When Consumers Abandon Online Shopping Carts? - Clorida Technologies Pvt Ltd

The incidence of Shopping cart abandonment—shoppers browsing, selecting, and placing their purchase items in online shopping carts, but leaving without paying—is one exasperating thing for online retailers. This is indicative of a lower conversion rate and denotes that additional effort has to be put in to achieve the expected business results.

Significance

There has been considerable enthusiasm on the part of buyers in opting for online purchase mode in the recent past. People love to check out availability and select what they prefer, using the convenience of the Internet—after all, who doesn’t like shopping—and added with the comfort of sitting in their living room and acquiring things with a few simple mouse clicks more than satisfies people’s needs. But the gray side of the whole process is abandonment of the purchase process at the payment stage of the transaction—shopping cart abandonment.

How Businesses Suffer due to Shopping Cart Abandonment

Most of the people who ditch their purchase process without completion tend to go away looking elsewhere, or entirely giving up the purchase intention. And a major portion of those who are not going through the complete process end up non-returning buyers as well. This proves to be quite unproductive and bad for online store owners.

Why Buyers Abandon the Online Shopping Cart?

There are varied reasons that cause buyers to stop mid-way through their purchase process and ditch their shopping cart, high shipping costs and comparative pricing being the major ones. The common factors that drive potential buyers into abandoning their shopping carts are listed below:

• Complicated Check out process
• Security features not up to the expectations
• Product Information not properly displayed
• Shipping costs being displayed at later stage
• Registration & account creation made mandatory
• Lack of convenient payment options
• Not being able to get promotional offers and coupons
• Noncompetitive Pricing

How to Bring Down Shopping Cart Abandonment?

The following features help in avoiding the last minute ditching of the purchase process:

• Displaying Shipping Charges in the Initial stage of the process
• Timely offering of Discounts and Coupons
• Providing comparison shopping facility in the website itself
• Offering better privacy & security to buyers
• Being flexible on Return Policies and being user-friendly
• Providing editing facility to the shopping process
• Optimizing the Check out process
• Offering reasonable shipping charges and maintaining competitive pricing

Shopping cart abandonment is a common problem faced my many online store owners. This can be tackled by making a few changes to the way of maintaining your ecommerce website and offering certain convenient and attractive features to the buyers

Big Data for Small Business Success - Clorida Technologies

How Small Businesses may Leverage Big Data for Achieving Success

It is not an exaggeration that future success of small businesses depend heavily on Big Data. Organizations across the globe happen to gather voluminous data in their various processes. Data is continuously being collected from varied types of sources and different people, for diverse purposes. In the recent times, Big Data solutions have been found to be falling under affordable tabs and conveniently priced for small businesses as well.

How small Companies can use Big Data for Success

Small businesses have endless possibilities to make use of Big Data. With a lot of platforms and tools having been significantly improved, small businesses can make use of Big Data for attaining impressive results. While competing with bigger organizations, leveraging Big Data balances them to be at even keel, thus providing exciting and unprecedented opportunities.

How Big Data Drives Success at Small Businesses

• Big Data Provides Complete Understanding of Customers’ Views: Offering a 360-degree view of customers, Big Data helps businesses  in creating better and personalized customer experience—starting with their first introduction to a product through various stages when they select, buy, and use it
• Helps Reducing Customers’ Rejection: By calculating and describing the value placed by customers on a particular business and its products, Big Data pinpoints why and when a customer chooses to discard a product—this helps in improving sales tactics and other factors to improve quality so that customers are prevented from leaving
• Customers’ Sentiments can be Analyzed: Using analytics strategies such as social media analytics, small businesses may collect data about what a given sector of the population think of the business or product—measuring such sentiments and responses improves the chances of increasing business opportunities
• Internal Processes can be Improved: Organizational operations can be improved by reaching out to customers through Big Data—being flexible than others, small businesses can streamline their research and manufacturing to their advantage

Big Data Solutions for Small Businesses

In the small businesses scenario, data proves to be of ample assistance in uncovering biases which otherwise will be limiting an understanding of market. Especially with regard to businesses that involve facing customers, getting thorough data about customers happens to be crucial, similar to knowing how and where customers interact with the business. Rather than trying to handle huge data with existing conventional IT systems, small businesses must try to adapt to Big Data that eases complexities and helps manage large data smoothly.

