There is also a stronger emphasis that has been placed on the profitability of the pre-existing database as a result of this shift in focus. Despite the fact that this new strategy has proven to be extremely beneficial for a brand, it should never be the sole focus of the marketing power of a brand at any given time. In order for a retention marketing strategy to be successful, it needs to work in conjunction with the existing strategies of both traditional and digital acquisition marketing that exist today.

It is not as difficult as it may seem to adopt a retention marketing strategy, which is why you should not give up. If you are doing the heavy lifting yourself, for example, then you have already done most of the work. The majority of businesses have a wealth of behavioural data from their existing customers that can be used to generate more revenue by enlisting the help of a retention automation solution to turn that data into revenue.

Keeping a close eye on customer retention is essential

Back in the day, most e-commerce retailers focused their marketing efforts solely on tried-and-true methods for acquiring new customers at the time. For decades, they kept on following the same procedure – and the motto remained the same: more ads + more customers = more sales.

There were only a few key channels that marketing teams heavily focused on in the 80s and 90s when it came to attracting audiences that worked well. At the time, retention was nothing more than an afterthought. With the turn of the century, however, a massive explosion of channels took place:

As there were more channels available to consumers, there were also more choices for them. As a result, it became (and is today) much easier than ever before for brand loyalists to not only jump from one channel to another but also switch to a new brand without missing a beat. Thus, it became increasingly important for businesses to focus on keeping loyal, repeat customers among those one-time buyers. The marketing industry is also beginning to realize that the cost of acquisition is simply not economical or worthwhile and is actually holding them back from maximizing their marketing efforts.

They are starting to focus on their existing database with a renewed focus on retention in their pursuit of value over volume. As a result, e-commerce marketing is becoming an essential part of any business’s marketing strategy.

In B2C marketing, keeping existing customers happy and buying can easily be considered one of the most profound, meaningful journeys a marketer could undertake – it’s difficult, but it pays off in the long run.

By converting a one-time buyer into a repeat buyer you are able to increase your profits and increase your brand’s appeal to customers, and as a result, your brand is more likely to be recommended to others.

Clear Picture of Customer Retention Marketing

The main purpose of retention marketing is to create loyal and engaged customers who return to a store or a website repeatedly in order to make repeat purchases.

Compared to that acquisition-first mentality so many brands had just a few decades ago, it is an atrophied muscle for many marketing organizations that are trying to market their products. It is important to acknowledge the fact that making such a major shift requires you to make a commitment to better understand and market to your existing customer base instead of just concentrating on growing it.

When it comes to attracting new customers, the cost is nearly 7 times higher than it is to retain existing customers. There is no question that you have already spent countless hours, dollars, and energy nurturing existing customers, so keeping them around makes all the sense in the world to you.

As a result of refocusing on retention, you will also see previously unseen benefits on the bottom line. The chances of a one-time customer coming back to the store are 27%. But there are higher than 50% chances of a second- or third-time customer coming back to the store.

The Harvard Business School conducted a study that showed that if you increase customer retention rates by only 5% over a period of time, you can increase profits by up to 95%. One more study by Gartner estimated that only 20% of the customer base of a company will be able to drive 80% of its future revenue.

There is no doubt that marketers need to pay more attention to retention, but it should never replace acquisition in any way. Only complement it. The most successful retention marketing strategies are the ones that work in tandem with traditional and digital acquisition marketing strategies that are already working and that can be executed brilliantly.

Having a retention marketing strategy in place does not have to be a daunting task as you may think it is. The good news is that you’ve probably already done much of the hard work. Almost all businesses have a huge amount of behavioural data on their existing customers that they can take advantage of in many different ways. 

Measuring Retention: Does it work?

There are a number of high-level retention metrics that can be used, including:

• The percentage of repeat customers that contribute to the sales of a business
• Rate of active customers repurchasing products
• Value of a customer over their lifetime

Other derivative metrics that may be considered include the following:

• Differences in behaviour/engagement between existing (or long-term) database members (or long-term buyers) and new buyers – such as the likelihood of purchasing, perhaps, or even the average order value
• Known contacts behave differently than anonymous visitors when it comes to app sessions, email engagements, social engagements, and website interactions

Customer retention marketing: Secret Unfolded

It is important to realize that loyalty is a luxury, and re-engagement is a remedy for it. There is no doubt that customer loyalty is crucial to the success of any retention marketing strategy, but re-engaging inactive or one-time buyers is the most effective way to help them reach that point.

Re-engagement campaigns

An important aspect of re-engagement campaigns is that they’re all about reinvigorating that spark that once existed when a customer made a purchase. You don’t want to dwell on the problem of buyers defecting or unsubscribing – 25%-50% of customers become inactive, and brands lose an average of 25% of their mailing list each year to inactive customers.

Fortunately, there are several options available to you when it comes to defecting or inactive contacts. There are a few things you can do:

• The standard win-back campaigns will help you reactivate inactive customers and defecting customers. Campaigns aimed at bringing back customers and reactivating subscribers are a great way to remind customers how much they value doing business with you. Using social media channels, you can also reach out to inactive contacts who are not active on your website.
• Provide customers with replenishment offers in order to engage them. You can make it easier for customers to come back to your store by reminding them to reorder products they previously bought.
• Remove them from your list entirely or delete their email address from your list entirely. It is not ideal to choose this option.
• The best way to make sure they aren’t included on the main list is to include them only in sporadic or infrequent emails.
• To confirm that they have opted in and are interested in the emails, test variations of re-engagement emails with variations on the subject line (e.g., “We miss you!”). There is no better option when it comes to executing strategic plans than this one.

Perks of loyal customers

A loyal customer is also more likely to share the experience they have had with their social network, in addition to purchasing more. There has been a trend over the last few years for the Harvard Business School to coin the term “word of mouse”, as social media has a much greater reach than traditional word of mouth. It will be well worth it in more ways than one to follow up with these follow-up communications in the future. With the heightened use of social media channels in the retail space, the value of referrals in the realm of e-commerce is amplified by the fact that referrals are extremely beneficial in the e-commerce retail sector.

Read More: Top 7 Online Reputation Management (ORM) Tools for E-commerce Companies

Take Away

Due to the emergence of behavioural data, marketing organizations are now more than ever able to build a solid retention marketing strategy from a pre-existing base of behavioural data with which they can create a more personalized customer experience in the future.

If you are looking to reap the rewards of having more engaged customers, it is important that you subtly shift your focus. It is well known that long-term, loyal customers are well worth the time and effort it takes to acquire them, and their benefits will greatly exceed the cost of acquiring new ones, as we all know.

Brands risk losing valuable data, deals, and money if they do not develop a strategy to maintain lasting relationships with customers, which is essential to the success of their e-commerce marketing campaign.

The post What Is the Need for Customer Retention Marketing in E-Commerce Brands? appeared first on Cyfuture Blog.

1.   Ensures Online Security

Online security is certainly a concern shared by all online shoppers. With the recent increase in cyberattacks, you should have the necessary certifications that show your commitment to ensuring a safe shopping experience. Ecommerce stores with vested interests in protecting their customer data should prioritize ISO 27001 certification.

This certification means you’ve met the necessary standards and can preserve the integrity and confidentiality of customer data. The ISO 27001 is an international standard that outlines your Information Security Management System requirements. These standards ensure that your eCommerce store has all the relevant security controls.

2.   Credibility and Trust

ISO certification boosts the credibility and trustworthiness of your eCommerce business. Customers have been forced to become more cautious to avoid frauds who’ve flooded the currently buzzing online marketplace. As such, they insist on shopping from reliable and secure platforms.

Obtaining an ISO certification shows your commitment to adhering to all the internationally recognized quality and security standards. ISO certification is an independent validation of your business practices. It ensures customers that your business operations meet the tight global benchmarks.

3.   Customer Satisfaction

Unknown to many online store owners, you can improve customer satisfaction by getting ISO certified. Businesses with ISO certification commit to delivering quality and efficient services to customers.

Online shoppers appreciate the little things most eCommerce store owners ignore. A reliable inventory, seamless order processing, and accurate product description greatly improve customer satisfaction. This reduces cases of incorrect orders, delayed deliveries, and products running out of stock.

The systematic approach required by ISO standards also includes customer support. Swift issue resolution, clear product return policies, and effective communication become part of your business operations. Observing certification standards means you will deliver hassle-free services to your customers.

