As e-commerce has become an increasingly important element of branding and business strategy, a number of elements have been added to the list of things businesses have to worry about and in which they have to focus if they want to connect with your potential buyers in the new times. One of those elements is delivery. Unlike traditional commerce, where consumers have things at the same time they buy them, in e-commerce one has to wait for purchases to arrive home. For companies in this sector, this is one of their most crucial issues and one, moreover, that they have to leave in the hands of a third party. They can not control the deliveries, but they have to contract them to third parties, which implies a new expense that is transferred to the consumer and that has become one of those elements of the eternal debate. Because... what do consumers prefer? Do you want to have your purchases right now and therefore are willing to do anything to have things as soon as possible? Or, on t...
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When e-commerce appeared, many people rushed to announce the death of traditional commerce. Consumers were increasingly buying online and, therefore, they were condemning physical stores to a possible future death. His luck was set and it did not seem to be very positive. But in spite of it, the physical stores are still there and they are a very important part of the buying habits. In fact, consumers are quite far from being buyers of one or the other scenario. They want to buy in all the stages and they want to do it also how and when they please. That does not imply, however, that they do not see the different sales channels without problems and without fail, and that they have no complaints and negative opinions about them. That physical stores have been around for so long does not necessarily mean that everything is seen in them with special good eyes. Consumers remain highly critical and continue to find defects that should be addressed. What are the things that most frustrat...
First, you buy the products from a supplier to sell them under your brand name. You don’t actually manufacture them, which is the conventional way of doing business. You create a private brand and then put all the bought products under that brand so you can resell them. For this, you need to get custom logos printed on the items and their packages, and get the previous brand identities (if any) removed. This ensures that the customer will associate the product with your brand, not with that of the manufacturer. This strategy is extremely popular right now and most online sellers use it. You can find companies that will help you in creating your own brand identity. They’ll advise you on extending, promoting, and positioning your brand in the market, so you can make the best of it. Here are a few things that you need to know about this practice. Easier to handle Trading is easier than manufacturing, that’s pretty obvious. There’s a lot less trouble in comparison, so you need to throw...
The boom of mobile devices has made the Internet users stop using their computers - and therefore the desktop - as the only entry point to information and consumption. Their smartphones and tablets have been erected as the space they get when they want to see a movie, to read those news that interests them in a media, publish a status update on their social network and, of course, search the product they want to buy or about which they are looking for data. M-commerce has become an increasingly common reality and consumers are more comfortable. Do not ignore the power of an app When thinking about m-commerce, many are the elements that are open to debate and of which brands have to make decisions. One of them is to establish if the brand stays only with the mobile version of its e-commerce website or if it also creates a mobile application that offers direct access to products and services without going through the web. It may seem that once you have a mobile access, the app no l...
It is not very difficult to find examples or at least think about them. We have all met with some product that advertised what it was with enthusiasm. The mini bottle of gel in the hotel room that exclaims I'm soap, use me! The chocolate that is sold as a remedy for difficult days.You just have to think about any product and it is possible that somewhere someone has already tried to sell with that presentation to the friendly and nice, the nice. It is what is known as friendly branding. The product is presented in a fun and friendly packaging, one that is charming and friendly. These types of designs have a clear explanation and justification. To the user, these products are more accessible and it is easier to establish a connection with them. For example, you just have to think about the Dropbox case. Dropbox is a product that, at first glance, does not look anything particularly accessible or especially nice. In the end, what we are selling is storage in the cloud, something th...
The growth in e-commerce is exponential Online retail is perhaps the most high-profile e-commerce sector. Over the past decade, this sector has experienced both explosive growth and spectacular failures. Many of the early pure-play online-only firms that pioneered the retail marketspace failed. Entrepreneurs and their investors seriously misjudged the factors needed to succeed in this market. But the survivors of this early period emerged much stronger, and along with traditional offline general and specialty merchants, as well as new start-ups, the e-tail space is growing very rapidly and is increasing its reach and size. Although online retailing is one of the smallest segments of the global retail industry, constituting about 7% of the total retail market today, it is growing at a faster rate than its offline counterparts, with new functionality and product lines being added every day. In the United States, the apparel and accessories category generates the highest percentage of...
E-commerce has positioned itself as one of the main markets, growing by leaps and bounds. However, it is a trade dominated by the female sector, since a large part of the women make purchases on the network. While in the case of men few are using the click to make their purchases. The star product that women in the network are looking for are household items and decoration, what is the reason? Furniture stores are often separated, on the outskirts of the city. Visiting them all, on many occasions, means losing an entire afternoon and more if you have to wait for the couple to buy together. While for men, electronics is the star product for similar reasons; buy a plasma television or the game console of the moment, in just one click, without moving to the physical store or having to load the order. Fashion is the common ground of both sexes Both women and men, see on the Internet the opportunity to buy clothes without having to go to the physical stores and try it at home comfortabl...
Let's continue with some advice for your marketing strategy! - Schedule: Place each of the actions of the plan in a calendar where each responsible agent of the campaign is compromised. It will help you locate, evaluate and arrange not only the execution of actions but also budgets. - Target your audience: Define your target audience in a clear and accurate way. Research the pattern references very carefully so you do not waste your budget. Target your ads to a specific audience group. You will ensure conversion and you will have quality traffic. - Specialized metrics: How will you measure the results? This is one of the most important stages of the process because thanks to the web analytics, you will realize if the actions taken are bearing fruit. I recommend using: Google Analytics, Wroopra, GetClicky, W3Counter and ClickHeat. - Advertising Modes: Identifies the mode under which you want to target: CPM (cost per thousand), CPC (cost per click), CPL (cost per lead) or CPA...
The lack of information or provide contradictory documentation on shipping costs or exceptions that are not admissible to the right of withdrawal are just some of the most common faults that can be found when buying online. Information not available or contradictory about the shipping costs. Often online retailers are missing information on shipping options. In many cases users find that the expenses indicated previously do not match the calculated actual expenses of the final shipment. It should be added to this situation that information on shipping costs is often incomplete: not all countries to which the products are supplied are listed, missing details and weights of the product groups and have not been registered possible reimbursement expenses that may arise. How to solve it? Before the customer places a product in the shopping list, he must be able to calculate the shipping costs, including additional costs, such as a shipment per carrier. If the shipping costs have bee...
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...
- 1. AiHello- Features - Pricing - 2. BidX- Features - Pricing - 3. Quartile- Features - Pricing - 4. Pacvue- Features - Pricing - 5. Skai- Features - Pricing - 6. M19- Features - Pricing - 7. Ad Badger- Features - Pricing - 8. Adtomic- Features - Pricing - 9. Sellerapp- Features - Pricing - 10. Intentwise- Features - Pricing - 11. Sellozo- Features - Pricing - 12. Perpetua- Features - Pricing - Conclusion Teikametrics is a popular software and managed service provider for Amazon and Walmart sellers that need help with their PPC. They’ve been around since 2015 and have become popular for their Flywheel platform and the market intelligence tools they offer. Like any other software, however, Teikametrics has its downsides. Here are what a few recent reviews had to say about the services they offer (all reviews are from Google): “Worst company I have ever done business with. They destroyed the profitability of my account, wasted so much money, and lied to me that it was going well. I was ...
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...
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...
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...
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...