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Showing posts from August, 2024
Negative feedback is the bane of any seller on a marketplace website. It not only means that you will be ranked down, but also that your potential customers will think twice before ordering from your online store. These things are very important if you want to run a successful online business via a marketplace, since you are competing with 100s of other sellers to get your product noticed, and if it is downranked in natural search, your product will never get they eyeballs it deserves. Here are some things you can do to make sure that your feedback always remains positive. 1.    If you get a legitimately negative feedback, act on it. We are humans, we tend to make mistakes. The first thing that you want to do if the product you supplied to your customer is damaged or broken in some way is to apologize to the customer for the inconvenience that you have caused to them. You should try and make up for the error on your part. Freebies are a good form of additional compensation if the ord
Elevate is looking to feature Canada’s most promising AI startups on stage at this year’s festival through our ElevateR Pitch. ElevateR Pitch is a March Madness-style pitch competition where Canada’s best AI startup companies compete for the attention of international media, investors and global tech leaders. Finalists from across Canada will face-off with over $1,000,000 CAD in funding up for grabs for select finalists. On Tuesday, September 25 at the Sony Centre, the final four companies will get to pitch live on Elevate Main Stage right before Al Gore’s keynote. We interviewed Ganesh Krishan, from AiHello, an AI startup founded in 2018 and headquartered in Toronto. Read below to learn more about Ganesh’s experiences at a startup and valuable advice he gives to the next generation of startup founders. What problem is your company solving and how? We forecast sales of inventory by location. AiHello is a two-sided logistics company working to solve India’s shipping and supply chain
This video will show you how to use other ecommerce marketplaces to increase your sales and profit margins. We will also discuss diversifying outside of just selling on Amazon like using Shopify and Woocommerce and moving onto your own website. Some benefits of that include having the customer as a direct customer, guaranteed income, Amazon not being able to shut you off, and best of all increased credibility which can help you out if you’re also selling on Amazon. However, Amazon does provide you with all their customers and the exposure of your products to those customers, whereas with Woocommerce you’ll need to advertise extensively. Firstly, we’ll have to connect Woocommerce to Amazon FBA so that any sale completed on Woocommerce can be fulfilled by Amazon FBA. You could also use 3PLs but if your numbers are not above a certain threshold, it’s more effective to use Amazon FBA. Amazon has the potential to make sellers a lot of money, but you don’t want to rely completely on Amazon
Brands and those responsible for their strategy have to face each time more and more varied problems and more demands. In the case of the internet and what they do in that environment, companies can no longer continue to bet on everything and they have to be careful with the type of advertisement they use. This, until the stage they choose to show it to the world. Consumers are increasing with more and more things. Not only do they not want ads to be annoying. They expect brands and companies to strive not to be intrusive, but are also increasingly concerned about who the companies are partnering with when launching those ads. That is, for the consumer, the values ​​of the medium in which they have found the advertisement have a effect on the brand and the company that appears in that advertisement. People in Internet do not separate the content and assume that if you advertise in one place you are supporting that editorial line. That thought has some logic. After all, the media li
  If you are a seller and you haven't thought of integrating Shopify with Amazon, then most experts will probably tell you that you are missing out a great deal. To some extent, the statement may be right. But hold on, not so fast; looking at it from a broader perspective, I think Amazon has its fair share of disadvantages for any business that is looking forward to building its own brand. Look, the truth is that Amazon has no interest whatsoever in helping a seller build his or her business, even if they advertise. Just like you, all they care about is building their own brand and having a firm grip on the marketplace. One advantage Amazon has is that they have gained millions of buyers' trust; which is a good thing- I mean they deserve it since it was not an overnight success.   The backbone to this is that buyers: - Use reviews from other verified purchasers to assess sellers and throw out the bad ones. - Believe the marketplace will put things right for them if t
We do not live in a perfect world. It never happens that everything goes as per plan. Something always goes wrong no matter how hard you try. You’ll find you have your share of issues and challenges to address as an Amazon seller. Have you ever had a relationship that was completely perfect in every way? Finding that perfect client is difficult We don't think so. This one won’t be different either. However, on a more positive note, you’ll have advice from the others who have found success before you, you’ll meet many who have found success before you. You don’t have to forge the path yourself, which is good. But coming into the game after others who are thriving has disadvantages as well as advantages. Since so many sellers already have caught on to the tremendous opportunity that is Amazon, you’re facing growing competition. Amazon is obviously an overcrowded marketplace. Your margins will shrink, and that is inevitable. Still, Internet commerce continues to grow. If you kee