4.   Legal and Regulatory Compliance

Besides enhancing customer satisfaction and operational efficiency, becoming ISO certified also ensures that you are legal and regulatory compliant. Most ISO standards include sections that align with industry-specific regulations. Here’s why you should be legal and regulatory compliant:

• Alignment with regulations: ISO standards align with various legal and regulatory requirements. Implementing them ensures your eCommerce business remains compliant.
  
  
• Data protection: ISO 27001 and other standards help businesses that handle customer data have robust data protection measures and comply with GDPR and other data privacy regulations.
  
  
• Product compliance: ISO 9001 and other standards on product quality ensure your products meet the safety and quality standards.

Endnote

You should ignore the importance of business certifications. Getting ISO and SSL certified can take your business to greater heights. Ensuring your business is certified shows you can work according to global market standards. Certification improves customer satisfaction, shopping security, and reputation. Your eCommerce business can also access international audiences.

The post Why Should Your Ecommerce Site Be ISO Certified? appeared first on Cyfuture Blog.

And all brands are merely players, 

They have their exits and entrances, 

And a brand plays a key part in a consumer’s life,

Their actions monitored by online reputation management. 

A little deviation from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, but it still holds true for several online brick and mortar stores. Brands play an integral role in a consumer’s life, and they prize their online reputation more than anything else. 

The truth is, brands cannot afford any harm or spite to their online reputation.

Why so, you ask?

Because, businesses risk losing 22% of potential customers due to a negative article, comment, or review.

More importantly, if such dissenting information presents itself on the first page of SERPs. 

So, how can you manage it and make sure your current and prospective customers enjoy a safe landing at your e-commerce store?

The answer is Online Reputation Management. 

Quite precisely., there are online reputation tools that help you take the reign into your hands, improve your online standing, and reduce the number of negative reviews. Irrespective of your brand’s genre, online reputation management is a must, something that you cannot ignore.

Why is online reputation so necessary for brands?

Defining online reputation., ORM involves marketing positive content about your brand on online channels and managing contravening content. 

Let’s understand it with an example. 

How do you buy products online?

Well, you Google the product online, research about it a little bit, read as many reviews as you can, browse through the latest product updates, review the stars achieved by a product, assess its approval on social media, and then buy it. Also, you will keep a note of all the top influencers endorsing the product. 

This process repeats itself for all those billions of customers investing in anything new, including entertainment, education, lifestyle, beauty, technology, and more. 

Now think about what would happen if the comment box about your product floods with negative comments! 

Will anyone like to buy it?

Obviously, they won’t. It means your online reputation did not just cost you sales and revenue, but the trust of your consumers and a fruitful relationship you could have built with them if only you monitored what’s being said about your brand online. 

That is the real importance of online reputation management. 

Amiable ORM tactics translate to a boost in sales, ROI, revenue and constructs a trustworthy relationship with your customers. 

ORM provides more than brands can ever ask for! 

Does your brand need Online Reputation Management tools?

It is no wonder that everyone uses the internet to access, review, and share information. More so, over 86% of consumers read reviews about a business. Another 84% trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. And lastly, 89% of consumers read your response to reviews, especially negative ones. 

Long story short, online reputation management is more of a necessity than a luxury. And the only way you can ease the process is by utilizing the various online reputation management tools available and leverage them to achieve better stardom in the realms of online business. 

Coming back to the question, do you really need online reputation management tools?

On average, thousands of customers interact with your brand, and hundreds of them post reviews online. More importantly, if you are into the e-commerce business, then the risk is even higher. That said, it is impossible to respond to every review online, even if you hire an online reputation management company. 

Enter online reputation management tools! 

They not only alert you about negative reviews but monitor the sentiment around your brand, report what a customer’s persona is, and encourage positive messages. Moreover, such tools emphasize positive content about your brand online and resolve negative ones. 

The top online reputation management tools for e-commerce brands 

Now that you’re clear about the various benefits of online reputation management., let’s see which tools can help you facilitate and automate e-commerce operations. 

Awario:

If you’ve been googling the top online reputation management tools, you might have come across several articles crowning Awario as the best contender. The truth is, it is one of the most reliable ORM tools in the market, hence its popularity and position. 

Quite precisely, Awario is a social listening tool that makes it easy for you to manage your online reputation. The platform performs sentiment analysis, breaking down every review into a positive, negative, and neutral. It also analyzes how the sentiment changes over time and what points do you need to address. And then, of course, you get all complaints, questions, reviews, listings, and blog posts in one place. More so, it assists you with copyright infringement and people stealing your content. 

Awario also alerts you about mentions like compliments, questions, complaints, and any future social media crisis. It helps you process all the necessary data trends, collaborate with the biggest influencers, and improve brand value. Employing this tool, brands can observe their online reputation, strategize the best marketing campaigns, sport social media crisis, and attend to negative reviews diligently, in turn, drive more conversions, sales, and revenue. 

On the other hand, Awario helps you with competitor analysis., allowing you to learn from their mistakes. You can even compare brand mentions in terms of sentiment, reach, likes, comments, etc., and conclude whether you’re winning or losing the race. 

Reputology:

Another online reputation management maestro., Reputology is a perfect investment for small businesses who wish to collect all their reviews from Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc., in one place. Reputology tracks your reviews, feedbacks, comments, etc., and accumulates them on one dashboard. Since it is local-specific, this tool works wonders for local businesses irrespective of their business genre. It also allows a multi-location enterprise to segregate data as per their location and keep it in the respective dashboards. Therefore, brands can figure out which place does better than the other and how to improve your brand’s overall reputation across all channels. 

You can reply to all the reviews from this platform, addressing negative reviews as and when they come. Reputology sends notifications whenever there is a new review. Moreover, like Awario, it also performs sentiment analysis of the unstructured data collected from feedbacks to derive actionable results. 

The best feature of this tool is its integration with Hootsuite. It allows the monitoring and management of all reviews under the same roof, making online reputation management super easy. 

Mention:

Mention isn’t just any other social media monitoring tool. It allows brands to monitor over 1 billion sources daily, including social media, forums, blogs, comments, brand mentions, and the rest of the web. That means Mention lets you know about people all around the world talking about your brand. It allows brands to find their mentions on the online channel easily. You can even use Boolean alerts to market research more about the brand, competitors, and customers. 

Through this tool, you can observe your online reputation on the dashboard at any time. The tool email you when there is a spike in brand mentions or any review that needs urgent attention. You can customize alerts and adjust your tactics to derive more success and fewer failed campaigns. Its easy-to-use interface keeps you on your toes when someone specifics your name, image, or target keywords.  

Then again, there are different plans available to help you review your brand’s online image on the Web, Desktop, iPhone, or Android. 

The Brand Grader:

If you want to manage, monitor, and grow your online reputation, then Brand Grader is one tool that can help you with all the information you need to know about your brand’s performance. It is pretty easy and straightforward to use. All you have to do is enter the name of your brand and its email id, and The Brand Grader will send you a report concerning its reputation. 

This report covers details about the last seven days. It includes:

• A list of blogs and sites that talked about your brand 
• The top digital, online, and social sources remarks
• What customers perceive about the brand post analyzing positive and negative reviews 
• Mentions garnered on websites, blogs, forums, and social media channels 
• The top location of your customers 
• The follower count on several social media platforms 

The best part about this tool is that it was build using Mention. Hence, it uses the database to find conversations around your brand. Moreover, its free availability attracts more marketers.

SimilarWeb:

It offers web analytics services to businesses. This tool provides you with competition analysis, website traffic volumes, referral sources, keyword analysis, keyword demographics, time on site, bounce rate, page views, and other features. 

Its comprehensive reports offer a wealth of insights about your website: the digital face of your business. 

The best aspect of this online reputation management tool is its detailed comparison with competitor sites. It predicts insights about the industry and how well your brand is respected within the niche. 

SimilarWeb extrapolates data from a web user panel that allows them to monitor their online activity, driving direct observations for website traffic. Moreover, in 2019, it claimed to horde the world’s bulkiest panel consisting of a hundred million users. 

Review Trackers:

It does what its name implies. Review Trackers track customer reviews across sites, sources, and all other areas of the web. The platforms include hundreds of review sites like Google Reviews, Facebook, TripAdvisor, Instagram, Grubhub, Foursquare, etc. This tool gathers reviews from all platforms on the dashboard, and then you can select which ones to reply to and which ones to leave. 

