As we’ve talked about before, if you’re in the business of selling products, there really is no excuse for you to not have an online presence. 31% of consumers indicated that online shopping is their preferred mode of shopping and the trend is rapidly going upwards.
Most vendors have thought about listing in one or more of the online marketplaces (like Amazon, Flipkart, EBay, Snapdeal etc.) at some point. Listing on these sites is appealing on several fronts.
The well-known marketplaces are high traffic channels with millions of active buyers. It is the preferred mode of shopping for many buyers who enjoy the variety and seamless buying experience.
Merchants gain increased exposure for their products which can lead to higher sales volumes.
It opens doors to acquiring new customers who accidently stumble across your products while looking at competitors or simply while browsing randomly.
However, there are many hidden expenses and opportunity costs that could add up to ruin your business
Retailers, especially the smaller ones, end up paying around 30-40% margin of their online sales to online marketplaces. This includes even lesser known ecommerce platforms like Koovs, Jabong and Myntra. These margins are high even when compared to rental spaces in the brick-and-mortar stores
In addition to the high margins, marketplaces regularly push retailers to give an additional 15-20% discounts.
Competition will be crazy. You will be ruthlessly compared with other competitors, product wise, with price being the biggest differentiator in a marketplace. This will force price wars at the expense of quality and brand name.
Furthermore, if you come up with a unique product or idea, it will soon be copied and mass produced at lower rates. Even if your product has a patent, its enforcement and prosecution will be time consuming and cash hungry.
It will be difficult to build up a brand or generate loyalty for your products.
You need to have a corporate tax identity before selling on most e-marketplaces. This isn’t feasible if you are just starting out and selling from the back of your garage or house.
The supply and operations process to list and distribute your product is cumbersome
A fairly large amount of precious capital will need to be set aside to make sure you have enough stock and inventory and to order the MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) from suppliers.
It will take time, money and effort to find the right strategy that features your product over others. The strategy will have to be tweaked between marketplaces since each platform’s promotion algorithm differs.
These expenses are especially damaging if you are a small business competing with large multinational companies who have access to the massive budgets to spend on marketing and sales.
There are other options available to sell your products online or even just to channel traffic to increase sales offline
Use social media to build brand awareness and direct traffic to offline stores
Build your own website with shopping cart facilities from scratch
Utilise custom built templates or platforms already available to create your own e-commerce store
Hire a professional to build your website (maintenance problem)
Final Note:
Listing your products on an online marketplace does have its benefits, but, the hidden costs add-up to create a big dent in profits. What’s more, it is a constant uphill battle to monitor pricing and stay on top of latest platform related tweaks to make sure that your product is placed ahead of competitors. Selling through a marketplace doesn’t mean that you cannot also sell from your own e-commerce store to reap the benefits of both; Nor are you restricted to listing in only one marketplace. What is important is that you take the time to consider the options available and formulate a strategy that works the best for YOUR requirements. I will tackle the pros and cons of the other strategies, along with the tradeoffs in further posts.
This post was first published on LinkedIn, by Karina Pais, Consultant with Futureshift on Karina is an MBA graduate from UK and engaged with us as a consultant in digital marketing.
If you’re in the business of selling products (even if primarily in the physical world), there really is no excuse for you to not have an online presence. This is regardless of whether you are an established brick-and-mortar business with years of sales experience or if you’re a part time retailer working out of the back of your garage.
Having your products displayed online is necessary because
It helps you interact with a much wider audienceand even have a global reach.
You can set up your own social media channels in a few hours and the rest in a few days.
Your customers can access your store at times that are convenient to them and at places that they already are.
It complements your presence in the physical world to maximize sales.
It is one of the more cost effective ways to get additional marketing and exposure for your brand.
These seemingly small gains are especially important when you are a small retailer and do not have access to the massive budgets that large multinational corporates can freely employ on marketing.
There are many options available to sell your products online or even just to channel traffic to increase sales offline
Use social media to build brand awareness and direct traffic to offline stores
List on a marketplace like Flipkart/Snapdeal/Myntra/Ebay/Amazon
Build your own website with shopping cart facilities from scratch
Utilise custom built templates or platforms already available to create your own e-commerce store
Hire a professional to build your website (maintenance problem)
Whether you have just one product with multiple SKUs or multiple products it is beneficial and worthwhile to build your own channels.This is especially true if you already have a loyal fan following or if your strategy involves creating a strong brand for your products.