To be able to achieve success and sustain it in future, small businesses need to make minor changes to their existing IT set up and follow certain processes that lead them toward capability to face changes and competition. To name a few, looking for alternatives to SQL, working toward databases complete with features, and looking out for innovative models for pricing go a long way in the success of small business owners.

How the Consumer’s Past Experience Influence eTailers Business

Consumer’s positive experience on the product will state its success. Only if a consumer gets positive experience on using the product or service, the etailer can continue to sustain in the market selling the products in demand. This element is also based on the consumer’s awareness, attraction, purchase and use of the product. The individual expectations will also play a vital role in deciding the success of the product.

Analysts, researchers and commentators strongly recognize the importance of retaining a good consumer experience on the product. The etailers, manufacturers and other marketers must realize the fact that consumer satisfaction is always important more than the quality and service. This may influence millions of potential customers to decide upon to buy or not, from the past experience of their customers.

Although there are many analytics and metrics used to measure consumer’s satisfaction, it cannot be still fully determined.

Every etailer must concentrate on the point of increase consumer experience by convincing them with all their expectations about the product and services.

Today the world is moving to the digital market, which offers plenty of flexibility, options and time and money saving opportunities to the consumers shopping online. This has also increased the availability of same type of products from different brands and sellers at varying prices. Although quality is emphasized and given more importance, there are also other factors influencing the consumer’s experience of using the product bought online.

The etailers must consider many factors to improve their products and services, while increasing consumer’s experience to a higher level and retain the customer.

Here are a few elements that an etailer must consider to increase their customer experience;

·         Priority for retention of customer:

Keeping the current customers is of core importance to increase the leads, which the etailer will get through word of mouth and this is imperative to increase revenue. Remember, acquire new customers would cost at least five times higher, than retaining the existing one. Therefore, it is essential to retain existing customers and give priority to this.

·         Sell more to Existing Customers:

Selling more to the existing and loyal customers will lead to great success. However, to retain this loyalty, you must deliver good products that reflect good consumer experience with 100% satisfaction. You must aware of the fact that any negative feedback would affect your reputation.

·         Importance of traditional marketing

Although digital marketing plays a dominant role in attracting huge numbers of customers, traditional marketing is still effective and productive. You must try to retain your existing customers in the traditional market who still has a huge potential to bring more leads to the retail business.

·         Word-of-mouth:

Regardless of numbers of advertising options available right from media to internet, word-of-mouth is a very powerful tool to advertise your product and brand without any cost. The fact is undeniable that you can attract more customers by ensuring satisfying experience through your loyal services, which is transferred to numbers of new and potential customers from the existing ones through word-of-mouth. 

Build a Dedicated Fan Base via Newsletter

Any business involves interaction between people. People are the basic building blocks upon which any business activity needs to be established. Developing relationship with as many persons as possible is not only instrumental in acquiring prospects but also is helpful in fostering loyalty. Building your contacts and getting acquainted with a large number of people leads to increased business and improves profits.

Significance of Building Fan Base and Newsletters

Regardless of what field of activity you are involved in, it is always an excellent way to build relationships with like-minded people—it leads to development of a fan base that proves helpful to business in many ways. Considered one of the best tools for relationship marketing, Newsletters assist businesses to communicate directly with users, discern their views and needs, thus helping them plan their business strategies according to the current trends and tastes.

What makes Newsletters Tick?

Newsletter strategy of building your fan base is smooth and takes less time. People who give their email addresses agree to communicate with you. They are permitting you to directly contact them. The number of email recipients can be decided according to your purpose. The rate of people opening and reading your email is considerably more when compared to other methods such as facebook and twitter. Newsletters are a seamless way to seek not only participation but also to understand the market trend and product requirements of the masses.