Moreover, it sends a corresponding report via email, keeping you up-to-date with all the brand mentions and reviews. The tool analyzes for positive and negative keywords in reviews, detailing compliments and complaints. 

ReviewTrackers also allow to perform competitor analysis and understand their strongholds and weaknesses. You can even compare your brand with its enemies through competitor analysis. With this tool, you can manage your e-commerce reputation from every location, collect business reviews from popular sites, gain deep insights about customer experience, and employ reviews as weapons. 

Buzzsumo:

Different than the other tool listed, it provides insights into the brand content trends across social media platforms, news articles, and blogs. That means you can drain the web for any content displayed with the search term. You can even analyze why a content piece is so popular and how content can go viral. 

Buzzsumo details engagement rates with each search result as well. Some popular searches cover date, B2B publishers, country, language, domain, content-type, publisher, word count, etc. You can calculate these engagement figures for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and Pinterest.

The tool displays the total links received by each search term. 

In simpler words, Buzzsumo is more about content analysis, detailing about engagement garnered by each article. Its best aspect is customized alert creation for tracking brand mentions, competitor mentions, content, keyword mentions, backlinks included, and more. You can even set a minimum engagement value to receive an alert and how often you want to receive these alerts. 

Conclusion

There are more than a hundred online reputation management tools in the market. But these are the best amongst the lot. E-commerce enterprises share borders with bad reviews, cart abandonment, losing customer interests, competitors, and delivery-related issues. That is why you must invest in online reputation management; to move past these complaints, address issues, impress customers, and facilitate positive brand mentions. 

Have you employed any online reputation management tool for your business? Do let us know in the comment section below. 

The post Top 7 Online Reputation Management (ORM) Tools for E-commerce Companies appeared first on Cyfuture Blog.

Now, the prevalent question is, ‘Why Augmented Reality is the next big thing for the online shopping market, and how can it better customer engagement and conversion ratios?’

For answering it, you need to first understand why customers prefer shopping online.

Figure 1: The following shows the reasons why consumers like shopping online instead of brick and mortar stores. The main points can be constituted to the reasons like convenience, price-related, ease of selection, free shipping, only option to buy the product, and push away from the offline stores. 

Now, that you know that most of the customer prefer buying products online, augmented reality in retail will make the buying expedition more user-centric, transforming mobile shopping, by bringing products to life, with the help of 3D models that you can size up, see how they look in a particular space, examine from all the angles, and even judge concerning the environment around you. 

AR is an integral part of the many modern industry segments including medicine, transportation, education, supply chain, and marketing, to name a few. Even tech giants like Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore have employed the usage of AR tech in their projects. 

In the case of the online retail market, 75% of consumers expect brands to offer platforms with augmented reality experience. 

Still not sure about incorporating augmented reality shopping arcade for your consumers? Read along! 

As per a customer online experience survey, the following data has been tabulated. 

• 72% of customers buy products they did not intend to before of Augmented Reality.
• 71% of the customers shopped more products when using AR. 
• 61% of shoppers look for retailers who offer them AR-based experiences. 
• 55% of shoppers believe that Augmented Reality shopping is fun. 
• 40% of shoppers are ready to pay more for the product when tested by AR. 

Customer buying patterns are forever changing. Augmented Reality shopping has the potential to unlock a large portion of the market. With customers getting a 3D representation of the products, more and more people are trusting AR-based stores. For brands who take advantage of the accelerating power of Augmented Reality in Retail will be able to satisfy customers for a longer duration. Right from home furnishing to furniture, jewelry, and beauty retailers, most of the brands have discovered the power of AR in improving customer adoption rates.

The Global AR Market Growth: A Study

Augmented Reality shopping can be referred to as the next level of online buyinh, letting customers explore products, to interact better with products and brands. In the previous decades, retailers have searched out domains related to print advertising, in-store marketing, and social media channels, but now it’s time to indulge in a comprehensive consumer experience via Augmented Reality.  

Figure 3: The following shows the AR market amounted to a forecast of 18.8 billion dollars by 2020. This market will only increase drastically in the years to come. Consumer spending is the biggest portion contributing to the AR/VR market worldwide. The market will grow with a CAGR of 85.2% through 21%.

Figure 4: According to consumers, the following are the reasons state why shoppers prefer AR features for online shopping. Most of the users like to trace the 3D models before buying any new furniture, shoes, or clothes. As for retailers, more than 63% of brands plan on using Augmented Reality Shopping in the coming two years. Furthermore, AR technology gives confidence to 52% of retailers, to address customers better with their products. 

Benefits of Augmented Reality Shopping in the Customer Buying Experience

AR is one of the popular shopping buying trends, helping customers to gain an interactive experience of products in the real-world environment through computer-generated information. Augmented Reality shopping for groceries, furniture, and clothes is so much trending because of the following benefits.

It Helps in Enhancing Customer Experience

Through AR, customers can try the products before buying them. It’s like a personalized experience for customers, helping them to try on different variations of the products. Once customers are satisfied with the selection, then they can further go for delivery. It is convenient for shoppers, letting them make frequent and confident purchases. It serves as an added benefit for online shopping, and retailers offering such services are likely to enjoy benefits from customer satisfaction and brand reputation.

Reduces the Need for in-Store Visits

 The number of online shoppers is drastically increasing all around the world. With more and more customers going online for purchasing of goods and products, AR facilitates retail shops to cater to the needs of their customers online. AR serves as an online staff member for the retailers, to try out different products without any in-store assistance.

AR Aids in Online Marketing

AR makes purchasing products online fun and entertaining for shoppers. According to online marketing experts, AR helps in increasing brand engagement, which leads to increased sales and revenue generation. Through AR apps, people can scan through the online inventories and get recommendations for different products as well. This makes marketing easier for brands while providing an amiable shopping experience to the customers as well. Also, since AR is a very intelligent technology, it provides shoppers with in-depth information about different products, and the pros and cons of buying it as well.

Reducing Cart Abandonment Rate and Returns

Cart abandonment rates refer to shoppers not going through purchases after adding products to their carts. Since AR makes shopping, a fun expedition for shoppers, it reduces cart abandonment rates by a very high margin. Furthermore, as the customers are already visualizing the look of a product through AR’s virtual representation of products in 3D, users will indulge in purchases that are smart and reliable with their surroundings, while judging specifications like the right product sizes and colors. This also decreases the returns on online purchases.

 Shoppers can Judge Product Quality in Their Home

Through Augmented Reality shopping, users can view items in a 360-degree environment, unlike the traditional 2D visuals. AR powers life into products, bringing them to reality. With the help of AR stores, brick and mortar stores can keep running their business. Through Augmented Reality in Retail, physical stores can let their customers have an in-store kind experience. This gives rise to brand trust and reputation as well.

How Retailers can Benefit from Augmented Reality Shopping

AR technology is becoming a prominent part of online marketing, engaging more customers, improving conversion rates, and delivering an amazing shopping experience. More and more brands are trying to make AR services available for their consumers, to meet the needs and demands of the market. Since this new technology is doing great in the retail market, marketers are considering ways to implement it as a part of their marketing strategies.

AR is just another tool, to drive sales, and enhance brand value through mobile devices. Therefore, it is going to be a necessary part of the online sales, and marketing tactics of many brands in the coming years.

Figure 6: The following shows the time duration in which consumers will adopt AR experiences while shopping online. For shoppers, it will take 3-4 years to adopt AR into their online shopping spree.

Right from virtually trying 3D products at home, to looking at 3D products at home, and virtual trying rooms, AR is everywhere in the retail business. Big brands like Google, Apple, ASOS, Gucci, Toyota, Ikea Palace, Dulux, Sephora, Modiface on Amazon, Adidas, and YouTube Beauty-Try-On have already started advertisement campaigns using AR, to stand out of the competition, and give value to their customers through their products. 

Moreover, around 60% of shoppers lookup for product information and prices with their mobile phones in AR-powered stores. 

For example, Topshop partnered with AR Door and used Kinect Motion-sensing technology to create a virtual trying room for customers in their Moscow store. All shoppers had to do was stand in front of the camera, and customers can see how apparels look on them without physically trying out anything. 

Lacoste AR app allows shoppers to virtually try on shoes before buying any pair. This strategy reportedly helped them to interact with 300,00 shoppers. 

Sephora created a Virtual Artist App with Modiface to let women try makeup on their faces with their phone’s camera before buying it. 