However, many businesses still don’t even have a social media account for their commercial enterprise. This simple to set-up and easy to use should undoubtedly be the low hanging fruit that is first targeted. Once this is tackled the next steps tend to become a little fuzzy. Is it better to sell on an online marketplace or is it more worthwhile to have your own personal platform? If you are going to create your own personal platform should you take the time to figure out how to do it yourself or is it better to use readymade solutions available out there? I will tackle the pros and cons of each strategy, along with the tradeoffs in further posts.
At the very minimum it is worthwhile to have your own website in addition to just a Facebook or other social media account. Having your own online sales channel along with this, whether through a shopping cart on your website or an entire online store by itself will be a great value add.
Final note
Once you do go online you don’t need to be restricted to just one channel. Selling through your own e-commerce store doesn’t mean that you cannot also sell your products through a marketplace to reap the benefits of both; Nor are you restricted to listing in only one marketplace. Many successful retailers, especially the larger ones, prefer to be involved in multiple channels. However, each additional route takes time, money and energy to understand its processes and maintain it. What is important is that you take the time to consider the options available and formulate a strategy that works the best for YOUR requirements. I will tackle the pros and cons of each strategy, along with the tradeoffs in further posts.
This post was first published on LinkedIn, by Karina Pais, Consultant with Futureshift on Karina is an MBA graduate from UK and engaged with us a a consultant in digital marketing.
One of the key areas of funnel building and lead generation under our ZMOTly frame work is about reaching out to the victors of your website or blog, even as they are browsing your page. That is their moment of truth, when they are looking for something and obviously, it is like a customer browsing through in a real store. Without, being intrusive, how do you get to the visitor and see how you can help.
After a lot of research, we ourselves zeroed in on Optin Chat. [https://www.optinchat.com/]. Optin Chat is easy to install on any website or blog and yes, you can start off with free.
When we talk to corporates, they are looking at a simple and effective way to leverage their website with call-to-action on content pages. Without an email IDs, one cannot build audience. Without audience, you cannot grow and one of the best ways to build an audience is to build an email list!
Unlike some of the other chatbots that put the customer off by asking for an email ID, Optin helps reach out by providing something of value and asks if the visitor is interested. Imaginer asking in real life store – “Sir, we have a free beer offer on level 2”, would you be interested? If the visitor says yes (who would not :)), you move on and collect some basic information and direct them to level 2. Optin Chat is something like that.
It is about chatting with users and asking for their email IDs in an interactive way. It is not intrusive but pops up with a catchy ‘ding’ sound to grab the visitor’s attention. This chat is not a Live chat but looks like one. And we humans are wired to respond to chat messages! And then, there you go! your first step to getting your customer email ID. Optin Chat has also a very flexible question builder that helps you to configure the chat module and create a JS code that can be installed on your website.
Go ahead, try it out. It doesn’t cost you much. For all you know, this may be your first step to getting to building your customer base.
Amazon and Google started out being unlikely competitors.
One started in 1994 by selling books and the other in 1997 by designing a new search engine for the Internet. In 2002, both realized that they needed to open up their respective systems to developer communities as a technology disrupter, gain traction, and grow fast.
Both gave brick and mortar businesses a run for their money. Both ended as undisputed leaders and have redefined the industry in their own ways.
Both Google and Amazon broadly attract the same segment of consumers, albeit for different reasons.
They have not looked back ever since. The Titans are now eyeing domination of the Enterprise segment with cloud based web hosting services and solutions. Amazon has a significant lead here. What does it take for them to come out as the winner? Is the threat from Google real?
In continuing our series on technology game-changers, we focus on a summary of differences between the Google Cloud and the Amazon AWS from an end-user and developer perspective. In an earlier series (*ISMAC) we had discussed the ubiquitous nature of CLOUD infrastructure in current technology solutions.
Cloud Vendors and Hosting Providers are available dime-a-dozen.
Hosting Providers are good enough for simple web site hosting, be it local or regional. Most hosting providers provide base hardware
infrastructure (either Physical or Virtual Machines) with Linux or Windows Operating System and the corresponding Web(App)server (Apache, Nginx), Database (MySQL), Programming Language Support (PHP, Python, Java) etc.
Cloud Vendors on the other hand provide a whole slew of ready made and integrated software support like Email, Queuing, Messaging, BigData, NoSQL, Storage, Networking, Billing, Logging etc. These services are all independent, but can be installed and setup to work cohesively with each other. In this article, we will look at the offerings
of “Google Cloud” and “Amazon AWS”.