Tips for Using Newsletter to Your Advantage in Building a Fan Base

• Convey what is Important
• Being consistently relevant and concise makes your newsletter effective and more readable
• Ensure that you are being recognized as a bonafide mail sender
• Avoid landing in the spam box of followers—make sure that users receive your mails in their in box
• Post Attractive Stuff
• Useful and relevant content, catchy and fascinating visuals, and words rich with usefullness can make followers to take interest
• Attract Attention
• Offer incentives to gather as many email addresses as possible
• Formulate your Newsletter Well
• Focus on the subject line—the first thing that is viewed by fans or followers is the subject line
• Have Personal Communication
• Have one-to-one communication with users—this keeps the momentum up
• Ensure that Content is Worthy
• When the audience are in some way or other benefitted by the content of your newsletter, it leads to more readership, and consequently, to more revenue

It is universally proven facts that it is rather easy to sell products to somebody you already know than to people who are complete strangers. Try to garner as many contacts as possible through newsletters and develop good relationship with them so that you can use them for future business transactions!

Technology Accelerates Business

There are a number of ways through which small and medium sized businesses can benefit from prudent application of technology. In the early days, communication process was mostly handled by methods that were dependent on manually operated systems that needed continuous monitoring and involved a lot of human effort. Innovation in technology has given rise to tools and applications that have not only improved the various processes but also turned small and medium sized companies into global businesses.

Significance of Adopting Technology in Business

Technology helps business owners to improve the way of operation among staff—speeding up existing processes while allowing new and better ways of achieving things in short time. Considerable cost savings is also possible by embracing technology to boost your business activities.

The different practices and systems inherent in industry may be conducted in a seamless, effective, and profitable manner when appropriate technology suitable to cater to the needs of the specific industry is taken up.

How to Adopt Technology that Helps Improvement in Business

To be able to reap the full advantage of technology, entrepreneurs need to assess their existing systems and compare these with their specific requirements. Inefficiencies found must be eliminated; better means and methods must be formulated and followed. A well run research about competitors in the industry helps in arriving at cost-effective ways to leverage technology in your favor.

Benefits of Technology to Businesses

Selecting and adopting technology that gels well with the nature of your business brings about invaluable changes to your organization. A few are listed below:

§  Enhanced Marketing Strategies

o   Small and medium businesses have been freed from budget constraints in reaching customers—Technology-oriented marketing strategies such as Internet marketing, Mobile marketing, and Social Media marketing have enabled users to reach out to the masses in no time and in an entertaining way

§  Improved Communication

o   Devices using the latest technology have turned lifelines for businesses, offering opportunity to keep in constant and uninterrupted contact with clients—getting connected and staying in touch with customer base is smooth, making internal and external communication channels better

§  Increased Productivity

o   It is well-known that businesses need to make the most out of operations and technology for getting the maximum productivity possible—employing technologies that enable staff to complete tasks quickly, using online facilities to reach customers quickly and maintain better relationship, and training organizational members in cutting-edge technology are certain sure shot ways to achieve decent productivity

§  Satisfactory Customer Service

o   As technology helps to bring customers closer to your business, attaining customer satisfaction is possible when proper tools and technologies are kept in place

§  Teleconferencing and Telecommuting

o   Making prudent use of telephone and email services empowers businesses to easily convey what they intend to communicate and mobile devices offer the facility to keep in touch from remote locations

By adopting technology and moving your business into the cloud, every single process in the organization becomes simpler and faster. Leveraging technology for the betterment of activities and accelerating business is the order of the day!

Do you have multi-store business? - Clorida

A Multiple Store System is one in which a single business firm owns a number of branch shops or stores. Developed with the prime intention of avoiding middlemen and establishing a direct link with the consumers, this concept has been in vogue among manufacturers as well as wholesalers. The stores may be located in different parts of the same city or a country, each one dealing in the same products or services. This mode of operation is sometimes referred to as Chain Store system. Scattered Locations having Central Control and ownership mark the identification of such shops.