Furthermore, many furniture shops allow consumers to try a piece of furniture in their homes before buying it. 

So, why is Augmented Reality in Retail so famous?

Augmented Reality aids in creating memorable customer experiences, boast higher engagement rates, increase sales, and lower customer entry barriers. Brands opting for Augmented Reality Shopping are said to have a forward approach. 

In simpler terms, Augmented Reality is the next big tech trend for online shopping. 

The post Augmented Reality in Retail: Transforming Online Shopping Experience for Customers appeared first on Cyfuture Blog.

This practice of offering goods at different prices or dynamic pricing has become commonplace in e-commerce today. While Amazon is hailed as the leader and pioneer in e-commerce dynamic pricing space, other players are slowly catching up.

Dynamic pricing has allowed the likes of Amazon to maximize their profit margins by up to 25%.

So, what is dynamic pricing all about, how does it work and how has Amazon dynamic pricing helped the e-commerce giant achieve the undisputed market leader it is today?

We will cover all this and more in our blog. So, let’s begin.

What is Dynamic Pricing?

Dynamic pricing is a pricing strategy wherein the prices of products are changed in response to real-time changes in demand and supply. Different factors come into play in a dynamic pricing model: demand, supply, prices of competitors, prices of subsidiary products, etc. Prices can even change from one customer to another depending on their purchasing habits.

Dynamic pricing helps e-commerce players like Amazon and Walmart adopt a flexible and personalized approach in pricing products while letting them stay competitive.

How does Dynamic Pricing Benefit E-commerce players?

1) Dynamic Pricing Maximizes Profit

Dynamic pricing lets an e-commerce player maximize profits for each customer. Now, let’s say they have a product for which the initial demand is low. If they want to finish the stock for this product, they can lower the product price and trigger demand for the product. This way, they can earn additional revenue on a product.

On the contrary, if the demand for a product shoots up during a season, say sunscreen during summers, they can raise the price and sell the product at higher margins without affecting sales volume.

2) Dynamic Pricing Boosts Demand

Not all products of any e-retailer sell equally well. There are times when they need to clear their inventory. Common examples include stock of woolen clothing during spring and stock of swimwear during autumn. Such products can neither be sold at original prices (because no one would buy them at those prices) nor at very low prices.

With dynamic pricing models, e-retailers can analyze inventory levels, market trends and competitor prices to optimally price any such product.

3) Dynamic Pricing Beats Competition

Prices in e-commerce move fast. More often than not, customers check multiple websites before making a purchase. If you don’t offer the best price, chances are your competition will beat you on many prices. With dynamic pricing, retailers can stay acquainted with competitor prices and other pricing trends and automatically incorporate these into new pricing.

4) Dynamic Pricing Offers Insights into Consumer Behavior

Dynamic pricing models allow you to calculate the demand curve for each customer. This curve indicates the minimum and maximum price a user is willing to pay for a specific product. Several data points go into making a demand curve. With so much information at their fingertips, sellers can study consumer behavior closely and price their product accordingly.

Dynamic pricing, however, poses certain risks that e-retailers need to beware of:

1) Dynamic Pricing can Alienate Customers

Customers don’t like when they pay a higher price than other people for the same product or service. Such a pricing strategy can leave customers dissatisfied, resulting in unsavory reviews or complaints. Some of them may even ask for a refund.

Regular shoppers may get offended when they come to know that the seller is giving discounts to infrequent shoppers who take their time before checking out.

2) Dynamic Pricing can Breed Price Wars

Dynamic pricing can lead to a situation where one e-retailer drops the price of a product, which causes its competitor to lower it further. This process continues until these businesses reach a point where they cannot sustain themselves at the artificially reduced price.

For this reason, many retailers look at dynamic pricing with skepticism.

How does Dynamic Pricing Work?

Now that we have discussed the pros and cons of dynamic pricing, let us elaborate on how the entire thing works.

Dynamic prices are determined using self-improving machine learning algorithms that take into consideration a wide array of factors to determine the best price for a specific customer at a specific point of time.

Out of the many different variables that are using to decide the price, the major ones include:

• Supply: This can include current inventory levels, current cost and future cost predictions.
• Demand
• Customer Data: This can include factors like:
  • User Demographics: Age, gender, profession, income levels, current location
  • Device-Specific Information: Device (desktop, laptop, mobile, tablet) used to browse/purchase products.
  • Behavioral Data: Customer’s purchasing history, spending data.
• Prices of Competitors
• Prices of Substitute Products

Because dynamic pricing is inherently complex, different modules can be used over different stages of the life cycle of any product (see chart below). These modules include:

Long-Tail Module: This module allows an e-retailer to set the introductory price for a product with little or no historical data. The module uses attributes to match such products with those having rich historical data.

Elasticity Module: This module uses a range of factors including seasonality, cannibalization, and competitive moves to determine how the price of a product affects demand.

Key-Value Items (KVI) Module: Key-value items are popular products whose prices consumers tend to remember more than other products (grocery items for instance).

KVI module determines how much each product impacts user price perception by taking into account actual user data. The module ensures that the products strongly impacting users’ price perception are appropriately priced.

Competitive-Response Module: This module takes into account real-time pricing data from competitors and accordingly suggests adjustments to the product price.

Omni-Channel Module: This module co-ordinates prices between the offline and online channels of a retailer.

                             Image Courtesy: McKinsey & Company

Though an ideal pricing solution should include all five modules, e-retailers can begin with just the KVI and competitive-response module to optimally price their products and then introduce the remaining modules over time.

The Case of Amazon: The Pioneer in E-commerce Dynamic Pricing

Dynamic pricing, once heard of in the airline and hotel industry, is now gaining a foothold in the e-commerce space. Retail behemoth Amazon has been considered a pioneer of sorts in e-commerce dynamic pricing.

If statistics are to be believed, Amazon changes its product prices 2.5 million times daily which means the price of a product changes every 10 minutes on an average. This is 50 times more than Walmart!

This frequency of price changes sometimes irks customers who see a drop in price right after they have made a purchase. But this strategy has helped the e-retailer stay competitive and bolster its earnings on a year-on-year basis (see chart below).

The price-tracking website Camelcamelcamel.com checks prices of some of Amazon’s products 3 to 4 times a day. Camelcamelcamel’s founder Daniel Green says,

“We wish we could do hourly price checks, but we’re monitoring 50 million products. This is the best we can do.”

Amazon sells some of its products at a loss. In such cases, the loss is covered through cross-selling, up-selling or enticing new customers with below-average prices.

These newly-converted customers may not purchase a profitable product right away but keep on making repeat purchases and become loyal customers in due course, all thanks to the user experience they enjoy on Amazon.

Amazon dynamic pricing has become a competitive tool: the retailer beats its competitors on popular products while raising the price of uncommon, less-frequently purchased products. So, when customers compare the prices of common items, they find them to be the cheapest on Amazon and form the perception that Amazon has the best prices overall.

Such customers start purchasing frequently from Amazon and end up paying high prices for other items they purchase during their customer journey.

Wrapping it up

In today’s fiercely competitive online marketplace when customers can check the prices of any and every product out there, an effective pricing strategy is a must for any online retailer.

Advances in technology and availability of data storage and processing techniques have allowed the likes of Amazon and Walmart to respond to the ever-changing dynamics of demand and supply and price their products optimally, all while keeping their customers satisfied. So, dynamic pricing is here to stay and expected to get more mainstream in the days to come.

Need more such articles? Please let us know in the comment section below. Thanks for reading.

The post The Dynamic Pricing in E-commerce: Everything you need to know? appeared first on Cyfuture Blog.

Figure 1: The following graph shows the market size of the retail stores in India (in USD billion). The retail stores in India occupy 10% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and approximately 8% of the employment. It is also the fifth-largest retail destination around the globe. 

Figure 2: The following shows the e-commerce market and the Online retail market in India. The retail industry in India reached USD 950 billion in 2018, with a CAGR of 13%. It is expected to reach USD 1.1 trillion by 2020. Furthermore, the revenue of the offline retailers, better known as the brick and mortar stores, is expected to increase by USD 1.39-2.77 billion in FY20. 

Figure 3: The following figure shows the segment-wise division of the Indian retail market. The e-commerce segment consists of all the online stores and sites hosting such services. With India’s current internet penetration rate of 30-40%, it is said that this sector will boom in the coming years. Revenue generated from the online retail stores is expected to grow to USD 60 billion by 2020. 

