at a restaurant. Speak to your waiter on a first name basis. Call him by his first name. More often than not, you will receive some great service.

You see calling someone by their first name is based on trust. Only people you trust, call you by your first name. It’s a psychological hack that makes your would-be customer feel at home.

Knowing the important dates

Image source: invecspro.com

Treat your customers like your significant other. Your significant other surely likes it when you remember the important dates – birthdays and anniversaries. Everybody likes being greeted on their birthday. They like it so much that they will open any e-mail greeting them a happy birthday.

It’s a great time to give them an offer. These life events usually make people want to make a purchase, sort of like a birthday present for yourself. You see it working in buffets all over the world.

Selling only what they want

Image source: addthis.com

Big stores have huge inventories and they are all trying to sell it to you. That is a huge problem when your customers get overloaded with all the choices. Personalization allows you to put only the items they want in front of them.

Analytics can do this for you by seeing what your customers are looking at and finding possible items that they might want based on their behavior. It may seem a bit Big Brother but at the end of the day, it makes for a good shopping experience as almost always, this leads to another sale.

Ask the right questions

Image source: springtab.com

Sometimes it is best to ask your customers outright what they like. It’s less invasive this way. By using filters and questionnaires, you can narrow down the options to what your customer will probably buy.

This allows you to filter a unique basket of goods for your customer. It’s like having your own personal shopper with you.

Make it a group thing

Image source: smartinsights.com

It may sound counter-intuitive, but being part of a group is actually a very personal experience. If you are part of a group, you tend to take on the qualities and behaviors of that group. Call it a version of group-think or herd mentality.

This also makes a great opportunity for “exclusivity” and making your customers feel like they are special, except of course for the fact that your group is essentially open for everyone.

What to do next?

That is a pretty good list of some personalization hacks you can do for your website. Remember that if you make it a personal experience, the more likely it is that your customer will buy from you. Treat it like being a friend to your customer. You would rather buy from a friend, wouldn’t you?

Was this article helpful for you? Show us some love in the comments below.

About the Author

Nera Cruz is a technical writer and a web merchandiser for different online marketplaces around the globe since 2011. Nera gained tons of experience working with several e-commerce platforms. She spends her free time selling her fashion products and gadgets on Facebook (Nera Shoppe). You can also connect with her on Twitter @nera_joy

4 Ways to Optimize Your eCommerce Site for Voice Search

December 18, 2017 by WisdmLabs Leave a Comment

This is a guest post by Bernard. If you’d like to contribute to our blog, feel free to get in touch with us.

I think you can agree with me: it’s really hard to make your ecommerce site stand out in Google’s search results page. There are so many aspects to good SEO, but you’re also busy trying to improve all the other parts of your ecommerce business. It seems almost impossible that you can break through and get great rankings for your ecommerce site. But what if it wasn’t so difficult? What if you could optimize your site for search little competition and great results? Well, you can, with voice search. These are the devices like mobile phones, digital virtual assistants such as Amazon Echo, Alexa, Google Home, Siri, Cortana, or others like the Roku. Today I’m going to show you how you can optimize your ecommerce site for voice search—and not only stand above the competition, but also get much better sales. Voice search is great since it allows people to do hands-free searches (such as when they’re driving, or just for fun). It’s also much more efficient for users to speak than to type. Even better, while voice search made up 20% of Google’s total searches, it’s set to make up 50% of all searches by 2020.

#1 Make your site faster

Visitors nowadays have very little patience for slow-loading sites. Anything that takes longer than 7 seconds means you’ve just lost another site visitor. They’re even less patient on mobile. This is especially true since the programs they’re using (like OK Google) has to come up with a good answer to their question within a second or two. If you have slow-loading pages, the voice search app won’t be able to get all your information in time. That means you’ll get passed up and ignored. You need to make sure your site is loading within 3 seconds, though optimally under 2 seconds.

#2 Prepare for voice search queries

People search very differently when they type and when they speak. For example, if you’re typing a search query into Google search, you’ll probably type in “Black Friday deals Seattle” or something similar. However, when doing a voice search, people tend to speak in fuller phrases and sentences. So it would look something like:

“Siri, what are the best Black Friday deals in Seattle?”

“OK Google, how do I find the best Black Friday deals in Seattle?”

For that reason, when you’re optimizing for voice searches, you need to make a list of long-tail keywords and questions (sentences and phrases) that are related to your business. Then, make sure your content is optimized for that. So, for example, instead of going for keywords like “children’s shoes” you should use long-tail keywords such as “brands with the highest quality children’s shoes.” You can also optimize for questions, such as, “What are the highest quality children’s shoes?”

#3 Make your mobile experience better

Let’s say you’ve taken care of #1 and #2 from above, and your content is optimized for voice queries and your site speed is good. But how does your actual site look when a visitor comes to your site? Remember, SEO (including voice search) isn’t about just getting visitors to your site. It’s also about keeping visitors engaged. If visitors have a terrible mobile experience and have a high bounce rate with a low average time on page, then your rankings will drop in the search results pages. That’s why you’ll need to make sure that your mobile experience is great for all users. This is especially true if you are (and you should be) preparing for the high ecommerce holiday shopping season.

