3 Biggest Ecommerce Challenges That Exist Today

TargetingMantra
TargetingMantra is a 500Strong company offering SaaS based personalization platform to online businesses. The team has previously worked in developing recommendation system for Amazon, Zappos, IMDB. It’s proprietary technology offers 15% increase in conversion rate. The company has offices in India and Silicon Valley and has clients spread across the globe.

Ecommerce retailers continue to get love from the online shoppers and sales continue to soar during the current year. As per the latest forecasts from eMarketer, global B2C ecommerce sales will increase by 20.1% this year to reach a whopping $1.5 trillion. However, many retailers worldwide are still facing some big challenges in their ecommerce strategies.

Read: Online Commerce In India — Key Stats

So, let’s explore the top 3 ecommerce challenges that exist today.

Omnichannel Experience

There is a rising demand for a seamless cross-channel or omnichannel shopping experience that makes purchasing decision and journey of online shoppers much easier. According to a 2013 UPS/ComScore study, 44% of shoppers cite omnichannel factors as driving their likelihood to shop with a retailer. On the other hand, a survey of retailer conducted by RIS News & EKN revealed that a retailer loses 4.5% of revenue in dearth of technologies and corporate policies to support omnichannel customer journeys.

This implies that e-sellers must consider integrating this functionality across devices, mobile applications, in-store and even marketplaces. This synchronization of experience across multiple devices and channels can be a recipe to success in the future, though it’s not that easy as it sounds.

As new mobile devices of various screen sizes emerge, the only mantra for the success of your retail strategy is to deliver first-class optimal user experience. Here’s the recipe to become an empowered mobile-savvy retailer:

• Think beyond the obvious channels. Out of the world’s total 4 billion mobile phones,1.08 are smartphones, and 3.05 billion mobile phones are SMS enabled (Source: Microsoft Tag). Retailers must now think beyond traditional marketing routes and offer simplified access to their content on mobile (that their customers so obsessively clutch!) – SMS, mobile web, mobile chat or mobile apps. For that you need to get found easily in the mobile world. Here’s how you can do this:
• Serve up a fantastically mobile optimized responsive website to your mobile users
• Optimize your mobile website for search marketing
• Eliminate the purchase barriers and boost conversion
• Offer conversion-oriented user experience

Customers will love it! And, your retail business is most likely to get the much needed dose of competitive edge.

Personalization

The modern connected shoppers expect their preferred etailers to offer them personalization across products and marketing offers. According to a recent study by Infosys, 86% of consumers said personalization has at least some impact on their purchasing decisions. And also, almost 31% of consumers seek more personalization in their shopping experiences.

Personalization can be a game change for your ecommerce business, if you’ve not cottoned onto it yet. Begin tailoring your ecommerce strategy to map it to your customers’ expectations. How? Your marketing department needs to leverage Big Data to extract meaningful inferences about your customer’s likes/dislikes, on-site, off-site buying behavior and patterns, and then need to devise smart marketing strategy and offers based on this segmentation of buyer personas. You can then start targeting your customers with relevant and well-tailored products and offers aligned with their choices and behaviors. This can fetch you a significant competitive advantage in the present and times to come. Not only will this help you engage with your customers effectively and increase your conversions, but also earn you an army of brand advocates thereby bringing you more new traffic to your ecommerce store.

Related: Does Ecommerce Personalization Boost Your Conversion Rates?

Mobile Business Intelligence and Real-time Analytics

Mobile BI: Enterprises must integrate various mobile channels with existing Business Intelligence (BI) and CRM systems. Choose a retail intelligence-based solution that leverages vital customer and operational data such as customer segmentation and customer’s decision journey, track sales and maintain customers’ profiles in order to dig out problem areas and optimize marketing and sales strategy. Retailers can use these deep insights to determine the direction of their business, while ensuring they’re able to tap the maximum value out of every chosen channel.

The luxury goods retailer – Gucci – was the first enterprise to embrace mobile BI. Recently, it has got a customer mobile app that enables sales executives to do the qualifying work manually and serve their multi-channel customers better, while educating the latter on using the cool app features to be able to enjoy a seamless omni-channel shopping experience.

Use cross-channel, real-time analytics: Leverage actionable analytics across your entire spectrum of self-service applications for identifying problem areas and scope to deliver better services. It’s imperative to monitor your customer’s journey and interest points, and collate this important information from different sources. This customer data can be used to derive meaningful intelligence and build fine-grained customer segments and highly targeted messaging that caters exactly to the needs and interests of customers. 

Related: NotifyVisitors: The Web Tool For Increasing Customer Engagement Via Notification

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