Organized retail consists of sub-divisions like food, groceries, consumer durables, health and entertainment, beauty and personal care, apparel and footwear, jewellery and accessories, home décor and furnishings, and others. 

Unorganized retail consists of a traditional form of retail mostly situated near the residential areas. These are constituted as Kirana shops, general stores, pan shops, and other small retail outlets. 

FDI in Retail Sector in India Policy Amendments to Create More Opportunities for Brands in India

Most economists believe that the changes in the policies of FDI in retail sector in India will be highly opportunistic for the growth of the retail market, both online and offline, and they are probably right. The issues related to logistics and supply-chain prevalent since the last decade have been improved substantially, and that is a huge advantage for the Indian audiences. Modern retails are willing to invest, mostly because of the relaxed policies of FDI in retail in India.

But the real question that still pertains is, ‘Are the policies of FDI in retail good for Indian growth and its overall economy?’ 

Numerous factors have played a role in improving the shape of the retail sector in India. Some of them can be related to the advent of digitalization, the rising number of consumers, urbanization, easy penetration of the internet, and the rapidly changing lifestyle of the customers in India. The consumption pattern has changed drastically for the Indian audiences. Some say that a major role is played by the relaxed FDI in retail sector in India. This is why the retail sector is booming with such numbers, expected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2020.

Figure 4: The following shows the FDI Confidence 2016. India is said to be the fastest-growing retail market in the world. Indian retail sector is predicted to grow with a CAGR of 13%, reaching USD 950 billion in 2018. Furthermore, India is ranked amongst the top developed nations in the FDI Confidence Index. 

What Does FDI in Retail Sector in India Mean?

Foreign Direct Investment is defined as a type of investment made by any country other than the home country. This investment can be of any form and for any type of product like for production facilities, retailing, or any other venture. However, the objective of this investment should be of long-term interest in the home country. There are various regions as to why FDI in retail in India is trending. It could be due to cheap labor, an increase in the number of purchasers, availability of cheap or abundant raw materials, tax privileges, better brand endorsement, etc.

As far as the FDI in retail sector in India is concerned, 100% FDI is allowed in single-brand retailing, but only 51% is allowed in multi-brand retailing. 

If you are still confused about whether FDI in retail is good for India or not, then you need to understand that FDI is the reason why consumerism is increasing in India. After the norms for FDI in retail in India were relaxed, more and more companies can invest in the retail market of India. This has also brought a change in the taste and the preference of the consumers in the country. Changes in the FDI policies in India have attracted many international retailers, to prosper their consumer base in the second-most populous country in the world. 

Figure 5: The following shows the inbound sources for FDI in retail sector in India. Indeed, India is all set to be included in the top 20 global FDI sources by 2021, however, its inward FDI is not as successful as the outbound FDI. According to the reports, the inbound FDI rose to 6% in 2018 to $42 billion, however, the government data shows the inbound equity investments declined for the first time in six years in FY 19. 

After the relaxed policies of FDI in retail sector in India, 10 foreign single-brand retailers started operations. One of the companies that had sought the government’s permission for setting up single-brand establishments is the Japanese casual wear brand, Uniqlo. The Modi-led government had been trying hard to pitch the Indian retail market to foreign investors.

Other important changes done for FDI in retail in India include rules like 30% local sourcing being relaxed for the first five years, for companies coming under single-brand retail trading.

What are the Market Drivers for the FDI in Retail in India?

FDI in retail sector in India is considered to be the major catalyst for promoting sustainable development in India. Because of the relaxed policies, foreign brands can now invest in the Indian market to generate employment for the ever-increasing population of the country, raise productivity, increase incomes, enhance exports, and play a part in the long-term economic stability of India.

If FDI in retail is good for India, then what are its demand drivers? Why will foreign brands open their franchise in India? The following are what attracts foreign brands to sell their good in the Indian market that too with Indian manufacturers and raw materials.

1. Demographic advantage

The growing Indian population consists of earning individuals. This is the major reason why global brands are targeting the Indian audience. Considering the huge Indian population with a median age of 28.1 years, a boost in the retail sector of India is expected.

Figure 6: The following shows the median age of India along with some of the developed nations. As 25 years, is considered to be the most spending age group, India’s median age of 28.1 is ideal for foreign brands looking for a purchasing consumer base. 

2. Accelerating Urbanization

The transition from rural to urban areas has been highly promising for the Indian retail market. For the relaxed FDI in retail sector in India to flourish, there must be an organized segment who can be easily targeted.

3. Rising income levels

The Indian economy has progressed rapidly. India’s per capita GDP has gone up to INR 142,179, at a CAGR value of 9.7% in FY19. This growth in the country’s per capita GDP is the reason why FDI in retail in India is proliferating. The disposable income of the Indian population has increased, and this is the main source driving the country’s consumption.

Figure 7:  The following shows the per capita GDP of India from FY-15 to FY-19. This rise in disposable income is one of the reasons why FDI in retail in India is booming in India. 

4. A rise in plastic money and the availability of credit

The rise in the number of transactions through debit cards and credit cards and the availability of digital payment options are elements fueling the demand in the retail sector. With more and more retailers accepting such modes of payment, it is easier for consumers to indulge in more buying patterns. The idea of cashback on credit and debit cards is also why the Indian customers like carrying cards instead of cash. Furthermore, credit card transactions rose by CAGR of 30%, and debit card transactions increased by a CAGR of 16% from FY15 to FY19.

Figure 8: The following shows an increase in both the credit card and debit card transactions over the years.

5. The changing patterns of consumerism

The needs and demands of the Indian populace are widespread. Major purchases are categorized in food and non-alcoholic beverages, clothing and footwear, and discretionary needs. Discretionary needs include personal care products, transport, and recreation. This shift in the buying patterns, to more discretionary and less of food and non-alcoholic, is a reason why more and more brands are targeting similar segments.

Figure 9: The following shows a shift in the consumer buying behavior from food and non-alcoholic beverages to discretionary needs.

How Well Does the e-commerce Market Grow in the FDI in Retail in India?

The online shopping segment is expanding in the country every minute. With the advancements in the quality of the internet, adoption of smartphones, payment accessibility, secure payment portals, and changing consumer behavior, many e-commerce players are going to undergo the biggest revolution in the retail industry. It won’t be wrong to say that all the top foreign brands established their market in India through online portals.

According to IBEF, by 2021, traditional retail will hold 75%, organized retail will hold 18%, and e-commerce retail will reach 7%, of the total retail market share. 

E-commerce in India is growing at a rate of 51%, the highest in the world, and is expected to achieve a cap of USD 200 billion, by 2026. Online retail has a very disruptive approach to the market. Factors like cash on delivery, improved supply chain, increasing internet penetration, rising number of online shoppers, availability of deals and cashback, increase in the adoption and use of smartphones, and government initiatives like Digital India are the reasons contributing to the growth of the e-commerce market in India.

The post FDI in the retail sector in India: How foreign retailers impacting employability status appeared first on Cyfuture Blog.

Figure 1: The following shows the online Indian retail market division. The highest market share is acquired by Flipkart (32%), followed by Amazon (31%). Amazon and Flipkart are fighting a very staunch e-commerce battle, trying to acquire the maximum market share. According to a report, it is said that India will be responsible for generating a gross sale of $32 billion by 2023 for Amazon. 

How Amazon Grew its Billion-Dollar Empire in India: The Chai Cart story

It is said that Amazon always wanted to grow its online retail market in India. Moreover, every global market wants to target the second-most populous country in the world, a powerhouse of e-commerce revenue when it comes to the online market. Amazon store in India tried to tap into the market with both merits and demerits at its end.

The merits were a very young populace, more than 65% of the population under the age of 35, and cell phone prominence uprising in the country with more than 80% ownership. The demerits included, more than 67% of the population lies in the rural regions of the country, undeveloped infrastructure, only 35% of the Indian population having access to the internet, and business operations running only with cash and not credit cards or online payments.

The situation was further worsened by the rigid FDI policy that restricted any foreign seller from selling their goods directly to the consumers online. That meant that for Amazon store in India to flourish successfully in the Indian market, they will have to act like a third-party seller that too for Indian-made products. All Amazon retail store in India needed was an innovative business model that could work for both the Indian audiences and the company as well.

India has many small manufacturers and sellers, and when Amazon decided to expand in the market, there were probably fewer manufacturers who thought of going online for selling their goods. This meant that the growing an e-commerce store in India will be a tedious, complex, and time-consuming task. The conditions were made impenetrable for Amazon by India’s cash economy.