When a consumer is looking for a particular product over the Internet, what is it that takes you to click on the "buy" button? Is it a low price? Very positive ratings? Product images and videos? Detailed information about it? In a context in which the buyer is increasingly demanding, and actively seeks to compare different items to find the one that offers the best value for money, all these factors are decisive. But according to a new Salsify report, detailed and correct information outweighs all others. It is specified that 90% of consumers already buy online and that almost all (88%) expect the information they find about the product to be rigorous, complete and varied before making a decision about the purchase. Specifically, and as we said before, a good description is the most important when deciding whether to buy or not, over other issues - also key - as the reviews or the price that are second and third place. As Salsify explains, "Consumers are very natu
Introduction My primary aim was to predict the sales of an item given the Best Seller Rank on Amazon. Predicting the sales helps me in other use cases like suggesting sellers the best products to sell. My final aim is to provide data insights about any product: How much it will sell as well as when, where and how. What is Amazon's Best Seller Rank? Best Selling Rank is a ranking system provided by Amazon that is linked to the number of sales of that product. This rank is calculated frequently. An important point to note is that Best Selling Rank is a 'ranking system' and by itself it doesn't mean anything.     A rank of #1, therefore, means that the product has sold more than any other product in that category, on that marketplace.   This kind of makes it relatively easy to predict the number of sales of a product if we know the sales of other products ranking close to it.   How did we get the initial sales data? I have been selling professionally on Amazon and
The Big Traffic Question The key to running any successful business is to have clients that buy products from you. Customer acquisition is the number one priority for any company that is selling online. Suppose you have or are planning on increasing your sales online, then you must make sure that you follow these ways to get traffic to your store, without spending a ton of money doing advertising campaigns. Make Sure Your Store is Beautiful! Having a beautiful website means that there will be people looking at your store for a longer amount of time. The design of your store is surely going to have a positive impact on future customers if it has a professional looking design. A store’s website represents what the store stands for. If you are selling products that look amazing, then the clients will expect that your website also looks stunning. For example, if you are running a store that sells wedding gowns and dresses, but your site looks like it was last redesigned in the turn of
Bad product reviews are the bane of any seller. You probably worked hard to get your order out, and yet you received a negative review, which talks unfavourably about your product. This will enrage any seller out there. Ratings that are 1-star can drag down your product’s average rating unless it already has a solid base of reviews. But even if there are already a lot of good ratings for your product, 88 percent of buyers specifically check the negative reviews to get an idea what issues could potentially arise with the product. This way, bad reviews can directly lead to a drop in sales. As a seller, you naturally want to avoid this and wonder: What should I do about unfavourable reviews? What can I do anyway? nobody likes these   The first thing that you should do is to not panic, on seeing that you have received a negative review. You must realise that if you are in this game for the long haul you will have to deal with this on a nearly regular basis. So, buckle up and take a de
Make buying online a differential experience to buy in store A few years ago, all that mattered when buying online was that the price offered by the products was lower than that of the physical stores. Consumers based their interest in the online market in the fact that what they were going to find would be cheaper than what they found in stores as always. The price continues to be a differential element to buy on the internet, but it is not the only one that matters and is not the only one that pushes the consumer to the arms of the network. Online stores have to create a unique, quality experience that sets them apart from physical stores to attract consumers' attention. Let's follow the example of online furniture stores. How can you create a completely differentiating experience that makes consumers come to the network to get the products? Brands can draw on many elements that can create a potential for purchases that is even superior to that of physical stores. Online
If you have put your product on Amazon and have it listed, you are probably hoping that the description is perfect. Here is our checklist when it comes to your product listing. Do keep these in mind when cross checking your product descriptions Mention the benefits, not the features This is an elementary rule of selling anything. Don’t concentrate on the features of your product, concentrate on the benefits. The buyer is not interested in knowing what the product can do; she only wants to know how the product will benefit her. This is basic knowledge, and while it’s important to do this, you need to be careful about how you do it, too. Start with writing down everything you know about the product. Try and be interesting; be creative and witty. It’s okay to write anything good about your product, even things like the colour, the material, special features, or ergonomic comfort. Once you’ve done this, pick the best ones and rewrite them, this time focusing on the user and how it will