Comprises of a separate Compute engine and App engine. The Compute engine provides the raw hardware and allows the developer to install any tools/technologies they choose. The App Engine on the other hand, comes pre-built with support for PHP, Python (language
interpreters). It allows the developers to directly upload their source code and setup the environment. Google Cloud also provides out-of-the-box one-click deployment of numerous tools in the Data Store, Programming, and Source Code Control, Configuration and Build Management and other Front-End, Mid-Tier, and Back-end packages.
Costing is tiered with a free-tier for almost all functionalities including storage and network usage (upload/download). This approach is
convenient for developers and companies to try out in a smaller scale free before choosing this as a production and scaling platform.
On the other side, setup is slightly non-intuitive for the first-time cloud user. The developer will require a few trials before getting comfortable with
the offerings.
The console is organized very intuitively under various categories – Computing Resources, Storage, Content Delivery, Databases, Networking, Administration and Security, Deployment, Analytics, Mobile, Application Services and Enterprise Services. Within each of these categories, the most common packages are provided in a single-click setup model. Impressive is the ability to setup your own
Simple Email Service, Simple Queuing Service, and Simple Notification Services (for server-side of mobile apps)
Costing is Free for the first 12 months. This provides a wonderful way
for developers and companies to test the platform and even use it in a
semi-production model.
AWS has a much bigger ecosystem and therefore has support on the Internet for almost all situations one could ever face.
Verdict
While both the offerings have similar setup and approach, Amazon’s AWS comes out better due to its maturity and developer-friendly tools. Google Cloud’s free limits are a wonderful idea that could potentially be adopted by AWS. This allows small companies to move to and continue on AWS (without charge) for their small footprint requirements. Google Cloud needs a bit of Usability improvements especially for the developer community.
In our earlier post, we wrote about #ISMAC and how it is changing the business ecosystem. In this post we will continue the conversation by understanding the leaders in each of these technology areas. We will also review what each one is doing in that space.
1. Internet of Things (IOT)
Vendors in this space range from chip manufacturers (Intel, ARM, Texas Instruments), mobile and embedded device vendors (Freescale, Qualcom, Ericsson), Home appliance vendors (GE, Bosch), pure-play software developers (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook), Networking vendors (Cisco) and large system integrators (IBM, Oracle, SAP). The spread is so broad given the multitude of technologies that go into making a device intelligent and automated. One of the biggest business and technological
challenges in this area is the need for standards at all hardware and software
layers. Standards are important to
ensure complete hand-shake across device vendors as well as to derive
functionalities at scale. Early-stage research companies will lobby for their
work to become the standard. This tussle
will continue for a few years until the standards bodies get a grip of the
overall collaborations required. A potential obstacle from consumer perspective is the pervasiveness of these devices leading to privacy compromises. This will be a larger problem involving social, economic and political ramifications.
2. Social
Social sector is already close to maturity on the consumer usage perspective. While there could be finer tweaks, the ability to post 140 character reviews to author elaborate ebooks provides consumers enough to go with. At the backend, processing of these gazillion bytes of data and deriving meaningful value for businesses is key focus area. At the current juncture social channels are simply used for consumer and prospect connect beginning with lead generation through to customer service and repeat customers. Most organizations are working to understand and correlate the various factors that impact the conversion funnel and how best they can take advantage of it themselves.
3. Mobile
With about 200 Million feature phones and 80 Million smartphones sold in India in 2014, the data cannot be clearer. Complete ecosystems have formed around mobile exchange of money, ewallet, transaction processing etc. Nationalized banks are also heavily invested in this direction. Ability to transfer money with the swipe of a finger is practical subject to security considerations. While Social is the biggest application used on mobiles (much more data traffic over voice), other ecommerce and financial transactions are not lagging far behind. It is critical for business to adopt a mobile-first strategy in through thinking. Minimalistic and Responsive Design as some of the key deliverables in this space.
4. Analytics
The ability to spot the proverbial needle in the haystack holds promise. Analytics space continues to be hot with hundreds of new entrants each quarter. Open Source Technology platforms like Hadoop (sponsored under the Apache Project) play a key role in providing real-time and batch analytics. Quick access data stores like NoSql are very prevalent given the
unstructured nature of data. The need to handle millions of data element inputs per minute has also created a proliferation of queuing technologies that ensure data events are processed without loss. While Analytics is touted as the panacea, this space requires good blend of business acumen combined with computing abilities to derive true
value.