Figure 2:  The following graph shows the net revenue of Amazon’s e-commerce services from 2010-2019. The company currently has a net value of USD 280 billion. However, most of the revenue sources of Amazon was earned from North America and Canada, and around 75 billion US dollars were earned internationally. 

To sow the seed of their business in India, they first went on a supplier hunt, convincing every small supplier to be their trustworthy partner, to help them earn revenue through their platform. A master-stroke by Jeff Bezos was their concept of Amazon Chai Cart, serving refreshments to small business owners, in the form of chai and snacks, navigating throughout the city streets, while teaching them the essence of e-commerce marketing, and how an Online India is not just a concept, but reality as well. According to a report, the Chai Cart travelled more than 9400 miles across 31 cities in India, engaging with more than 10,000 sellers. 

Once they had the sellers in their arcade, now they moved to the next segment, the delivery fulfillment. In the US, Amazon fulfilled its orders through the FBA rules. The sellers sent the products to the Amazon centers, and the e-commerce-giant distributed it further to the customers. Amazon started with the same concept in India as well. To date, there are more than two dozen warehouses of Amazon in India. For delivery, they partnered with delivery experts like India Post and Blue Dart. They also started with its own Amazon Transportation Services, for last-minute deliveries.

Figure 3: Amazon’s business is segmented into North America, International, and AWS. The online stores generated USD 123 billion in sales, in 2018, or 52.8% of net sales. The physical stores generated USD 17.2 billion or 7.4% of net sales. North America accounts for most of the sales for Amazon. 

However, since the last 3 years, Amazon is losing a lot in its international business. In 2018 alone, it lost 65.9 billion in international sales.

What Amazon did was establish trust with the small sellers, and listed them as their delivery partners. This arrangement is the reason why Amazon store in India was able to reinvent the culture of a cashless and online payment economy in a country where every transaction happened in cash. With releasing 10,000 EVs in India for the delivery of their products, it is now funding an electric-equipped India too.

Why is the Indian Market of So Much Importance for Amazon?

According to a report, it is said that the estimated size of India’s e-commerce market in 2019-20 will be 103 billion. This means that e-commerce stores stand an opportunity to grow with the growing population. It is also said that India will be the biggest market for Amazon, outside the US, accounting for one-fifth of international sales, by 2025. Furthermore, the overall growth of the market is 43.5 billion, with a sales growth of 35%. 

The biggest question that arises over here is, why is the Indian market so much important for Amazon? Is it the booming population, stable economic growth, or the availability of cheap resources and good profits?

Since the launch of Amazon store in India, it has invested 10 billion into the e-commerce market. India will witness the Jeff Bezos-led company investing more dollars, especially for its Prime membership growth, to increase member engagement. Amazon retail store, currently has a blank cheque approach towards India, owing to the immense growth opportunities due to high-speed internet and increasing adoption of smartphones. 

The possible reasons as to why Amazon wants to invest in their e-commerce market in India, despite registering cumulative losses of over 7000 crores across their various units in 2018-19 are the statistical figures that predict the domestic e-commerce market in India will grow to 102 billion, by 2020.

Figure 4: The Indian market is driven by factors like the rise of the online shoppers, the increasing number of mobile internet users, evolution of new payment solutions, partnerships among the local companies, adoption of goods and service tax (GST), and the idea of getting 5G into India. Furthermore, the rise of middle-class consumers and changing shopping habits are going to provide Amazon store in India, the leverage it needs. 

Amazon India vs Flipkart: A battle between a Glocal and local brand

In 2018, Walmart bought $16 billion stakes in Flipkart Online Services Ltd, an e-commerce brand acquiring 31.9% of the market share. The point is Flipkart might win the Indian market, but Amazon retail store is a global brand, a reputation that helped it to acquire the Indian market by the second-largest market share.

Both, Amazon India and Flipkart have outstanding sales records, awesome discounts, and spectacular business tactics. Collectively, Amazon and Flipkart own 60% of the online retail market in India. Frankly, there is no competitor, foreign or local, that can knock any of the two companies. Now that Flipkart is owned majorly by Walmart, Reliance threatening to enter the online retail market race, and Amazon trying hard to capture the attention of the budding smartphone users, how well will the e-commerce players portray a positive brand value while ensuring customer trust, is going be a spectacle.

Figure 5: The following graph shows the Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) of both Amazon and Flipkart. Amazon stood as a clear leader for gross sales in India, with a whopping value of $7.5 billion. Flipkart, on the other hand, stood at $6.2 billion. 

As per Barclays, both Amazon and Flipkart are established leaders in the Indian e-commerce market and will grow two-fold to $40-45 billion by 2020. 

If the statistics related to the growth of the two e-commerce channels are to be believed, Amazon grew by 82% in FY18, whereas Flipkart stood at 47%. Flipkart might lead the market in terms of revenue, however, Amazon is not very far behind. Amazon has already made the delivery of groceries, affordable and easily deliverable for Indian households, and it entering the online food market will tap the nerve of the Indian customers. Once Amazon retail store earns a hold of the online food market, there is no turning back for the Bezos-led company. Other Amazon ventures like Amazon Web Services earned a revenue of $192 million in FY18, and Amazon Pay saw growth by 53 times, grossing a total of $61 million in FY18. 

Amazon in India: What Lies Ahead?

The Indian economic industry has billion-dollar potential. It is undergoing exponential growth, and by 2023, it is going to be an international market for Amazon, generating a gross sale of $32 billion. It just seems to be fair enough for big brands like Walmart and Amazon, to apply their tactics to this market and drive revenue growth. 

According to a report, it is said that India’s e-commerce sales will be the second-fastest in the top 10 APAC countries, with a CAGR of 26%. Now when India is booming its smartphone adoption, penetrating this gold-plated online market is expected. India’s e-commerce penetration will likely reach 9.5% in 2023, and investing in such a market will reap benefits for all the players.

Bezos has already invested 4400 crores in its various units in India. With Amazon store in India launching Prime membership, Amazon Echo, Prime Now, and AWS it seems like Jeff Bezos will make India, Amazon’s second home, after North America. It is also said that Amazon retail store is very soon going to enter the food delivery market, leaving top players like Swiggy and Zomato in the dust. Its promise to roll-out 10,000 EVs in India, by 2025, is going to accelerate its adoption in the household, and earn the trust of the Indian government as well. It will also help the Indian government to increase the adoption of EVs in the Indian market. 

The post Amazon Store in India: How a global brand targeted the online Indian market appeared first on Cyfuture Blog.

The new evolved digitized world has increased the expectation of users. It is evident, though!!

Who does not want to get the best things out-of-the-box?

We all want to!!

So, to walk concurrently, it becomes essential for the business to include beneficial practices.  The basic yet powerful element for online businesses is to get an engaging eCommerce store. 

We all are aware of the fact that no one entertains slow websites for more than 3 seconds. Approximately 40% of the users or shoppers abandon the website that takes more than usual time.

Nowadays, commencing an online store is not a fantasy. Because of exceptional and fully-functional features, WordPress is astonishing us every day. And, it has made it such an easy task to create an online eCommerce store with WooCommerce.

WooCommerce stores are known for the integration of different tools, such as real-time inventory, live chat, personalization, etc. But, one thing to consider is that if it is not executed properly, then it can give disastrous results. It can kill your website loading time and can make it non-optimized.

So, when you have a slower WooCommerce store, then you will face a higher abandonment rate and less revenue. Besides, it will eliminate your website from the list of SERPs.

Hence, to drive more sales and to thrive, your WooCommerce store has to be faster enough. It is the only factor that can decide your business fate.

Considering this, we have outlined the five best ways to optimize the WooCommerce store.  We assure you that your speed bumps will surely get eliminated that give rise to the best shopper experience.

Improve your WooCommerce Store Performance with 5 Tips

1. Increase WordPress Memory Limit

The default memory size of WordPress is 32 MB, and if, in any case, it gets exceeded, then an error message is displayed. Below, we have mentioned the steps revealing how you can configure this.

Check out:

Edit the Wp-config. php File

• Access the wp-config.php from the WordPress directory
• Locate the line; ‘/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */”. It could be at the end of the file.
• Add the line “define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’)” above the line mentioned above
• Save the changes

Edit the PHP.ini

• Change the line in PHP.ini if you can open the PHP.ini file.
• Check the memory limit- if it is showing 64M, then choose the 256 M: memory_limit 64M
• // The max. the memory amount of the script is 64MB.