Smart fulfillment is at the core of AiHello’s platform. If you’re an eCommerce seller who does business on Shopify, Woocommerce or Amazon we help you smartly fulfill your orders. Let’s better understand this with an example. Say, I sell on Woocommerce and I sell all across the world. The main challenge is fulfilling each order that may be originating from various different countries all across the globe. In the case where a customer from the US or Mexico purchases an item, then we would want to fulfill the order through Amazon US since it makes geographical sense to fulfill that order through Amazon US. If a Woocommerce user buys your product from Amazon France, Amazon Italy, Amazon Spain or what have you, AiHello helps you fulfill that order through Amazon UK because, again, it is the most efficient means to fulfill that order. On Woocommerce, we have enabled fulfillment by AiHello so that we can choose whichever order that comes from that country, we will fulfill that order with th
The reasons are very similar in both cases: savings, variety, comfort and experience The current consumer is multichannel, and is willing to buy through all kinds of ways: from the traditional store to the computer, from the mobile app to social networks. What he wants, however, is to be able to decide at any time and place what channel he wants to use on that occasion to get the desired product. But what leads you to opt for ecommerce or, conversely, to go to the store? A new GfK survey of more than 23,000 buyers from all five continents reveals that the motivations for choosing one option or another are actually very similar. One of the main reasons that consumers are betting on online shopping is the possibility of saving money, since through the Internet it is possible to compare and access a large number of retailers, and also to those who propose real bargains. In fact, the economic saving is one of the main factors that pushes to buy online, and that was considered by 55%
A major reason why many ecommerce businesses thrive and do well is optimizing their inventory management. In layman’s terms, knowing exactly how many and where to restock an item. What to stock, how much to stock and where to stock are the three pillars of a successful ecommerce business and if one of those pillars are disturbed it will affect the business’ profit margins and revenue. Knowing how much to stock lays the foundation and the rest and do what a human does best – running a business. You let the AI do the heavy lifting of how much to restock, where to restock etc. Here I will show you how the AI informs you how much to restock during the holidays. The holidays are generally a period in which an ecommerce seller will either makes a killing with a high profit margin or does not sell well and get bombarded by extremely high warehouse fees. You need to be prepared months in advance because there is are lead times, shipping times, and the closure (or backlog) of Amazon warehouse
In e-commerce is equally important what happens before as what happens after the purchase. Before the consumer makes the final click that will cause the product they want to become a purchase, the brands have to pay special attention to a large list of items. The design of the web, the photos of the product, the comments of other consumers, how the prices of different products or services are presented. All these elements are crucial to convince the consumer and all of them have become the elements of manual that all the brands and all the companies take care of. But the truth is that these are not all crucial elements and are not the only ones that brands should watch with falcon eyes. One of the trends in e-commerce is that of thinking that once the sale has been closed the work is already done. The consumer has bought, the product has been shipped and everything the seller has to do or should do is done. However, this reasoning is a mistake and only causes problems and failures in
Welcome to AiHello Machine learning e-commerce application. The goal of this application is to optimize selling physical goods on the internet via Amazon & eBay. We will be optimizing the following features in order to create a 24x7 automated selling program - Pricing of the product based on current date: we want to increase the price of a product pre-emptively based on historical prices of similar products. For example we can know beforehand that snow shovels are in demand during winter so we can increase prices before winter approaches and start dropping prices as winter fades - Pricing based on competition : we want to avoid the race to the bottom by constantly lowering the price - Keywords optimization based on product description - Estimate sales of competitors and "lookup" competitors for optimizing inventory - Forecast sales & profit - Automated personal customer support - Suggest more products to sell based on current sales I will b
  The digital era has opened up new opportunities for those that are willing to start a business. If you are searching for a spot in the online market, Amazon can become a great marketplace for your company. In order to sell on Amazon, there are two options: either we take care of the entire selling process, or we rely on “Fulfillment By Amazon” (FBA). With FBA we "rent" a space in one of the logistics stores of the American company, which from that moment is the sole responsible of processing our shipments. For many companies, this represents a great advantage, since the logistic management of an e-commerce can become a real headache. However, despite the attractiveness of this system, paying FBA fees can cut into your bottom line. To combat overcrowding in their fulfillment center, Amazon began instituting a penalty on a low Inventory Performance Index (IPI) for their third-party sellers, who provide just over half of their sales. Initiated on July 1, 2018, these penalt
As a seller, there comes a time when you are most interested in scaling your customer acquisition channels to grow your business. Sometimes it can be a tall order knowing the best platform to bring traffic to your site; traffic that you can convert to actual customers. Perhaps you have already taken your time and created the killer content & product descriptions. You have also probably studied your site analytics – and you are well conversant with best selling locations (globally). However, you can do better; that there are ways you can test channels faster, get more flexible, and even leverage existing customer data for a more in-depth insight into your next audience? Sounds interesting, right? One thing is for a fact; eCommerce is all about generating sales. Artificial Intelligence can be of great help when it comes to prospects conversion- from finding the potentials to providing after-sale services. It sure has its flaws as well, however, the effects of AI in helping you be