5. Cloud
Cloud is the most advanced of all the five technologies. The question is not one of viability any
longer. Usage of cloud has become so
common place that one cannot imagine otherwise.
All our emails, files, photos, documents, videos, photos, blogs are saved
up there in one of the cloud. Cloud infrastructure vendors have gotten the
entire store, access, retrieve cycle ironed out. Redundancy of infrastructure and replication mechanisms have evolved so well to completely hide the true complexity away from the end customer. With companies like Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and others giving out free access to developer’s worldwide, cloud is the only de facto platform to develop applications. It has also brought some semblance of uniformity of development with standardization of infrastructure stack open source products.
In summary, the five technologies listed above are very real and very NOW. Businesses should take advantage of these technologies in ways that is most beneficial for them.
SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) and IoT (Internet of Things) are the five buzz words in the technology industry that is driving innovation for business and hence valuations for businesses that are in that space.
Let us address this one by one. In this two part series, we will cover introductory and business aspects of SMAC+IoT in this part and take up deep dive in the next.
SMAC delivers an ecosystem to help businesses have maximum reach with minimal costs. It also helps business to be present in front of the customer without being intrusive. We are all creating peta-bytes of data both in structured and unstructured formats. In today’s day and age, anything that we do on the internet is captured in more than one way. This explosion of structured and unstructured data is generating through billions of devices and services – mobile devices social media, sensors, loyalty programs and browsing website and is creating new business models built upon user-generated data. Each of the four technologies – social, mobile, analytics and cloud (let us keep IoT out of the equation for now) – is critical and creates a synergy and provides immense competitive advantage for businesses when used efficiently.
Social Media has provided billions of users and millions of businesses
with new ways to reach and interact between businesses customers and between customers to customers. The mobile technologies have dramatically altered the way people communicate, shop and work and have fun. Analytics allow businesses to understand how, when and where people consume goods and services. Cloud computing provides a disruptive way to access technology with data a business needs to quickly and respond to rapidly changing markets and solve business problems. Each of the four technologies can impact a business individually. But the power lies in the integration and the coming together of the four is proving to be a disruptive force and is creating entirely new business models for service providers.
While it sounds simple the integration involves immense complexity at the back end. There are tools available to achieve the stated purpose. Integrating SMAC requires clear systems, policies and management tools that can automate business processes. The online-retailer company Amazon is a
good example of a business that has successfully harnessed the power of SMAC.
For example, when an Amazon member buys an item on Amazon on their iPhone, they are given the option to login with Facebook’s social login. After the purchase, customers are given multiple ways to provide social feedback. They can rate their experience with stars, write reviews and/or share what they just bought with friends on Facebook or Twitter. Customer data is stored in the cloud and Amazon can break down its analysis to such a granular a level that its recommendation engine can personalize suggestions for friends that are connected and have similar preferences, a concept known as 1:1 marketing.
Any modern CRM strategy would see such 1:1 marketing as the holy-grail of customer engagement and is the aim of every SMAC initiative. Critics however worry that such massive aggregation of customer data from disparate sources, data that is possibly purchased from data brokers, may violate user privacy and cause legal problems related to compliance and data sovereignty.
In spite of such criticism, SMAC is here to stay. In the next post, I will talk about Internet of Things, IoT that is the next big disruptor. Stay tuned.
Shoppeazy: How can you get your own Online Store in a less than 99 minutes . We have made the complexity simple. Designed ground up from a total-retail perspective this is designed with a simple goal. To give you the exhaustive capabilities and at the sma etime have a 10th grader run the store and get your cash registers ringing.
With Shoppeazy you can
define your multi-level and multi-dimensional Catalogs
Define Products
Upload Content, Technical Details, Special Instructions
One of the most widely appreciated offerring by in the Hi-Tech Retail segment is 3X3 Learning.
In simple terms 3X3 learning is all about Instant Learning, Anytime, Anywhere. This is a blended learning optimized to maximize attention, retention, results.
3X3 comprises of Online Assessments, Tests, Quizzes, Rich Interaction, Gamification. This can be either used for compliance or used for In-Store Personnel (ISP) training. We had a good experience with #Microsoft during launch of #Windows8 and at #Acer stores when new series is launched
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If you’re in the business of selling products (even if primarily in the physical world), there really is no excuse for you to not have an online presence. This is regardless of whether you are an established brick-and-mortar business with years of sales experience or if you’re a part time retailer working out of the back of your garage.