Features of Multiple Stores

▫   Specializing in just one or two articles, they charge uniform price over the network

▫   Most of the business is being carried under cash terms—credit is not entertained

▫   To do away with middlemen and thus come into direct contact with buyers is the intention

▫   The Centralized Head office controls all the outlets and takes care of general procurements as well

▫   Sticking to simple and similar design, branches are distributed over a city or provinces

Challenges in Managing Multi-Store Business

▫   Communication Hurdles: Little or unplanned communication takes place

▫   Time Jugglery: When primary location gets busy, resources at other locations may not be able to get their deserved time

▫   Weakening of Logistics: Time delays and excess efforts required may not be avoidable

▫   Complex Processes: At times, it becomes difficult to coordinate and collaborate on certain assignments as employees are remotely based

▫   Reduced Team Cohesiveness: Not being acquainted with one another, employees may develop aloof emotions

▫   General Supervision and Discipline: It is a different story altogether, to maintain a controlled structure of discipline, when it comes to multiple location outlets.

Steps to Achieve Smooth Running of a Multi-Store Business

▫   Standardizing: It would be a good idea to standardize all vital operations such as Money transactions, Layout and Storage, Customer Service, and Security aspects uniformly over the entire network

▫   Make use of Technology: Using Cloud-based Solutions renders accessing and entering information easier and convenient. As this enables distributed storage and retrieval, all tools and features can be used by users on different locations smoothly

▫   Inventory Optimization: Across the network, taking stock of things, transferring commodities to the needful places, and deciding which items require priority can be dealt with efficiently, by optimizing inventory across the chain

▫   Hire the best Talent and Keep a Regular Check on all outlets: 

    Even under the conditions when dearth of appropriate resources prevails, it is crucial to place the right kind of people at the right place. Multiple locations bring with them multiple responsibilities—raising the need for well-qualified, reliable employees. Management must make it a point to keep vigil and check all stores at regular intervals

It is not an easy piece of cake, but running a multi-store business can be managed with the right tools & technology, procedures and people in a successful manner to reap profits.

eCommerce faces sales failure with ‘overload of options’ that confuse users - clorida

Running online shopping sites successfully is equally a great challenge to the normal shops. Website owners and the online retailers must understand the healthy eCommerce habits and try to follow them as much as possible.  Overloading of options is one of the mistakes to be avoided. It is a serious condition which will affect the sales considerably and lead to loss.

How Overloading of options affects the sales:

Many online retailers, who enter the eCommerce business without experience, provide maximum options and maximum products for the clients to choose from, thinking that customers will happily buy the products. However, sadly this is not the case. What really happens is that people get confused with so many options and as a result, purchasing is not done. Overloading can increase the traffic. Number of people who visit the site will increase and people will browse the categories and the products endlessly spending more time. However, this attitude of customers not at all helps towards the increase of purchase. Instead, there is a risk in decrease of sales.  

Reasons to avoid Overloading of Options:

·         Doing the right purchase is not an easy job for many. They do research work about the brands and products, get the feedback and only after that they come to purchase with an idea in mind.  When they come across more options, they stagger at the work they need to do for those options.

·         Decision taking becomes more difficult when ‘more options’ is available.

·         According to Social psychologists, this is stamped as ‘Choice Overload’, which explains the condition that people, when faced with lots of options, very often do not select anything and go in search of places where they can purchase in simpler terms, that is with fewer options. 

  

Facts on ‘Choice Overhead’:

·         Research Reports, after numerous experiments, prove with facts and figures about the sales failure of choice overload.  When there are more options, 60% of people browsed them and 3% made a purchase whereas when the options are few 40% of the people browsed them and 30% made a purchase. The increase in sales is 6 times more for the later condition than the earlier condition.

·         From the research and experiments, it has been found that it is safe for the retailers to have from 4 options to 6. For the providers of Software as a Service, they can safety opt choices between 4 and 5. For the providers of information products, they must concentrate on only one option. 

·         Restricting the options to fewer numbers does not mean to curtail or eliminate the products. It means to categorize and streamline the offers in a more efficient manner.

·         Of course, when the consumer has a very clear idea of what he is looking for, then he will not be disturbed by any number of options. However, this cannot be expected with everyone. Most of the consumers, though they have all information in their finger tips about the products and brands, are not clear about what they are purchasing.