In our previous post, we explained 5 keys to get consumers in online markets. Of course, that is not enough and we are here to give you 5 more pieces of advice to make you e-commerce grow. 1) It has to be a solution When we buy online, we can buy simultaneously in several spaces and various types of products. We do not have to navigate sections of a supermarket, for example, browsing shelves to see what we find, but you can put many things at the same time in the cart. This implies that companies have to be able to see the purchase not as something that is made product to product, but rather as a process in which products are keys to more things. 2) Many more audiences have to be reached, even those who have been forgotten In a physical store, space is limited. A supermarket can not sell vegan products if there is not really a significant niche market and a cosmetics store can not sell a type of shampoo that only buy 2 people in that neighborhood. However, the online store allows y
The psychology of why we buy is much more complex than it might seem, as well as how we respond to purchases and how these processes modify our perceptions about the things we do and about our relationship with brands. One of the elements that are associated with purchases and what brands should be considered is buyers 'remorse, which is known as buyers' remorse or poor shopping awareness, and that modifies how they act and how they feel consumers in relation to what they buy. Basically, consumer remorse is feeling bad after buying for one reason or another and it is a feeling that everyone has felt on occasion. It's the thrill that comes with deciding to buy something (and buying it) and you begin to think that maybe it was not such a good idea or maybe you should not have bought something that you really need. It is what happens when you buy a book despite having to read; when you buy new shoes although it is not something you really need or when you do with a product
One of the issues usually mentioned when talking about e-commerce is that it has served to break the frontiers. Consumers often look for specific things, products that they want, and it really gives them a little equal where the sellers sell them if what they offer them is what they want and if they make it arrive quickly and efficiently. This has created a boom in so-called cross-border trade (for example, we have to think about how we buy books today and where they come from nowadays: online bookstores sell all over the world, some of them even with free shipping no matter where you are) and has made consumers open their range of options. There are those who buy directly from Chinese e-commerces, although the products end up taking much longer to arrive than if they are bought in a geographically close online store. But is this principle absolutely true? Are consumers really so foreign to geography? I mean, are we buying without really caring about the physical location of who se
What are online ads for? In a market where brands not only have to face the general lack of interest of consumers in advertising but also have to be able to overcome the fact that consumers themselves are increasingly active in blocking advertising and not directly see it (after all, this is the era of ad blockers and consumers with the 'quick finger' to skip as soon as the online video ads can), you might fall into the temptation to think Online advertising, in the end, serves little or nothing. However, studies show that, despite everything, the ads seen on the network have an impact on consumers and have an impact, moreover, that goes beyond what happens in the network itself. That is, online ads not only impact consumers online behaviors, but also offline. This is just demonstrated by a study that has just appeared published in Marketing Science and that have made several university experts and linked to several technology companies that at the time of doing the analysi
You’ve already seen how easy it is to get started selling on Amazon’s Marketplace, and this is definitely the place for you to begin. For those just starting out without deep pockets for marketing, “Amazon is by far the best online marketplace for small businesses who do not have a big advertising budget,” says Bing Yang of Augustina Jewellery. If you’re already selling in an online market, you will be delighted to see how simple it is to move business to Amazon. But, even if you’ve never sold anything on the Internet, you’ll be on your way in no time. For a new seller, you can’t beat the fact that listing your items for sale on Amazon is free. That’s right, you don’t pay a thing unless your item sells. Whether you list a single item or start out with dozens, your only cost will be in commissions when your items sell. Then you’ll pay Amazon a flat 15 percent commission on the sales price. Amazon will charge your customers a set fee for shipping and handling, and if you buy your suppl
A few years ago, the San Francisco City Council ordered that an advertising campaign be stopped. They did not give it a day's worth of life when they forced it out. The campaign was at the bus stops and was an olfactory marketing. Bus stops smelled like cookies to boost a milk brand. City officials feared that it would be too annoying and had an effect on people with allergies. Despite this, it is not difficult to find on the internet photos that leave a trace of what happened: those who waited for the bus appear to have a dreaming face smelling those cookies. The idea is not particularly new. The truth is that in recent times olfactory marketing has become a kind of 'must' that everyone has to do, from the big chains to the smallest. Everyone seems to already have their fragrance. Smell is one more element when it comes to branding. However, and although the smell is the one that has become fashionable lately, it is not the only sense that can be taken into account whe