The advent of cloud, and the availability of dropshipping and other B2B services has made launching an e-commerce business easier than ever. The e-commerce sector is showing a steady growth rate: the IPC State of e-commerce report predicts worldwide e-commerce sales will grow by 141% between 2016 and 2021, with the US accounting for 20% of e-commerce revenue globally. The e-commerce retail sector in the United States is set to show double-digit growth until 2021, according to eMarketer.
Apart from the promise of economic growth, this spells increased competition for e-commerce retailers. While giants like Amazon, eBay, Best Buy and Sears have the greatest market share, smaller companies are going out of ways to win customers. Competition in an overcrowded marketplace is tough: to stand up to it, you will have to stand out.
Below are some actionable tips to help you gain competitive edge.
Improve your website
Here at VARTEQ we are strong advocates of optimizing your retail backend and keeping all your back-office operations in top-notch working order. But, guess what: having an outstanding design still works wonders! Great design will make your brand memorable, especially if your website is made with usability in mind. Excellent design and convenient user interface will ensure customers will come back for a great shopping experience.
Supporting mobile e-commerce is another vitally important aspect of fine-tuning your website. According to the IPC State of e-commerce report, mobile is a key driver of e-commerce growth in North America. Customers are getting increasingly comfortable with using smartphones to shop, and the percentage of shopping through mobile apps is skyrocketing.
A Forrester survey says, even if customers are not buying with their smartphones, they use them to browse products, view ads and make decisions. “Although online retail via smartphones accounts for only one-third of online retail sales, smartphones’ impact on retail sales is massive,” reports the research bureau. By 2023 smartphones will drive $1.4 trillion in sales, the survey says.
Have a unique brand voice
We mean, literally. Chatbots are the next big thing on customer service landscape: think Siri or Google Assistant but with your unique brand voice. Gartner predicts chatbots will account for 85% of customer interactions by 2020, and these figures look highly probable given that customers actually enjoy talking to them. Eliminating the stress of daily human-to-human interactions, chatbots save time by answering frequently asked questions, remember previous choices and collect customer-related data for further processing by CRM systems, helping e-commerce retailers build more targeted marketing strategies.
By leveraging natural language processing chatbots can successfully imitate human speech, form naturally-flowing sentences and give customer interactions a personal touch.
Offer personalized experiences
In a competitive niche like e-commerce retail, personalization is the name of the game. While SMB companies can’t compete with retail giants by most parameters, they sure can win by personalizing most of customers’ experiences. In fact, they can’t afford NOT to personalize: reports have shown, customers expect to be addressed by name as they shop online and expect the store to remember their previous choices. Moreover, they increasingly expect retailers to know what they are looking for even before they ask for it!
Fortunately, AI tools like NLP and text mining can carry out advanced customer data analysis, target both loyal clients and newcomers and suggest personalized offers and discounts. AI automates complex and tiresome tasks of selling personalized emails, tweaks website interfaces to individual preferences and can even be used to create personalized packaging. In the future, as the trends suggest, 100% of the shopping experience will be personalized.
Introduce same-day delivery
Even if you run a relatively small niche store, you can beat your competitors by delivering better order fulfillment. In any case, improving your order fulfillment strategy to offer same-day delivery at least for most loyal customers (alternatively, for bulk buyers or customers in your residential area) will definitely increase customers trust. Similar to personalization, same-day delivery is becoming an industry standard now, supported by a growing number of startups who offer fast shipping and delivery services to e-commerce retailers. Have a database of such shippers at your hand listing their rates, territorial and other restrictions. Surely, introducing same-day delivery involves major changes to your entire business ecosystem, but doing so will give you a distinct competitive edge over 85% of your competitors.
Practically speaking, acting on these tips will require leveraging AI and nascent technologies to add value to your business and partnering with a reliable third-party IT company. Despite the evident shortage of qualified AI talent and the perceived lack of affordable AI outsourcing services, companies like VARTEQ are targeted at SMB players and foster quality, flexibility and individual approach. We help small e-commerce companies to meet the digital transformation challenge by offering tailored solutions to bridge technology and business.