#4 Use schema markups

Schema markups can help search engines like Google quickly find out the keywords and crucial information about your content. You can often see this with all types of content, including recipes:

Above you can see not just the eye-catching image, but also the rating, votes, and other important details like cooking time and calories. With ecommerce, you can use rich snippets in the same way. Here’s what we see when typing in “apple ipad with retina display”:

Only one result really stands out, and that’s one that is using schema markups, which are known as rich snippets. In this example, we see the average rating and the number of reviews. When search engines like Google can easily pull the information from your content, they can easily pass this along to searches to make your site stand out above your competition.

Wrapping Up

With these 4 tips, you’ll be much more able to stand out from your competition in multiple ways. After all, although voice search is soon set to make up 50% of all searches, not many of your competitors are focusing on it. That gives you the perfect opportunity to boost your rankings, increase your visitors and boost your ecommerce sales. Good luck!

About the Author

Bernard is a content marketer for Omnisend, the ecommerce marketing automation platform dedicated to helping ecommerce stores build strong, lasting relationships with their customers. He also has a passion for good research and helping ecommerce businesses with their multichannel marketing needs.

Setting up Featured Listings on an eCommerce Marketplace

December 7, 2017 by Akshaya Rane Leave a Comment

Since the advent of e-commerce, there has been a rapid increase in the number of vendors catering to every imaginable niche. Today, the competition is so fierce that you have to fight tooth-and-nail, figuratively speaking, for every customer. The situation is such that gaining a foothold in an existing e-commerce sector is nigh impossible unless you have an extraordinary product and marketing genii at hand. And it is going to keep getting worse. According to the National Retail Federation, online sales are projected to triple in 2017, with new retail e-stores cropping up left, right, and center. As a result, there is a growing need to be heard above and beyond the conventional marketing and publicity efforts. Vendors are tapping into newer and more innovative means of product marketing, so as to increase their reach. The rapid influx of retail vendors and the need for every seller to stand out from the crowd creates a highly fertile field of opportunity for vendor marketplace owners. How so? Well, as the owner of a vendor marketplace, you have multiple vendor products and financial stability at your disposal, leaving you free to try out various sales strategies to increase profits. You can always opt for time-tested strategies like bundling products, offering discounts and coupons, and setting up personalized pricing for frequent customers. In addition, you can also tap into the field of paid marketing, by setting up featured listings on your e-commerce marketplace.

The Advantages of Featured Listings

A featured product listing is when you promote a prime product at a popular listing spot on your vendor marketplace for a definite time period, either for free or for a fixed price. There are several advantages of doing this. By setting up featured listings, you can:

Highlight Categories of Products on the Marketplace

Selective display of listings allows you to feature products by category on your e-commerce marketplace. This allows you to promote specific products as per your marketing timeline. For instance, say you have a category of Christmas-related products. You can easily highlight this category prior to and during the holiday season, driving traffic and sales to your vendors.

Feature Products based on Quality

Setting up featured listings gives you an opportunity to set a threshold defining the quality standard of your marketplace and thus build a reputation. Your vendors become aware of the fact that products can be featured only after they measure up to the bar you have set and hence work harder to fulfill the requirements. In fact, this can become your USP, provided you begin with the idea from the outset.

Set up Fixed Duration for Equal Product Exposure

Another advantage of featured listings is that you can set up numerous products for a fixed time limit on the marketplace. This gives you an opportunity to showcase a variety of products on the platform, giving due time and consideration to every category the better to highlight their advantages.

Enable Site Monetization

Apart from the altruistic advantages of featured listings, they have a very significant monetary advantage as well, namely that of being chargeable. Website monetization by advertising featured listings is one of the foremost ways most blogging websites make money. If you feature a blog on your marketplace, this is definitely a solution you should consider.

Setting Up Featured Listings on a Vendor Marketplace

WisdmLabs offers a comprehensive service for setting up featured listings on your vendor marketplace. The way it works, we help you create dedicated slots of product listings, which can each be priced differently. For instance, say you have three slots, depending on three locations in decreasing order of prominence on your website. Each slot has 10 spaces and is priced independently, as follows:

Position	Position Price
1 – 10	$50
10 – 20	$35
20 – 40	$15

Now, these slots will be viewable and available for purchase for your vendors, on a first-come-first-served basis. Vendors can select their desired slot, choose the product they want to promote and finalize the purchase. As the slots are filled, the counter counts down automatically, displaying the number of open places left. Some features of the service include:

The Administrator can limit featured listings to a particular category of products or keep them open to all
All slots can be set up for a limited duration, after which the process repeats again
Every product is displayed as per the position selected at the backend
As the duration of the featured listing comes to an end, a notification is sent to the Vendor, informing him that the listing will have to be renewed to continue in the said spot
All positions can be reset after the listing duration is over

Endnote

Paid product listings are one of the best ways to increase your market reach and build a brand. Today’s audience has a multitude of options to choose from; in order to stand out from the rest, you need to ensure that people have a constant visual reminder of your marketplace and your products. A word of caution though. Maintaining marketplace integrity is important as you monetize your website. As the bigger marketplaces get saturated day by day, you have the opportunity feature selective products in your marketplace, thereby increasing your market reach. What is your take on using featured product listings? Pen your thoughts to let us know. 🙂 Want to set up featured listings for your marketplace? Talk to us today!