Edit your .htaccess File

On the contrary, if you cannot open the PHP.ini file, then, add this to .htaccess, file: php_value memory_limit 256M

2. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

The other factor that can optimize your WooCommerce website is CDN.  It caches (or stores) the copies of the eCommerce website on the data centers across the sphere. And, when anyone attempts to access the website, the CDN redirects them directly to the nearest.

The best part is that it eliminates the more time taken by the website to load. It results in the boosts of the response time that later improves the shopper’s experience with you.

Also, the website might get crashed when the load on the central hosting server is shared with other hosting servers. Here, CDN can do wonders and can resolve the issues and work as the crash resistance.

3. Speed Up the WooCommerce Store

The website that loads in less than 3 seconds is considered, and the website that takes more than that gets abandoned by Google. And, it makes the visitors move to other websites, and therefore, an increase of bounce rate appears.

So, to speed up the WooCommerce store, page speed testing is essential from the Google Page Speed Insights, or some free tool can also be used. These tools will predict the time taken by your pages to load with some speed up suggestions.

Most of the store owners might get wrong in uploading the large and HQ images. Though, all these make the web page appealing but, in addition, slow down the page loading time (particularly for mobile users). Hence, optimize the image from an image optimizer. CDN can also be used for the content to load faster.

4. Set up a Caching Solution

In addition to CDN, the local caching configuration is also essential. It does not allow repeat customers to load the website time and again. Most of the users believe that CDN is sufficient as it caches the online store essentially. But, with the slow internet connection, CDN does not work appropriately.

Here, it becomes evident to optimize the store for the shopper by speeding up the website loading time by integrating the caching solution.  In the case of WooCommerce and WordPress, there are several caching solutions -one of them is Comet Cache. This plugin provides an easy to configure and set up process for WordPress websites.

But,  the complicated WooCommerce that usually gets updated requires cache configuration regularly.  So, it demands you to navigate to the Comet cache tab in WordPress. Select the cache expiration time section, and from the drop-down menu, you will find the expiration time settings. That’s it; your WooCommerce caching is done.

5. Add Helpful Features with Plugins

To get the best WooCommerce theme is not possible in every case. But it is not impossible, even. All you need is to select the theme that looks similar to your expectations. Our recommendation here is to get the one that has the built-in styling.

For instance, you can get the New York theme. This theme is fully-WooCommerce supportive; also, it has the click pointing and front endpoint options. It is best for those who do not have the technical expertise, and here, tweaking the color and fonts becomes easy.  

There is a plugin, called, WooCommerce Checkout manager, that lets you integrate more options to the checkout page. This plugin enables you to customize the page by adding or removing the custom fields. Adding conditional fields, email notifications, file uploads, and customs fees is also possible.

Wrapping Up

Now, you have tips that hold the ability to optimize the WooCommerce store. Now it is inevitable that it is not tough to implement them.   Any website building experience is also not required; it can be handled easily.

So, what are you waiting for?

Make your eCommerce store better today!! Deliver fast, rich, and responsive experience to the shoppers!!

Thank you for reading!!

Author Bio:

Emily Johns is a Senior WordPress developer. Currently she is associated with WordSuccor – WordPress website development company in the USA. She has dived through the open-source code for over a decade and shares everything about WordPress and new Web design technologies. You can find her on Twitter @emilywordsuccor and LinkedIn.

The post Optimize your WooCommerce Store in 5 Easy Ways appeared first on Cyfuture Blog.

While people are talking about the reeling impact of the virus on human life, the massive disruption to the economic activity of various countries is also worth mentioning. The biggest supply shock is handed over to the Indian market, with 13.7% of the Indian imports at risk due to the outbreak in China. 

The biggest question over here is, “With India importing goods worth more than USD 356.77 billion from China, now with the extended shutdown of factories, how is the Indian market going to brace itself with this Chinese supply shock?”

The Importance Of China In India’s Foreign Trade Market

China has been the largest source of imports for the Indian market since 2004-05, according to the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy (CIME) database. Furthermore, as per the latest annual data of the Indian import available, 13.7% of the country’s total imports is from China. 

As per an analysis of the World Bank’s World Integrated Solution database, the average share held by Chinese imports is:

• 40% of India’s capital goods
• 1/5th of the consumer goods 
• 15% of the intermediate goods 

This data is powerful enough to understand the fact that any major disruption in China will cast a glooming investment impact on the supply chains, manufacturing, and supply of the consumer goods market. 

Furthermore, the Chinese units are an integral export market for India. According to the data released by CIME, China is the third-largest export market for India, after the US and the United Arab Emirates. The biggest setback will be suffered by the raw material export division of the country if China doesn’t recover from the Coronavirus disruption. With China acquiring more than 10.03% of India’s export potential, the raw materials producer will be slapped by the slowdown in the Chinese manufacturing units. 

According to the Founder and CEO, PrimaDollar, “India will suffer not only because its health care system might be overloaded, but also because efforts to contain the virus will be disruptive. This will, in turn, lead to an increase in the price of the commodities. It will also lead to rising interest rates because the policy response to the supply-shortage inflation is to dampen the demand.”

The Indian Import Market To Suffer The Economic Nightmare Of The Decade

Figure 2: The persistent prevalence of the locked doors of the Chinese manufacturing units will hamper the Indian import market far more than its exports. Furthermore, the total value of the India-China imports in 2018-19 was $87 billion, 18 times more than that in 2002-03 ($4.8 billion).

CoronaVirus was first reported in China, in December, eclipsing the global death toll from its variant, SARS, that started in China almost two decades ago. Since most of the factories are locked, the production units are sitting idle in China. According to Ajay Sahai, Director, Federation of the Indian Export Organizations, those Indian sectors that maintain a low inventory, like electronics, might start experiencing the trade trauma of the outbreak in Wuhan, China shortly.

Furthermore, the Indian economy, mostly imports, is highly dependent on its northern neighbor, China, mostly because of the establishment of trade links between the two countries. The trade scale has expanded to more than 18 times, from $4.8 billion in 2002-03 to $87 billion in 2018-19. 

Since most of the phone companies, depend on parts, that are imported from China, they will soon run out of the electronic components, within 15 days. The initial plan was to import parts every month, but with the worsening situation, ramifications like price surge, supply shortage, and slow demands are a bit obvious aftermath.

How CoronaVirus Outbreak Will Impact the Supply Chain Structure Of India?

As per the India Ratings and Research, the economic shock of the CoronaVirus on the Indian supply chain wasn’t predicted to be such a disaster. Also, it is said that if the virus is contained in China over the next three to four months, the impact on the Indian supply chain could be higher than that during the 2003 SARS outbreak.

The impact of the CoronaVirus can be devasting for various sectors of the Indian market. Among imports, organic chemicals will be the most affected commodities since India imports 40% of its organic chemicals from China.  Although mobile handsets, the largest category by sales value in the Indian market, is still untouched by any immediate threat. However, if the conditions further than February, it will surely hamper the electronics sector of the country. In 2019, 158 million units of smartphones were shipped from China and only 145 million were sold. All in all, these sectors will experience a swell up in their production over the near medium term. 

CoronaVirus Threatens To Stall The Asian Economy

China accounts for 11% of the global import and 13% of the global exports in 2018. If the outbreak continues for more than two quarters, it will highly impact China’s industrial activity due to a fall in labor availability and low consumer demand. 

Figure 5: The Indian economy will get impacted by the massive outbreak of the CoronaVirus. India will, however, remain insulated as compared with the other Asian countries. India is the least exposed and dependent on the Chinese vendors amongst the others, and so its supply chain will not be impacted in the near term. However, if the virus is transmitted in the next three to four months, then the disruptions will be much worse than the 2003 SARS outbreak. 

Furthermore, with China being the 2nd ranked nation with the highest GDP, it will experience a 0.5%-point decline in its economic growth this year. This will lead to a 0.2%-point decline in the expansion of GDP in the 10 countries of Southeast Asian Nations including China, South Korea, and Japan. 

Is CoronaVirus an Opportunity for India?

While the hard commodities sector is facing a tough blowout from the CoronaVirus outbreak due to a pause in their imports, the soft commodities market of India is currently on a boom. Global buyers are exploring the Indian market for ceramics, homeware, fashion and lifestyle goods, and furniture. 

Indian manufacturers and exporters of such goods have received an increasing number of inquiries, mostly from the US and European Union, to replace China as a supplier. Even the textile market is ready for a boom, enough to compete with China. 

Furthermore, Indian exporters of chemicals, engineering goods, and marine products will benefit the most from the CoronaVirus outbreak. 

What Level Of Impact Will CoronaVirus Have On The Indian Market?

The impact of the CoronaVirus on the Indian economy is ongoing speculation around the world. Indeed, an uneven calm is still prevailing amongst businesses, including India, as the outbreak, has the potential to derail bilateral trade worth $87 billion. Furthermore, $70 billion worth of goods is imported by India on an annual basis. With China as the second-largest trading partner of India, the dependency index of the latter on the former has the power to shut down the local markets and shops. 

However, India might have found its importing options apart from China, the outbreak will have a significant impact on the Indian markets. It is predicted by many economists, that CoronaVirus can further slowdown the already struggling economy of India. But others believe that it is a great opportunity for India to scale up their game. What happens next can either be beneficial for India or disastrous. 

The post CoronaVirus: The Economic Aftermath on Indian Market appeared first on Cyfuture Blog.

Probably, when the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, chose John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino as 2019’s proud victors of Nobel Prize of Chemistry, they knew the power of lithium-ion batteries, their need in the market, and the electrifying world it will create in the years to come. 

Is Indian Automobile Company Ready for EV?

India’s automobile division is pushing forward to an EV makeover. The government is pressing ambitions to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles. They are doing so by reducing the GST rates from 12% to 5% on electric vehicles, and from 18% to 5% on electric charges. Furthermore, many private and public sector enterprises have started investing in the development of an ecosystem for electric vehicles.

But the viable question that remains over here is, ‘With India importing lithium-ion cells from China, Taiwan, and Korea, constituting to USD 1.23 billion (2018-19), is such a dependence on imports, worth an Electric-powered India?’ While the Indian Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, is working towards his grand EV mandate, by reducing taxes, it is not the only obstacle in India’s journey towards launching an electric environment.

Several public sector companies like BSES Rajdhani Power, IOC, Hindustan Petroleum, BHEL, Energy Efficiency Services (EESL), Union Housing Ministry and private sector companies like, Tata Power, Ather Energy, Vakrangee, Magenta Power, ABB, Acme Industries, and Fortum India are developing EV charging stations. The availability of lithium-ion batteries which accounts for more than half the cost of the EV are, currently, almost entirely imported from China.

According to a report by Clean Technica, India will need a minimum of 10GWh of cells by 2022 and 50GWh by 2025. India has already increased its importing costs of lithium-ion batteries, from China, six times more in 2018-19 than in 2014-15.

For a country that hasn’t revived from the economic constraints of demonetization, such huge import costs coupled with the worst air pollution numbers are a worrying aspect. While the Indian government is pressing hard on setting up of Giga factories in the country. However, the cost of such a surplus domestic demand is highly unlikely to be a price competitive with the Chinese imports. 

The Global Lithium-ion Battery Market

Lithium-ion batteries have had a significant impact on the Indian audiences since they first entered the market, in 1991. A lithium-ion battery consists of three basic components; the basic cell, the battery pack, and the battery management system. A complete battery unit consists of several cells packed together and controlled by the battery management system. In recent years, lithium-ion batteries are taken up to a new task, liberating the transport industry and transforming the automobile market dynamics of India. With companies like SmartCell entering the market with their own AA batteries collection, the prospect of having an electrically-equipped India doesn’t seem very far away.

China holds the major share of the lithium-ion battery market, right from the extraction of the minerals to the export of the cells and batteries. Australia and Chile are prominent producers of the lithium-ion cells. However, Chinese battery firms control almost half of the lithium-ion production and 73% of the global cell manufacturing capacity. 

Furthermore, the lithium-ion battery market size is expected to grow from an estimated value of USD 37.4 billion to USD 92.3 billion by 2024, with a CAGR of 16.2%. The major reason for market growth is an increase in the demands of plug-in vehicles and the need for automation and battery-operated equipment in the manufacturing industries.

With the increasing need for energy storage solutions, the price of lithium-ion batteries will decrease in the future. The impetus of the lithium-ion battery growth in this field is because of higher energy density, longer lifecycle, and low costs.

Amongst the lithium-ion battery market, Lithium cobalt oxide batteries will be the most used ones followed by Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt (Li-NMC) cells.

The lithium-ion cell market needs will be divided into consumer electronics, automotive, aerospace and defense, medical, power, marine, and industrial.

The Impact of Amazon Rolling out 10,000 Electric Rickshaws in India

Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, after the successful completion of its pilot program in several cities, has announced that its delivery fleet will consist of 10,000 electric rickshaws, by 2025. This decision came as wake to the disastrous climate change around the world and Amazon’s pledge to reduce the carbon emissions of its delivery operations. The project will start from 2021, in 20 cities of the country, including Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Pune, Nagpur, and Coimbatore. The delivery fleet will include 3-wheeler and 4-wheeled vehicles, designed and manufactured in India. Amazon will roll out the project until it achieves its benchmark of 10,000 electric vehicles running on Indian roads by 2025.

In a release, Amazon said that it spends 18 months analyzing the electric delivery truck operations before it decided to roll out its van for the delivery business.

With Amazon, powering a supply chain, to minimize the environmental impact of the delivery operations, its 10,000 vehicles benchmark will help the company in becoming an energy-efficient leader in the market. With the Indian government, encouraging the adoption of EVs in India, and the setting up of charging stations as per the FAME 2 policy, Amazon will be easily able to accelerate and expand its vision of carbon-free deliveries in India.

What Lies Ahead of the EV Rush in India?

The Indian EV growth will be mainly witnessed in the passenger cars segment, by 3400 points, by 2025, with a CAGR growth of 34.5%. The passenger car market will acquire more than 40% of the market revenue share. The Indian electric car market size is valued at USD 71.1 million in 2017 and is projected to reach USD 707.4 million by 2025. The major reason for rolling out electric vehicles in India is high pollution levels in major cities.

Is the Indian Transport Industry Ready for EV Ecosystem?

This sudden upsurge in the EV segment in India is highly understandable. The age-old automotive industry built on the internal combustion engines, and powered by fossil-fuels is on its way to exhaustion and disruption.

Issues clouding the fuel-powered vehicles include pollution, energy sources depletion, crude import bill, energy security, global warming, and climate change. At the national level, India is struggling hard to maintain its oil import bill, and an option as energy-efficient as EV is a good alternative for India’s import costs and transport industry.

In the words of Amara Raja Batteries CEO, S. Vijayanand, India missed the magic of manufacturing consumer electronics and the renewable energy sector. Therefore, as a country, Indians cannot miss the vast opportunities in the EV sector. As per the government initiatives, it wants all three-wheelers to run on batteries, by 2023, and by 2025, it wants to apply this rule to all the two-wheelers as well. However, with the country disregarding the need for lithium-ion cells manufacturing units, such changes are going to cost a lot, mostly on an Indian pocket. 

The Indian Government, in the wake of having its lithium-ion battery production unit, is offering incentives to carmakers, to develop new EV models and lithium-ion batteries. 

India is on its way to Become a Rechargeable Nation

However, according to the Jayadev Galla from the Amara Raja Batteries Ltd, “The electric vehicle ecosystem needs to be in place first so that there is a predictable and growing demand for electric vehicles before we go into cell manufacturing.”

Since India lacks the supporting infrastructure to get EV on roads, it should start with ‘urban mining’, a process of extracting minerals from waste, as an alternative, not just for lithium but for other needs as well. 

According to Nomura Research, the investment required for developing charging stations values to 13,000-14,000 crores. Furthermore, private sectors alone are expected to add 50,000 to 60,000 charging stations in the country. As said in the electric mobility policy, FAME 2, the Indian government will allocate 10,000 crores to set up charging stations to both the public and private sectors.

EV charging stations will indeed be the future of gas stations in the country, but the prospect right now is a money-spinner. Further, the non-availability of lithium-ion batteries will be a major bump for the EV market in the country, and will also lessen its adoption rate. According to research, India will require six plants of 10GWh each by 2023, and 12 by 2030, for the emerging EV market. With Tata Chemicals, to set up a 10 GWh plant at Dholera, Gujarat; established and new-age companies are more likely to venture into this market with government aid.

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