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The Impact of Packaging on Your eCommerce Sales

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | The Impact of Packaging on Your eCommerce SalesPackaging is one of the most crucial elements of an eCommerce store and it can determine the level of success your business experiences. The way you package your product goes a long way to attracting potential customers, appealing to your target audience and differentiating your brand from the competition.

With an eCommerce business, you don’t have the benefit of customers being able to pick your products up or to talk to them face to face about your offerings, so you’re reliant on first impressions. That’s where packaging comes in to win new customers, retain existing ones and boost sales.

A rising demand for sustainable packaging

Sustainability has become an increasingly prominent issue for customers in recent years, and consumers want the products they buy to be packaged in a sustainable, environmentally-friendly way. eCommerce businesses need to be sure they’re not overpacking their products which will contribute towards excess and unnecessary waste. They also need to ensure that the materials they use are recyclable or compostable to ease the burden placed on our planet.

Sustainable packaging comes in various forms and there are many packaging strategies for eCommerce businesses to try, from shipping in smaller packages to using biodegradable alternatives and plant-based solutions. These options improve your brand’s reputation, lower shipping costs for your business and increase sales.

Increased scrutiny from consumers

With the rise in online purchasing, businesses need to do all they can to connect with consumers on a personal level. In eCommerce, a customer’s perceptions of a brand are primarily based on their initial unboxing experience, so they’ll be checking for packaging damage, whether the item arrives in good condition and how the delivery experience was for them. Damage and faulty goods can negatively affect your reputation and lead to customers going to a different supplier, so the way in which you package your items makes all the difference.

This is even more important with food products. Customers have much higher standards when it comes to consumables, so you need to think about the item you’re selling and how best to package it to preserve the integrity of the product. For example, serving up one of the nation’s most popular drinks, tea bags are sensitive to light and moisture. As such, businesses in this niche need to choose packaging that provides a barrier to these elements to ensure the customer receives the product in the same condition as when you packaged it. Likewise, a company selling bath products needs to be sure the contents of a customer’s orders will remain intact and won’t absorb moisture.

The importance of visual appeal

While it’s true that packaging serves a practical function, there’s also a fantastic opportunity for eCommerce businesses to play with the design of their product and shipping packaging to elevate their brand presence and entice customers to buy. On average, customers form an opinion about a product in just 3 seconds, so you don’t have long to get their attention and keep it. Visuals are essential for representing your brand in the right way and could be the difference between a customer choosing to buy from your online business versus another.

You can use packaging design to convey your unique brand identity and messaging in a clear and concise way, so customers are immediately aware of what your business is about. Make sure your colours and fonts are cohesive with your brand and that you’re clearly displaying your business name, logo and trademarks so consumers instantly know that it’s your brand they’re purchasing from and will recognise your products from their aesthetically appealing designs.

Greater customer loyalty

Great packaging could spell the difference between a customer using your business again or switching to someone else, so it pays to take this into consideration. Consider if someone is purchasing a gift for a friend or relative. The packaging of your product could have a significant impact on whether they’re likely to consider your brand or someone else’s, and whether they’re likely to consider you again in the future.

Customer loyalty is an argument for considering custom packaging for your eCommerce goods, setting your products apart from the rest of the industry and making the design unique to your brand. Custom packaging is an underused marketing tactic that would put you a step ahead of your competition, but it also gives you the opportunity to really hone in on what your customers are looking for and provide it to them. Getting creative with the design, from the size, shape and functionality to colours and finishes, will delight your customers and encourage them to think of your business when they need to make a purchase.

Key takeaways

eCommerce businesses have to take packaging into account for a number of reasons, particularly if they want another effective method of boosting their online sales. Packaging plays an important role in protecting the interior items, providing a great service to customers and improving brand reputation and loyalty. There are so many opportunities to make packaging a focal point of a product, from playing with different designs to make your items stand out on the digital shelves to choosing sustainable materials that will give you eco points with consumers.

The main goal when it comes to increasing sales through packaging is to ensure that the style of packaging you choose is suitable for the products you’re sending out to customers and that the appearance matches up with the impression you want to give your customers.

Online Marketplace: New challenges to overcome

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Online Marketplace: New challenges to overcome

The marketplace model of eCommerce is one such breakthrough that allowed everyone to become a part of the new ecosystem of online commerce. There was a time when the entry of an online alternative in a market would scare the hell out of small offline retailers. The consumer behavior was changing and the prices were getting aggressively competing; it was not easy for small retailers to keep up with their online counterparts.

Then came the marketplace model that allowed even small retailers to claim a share from the multi-billion dollar pie of eCommerce. Now, instead of competing with the offline retailers, the eCommerce sites were connecting third-party retailers directly to their customers. We called this model the pure marketplace ecosystem, where the owner of the marketplace did not maintain the inventory but simply connect the people with inventories to the people who want to purchase. The marketplace was just an intermediary, which would make money from the commissions they charged on each sale generated for their retailers.

The time changed, markets evolved, competition became even harsh, and marketplaces required more innovative ways to make money than the mere commissions. This gave birth to different sub-classifications of the actual marketplace model, which still exists:

  • E-Bay: A peer-to-peer marketplace that sales only from the third-party inventories
  • Amazon: A hybrid marketplace that sales from both in-house and third party inventories
  • Walmart: A hybrid combined with the physical model to sell both in online and offline ecosystems

What’s next in the marketplace model of eCommerce?

The meaning of an online marketplace is changing as we speak. Today, the boundary that differentiates a physical marketplace from its online counterpart is as thin as a thread. The biggest names in the marketplace ecosystem, such as Amazon, Alibaba, and Walmart, have established both online and offline presence and securing major shares of the pie through their Omni-channel manifestations.

Today, the marketplace business is no more about massive catalogs of different categories of products. Instead, marketplaces are creating ecosystems for their customers. They are driving customers towards the business from all possible sides and earning customer loyalty by offering everything at one place on any channel. Take Amazon for example. Is there anything that Amazon can’t offer to a common consumer? From entertainment to finance, grocery, vegetables, electronics, home furnishing, and cloud services, Amazon is the best example to understand the rapidly evolving face of the Retail 4.0 marketplace model today.

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Is the marketplace is a profitable business idea in 2020?

It indeed is. Even the biggest entities in the market cannot cover everything. There are still numerous niches with profitable prospects for the new entrants. It certainly not an easy job to set up a marketplace and compete with the likes of Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, and Walmart. However, you don’t need to compete with them, if you identify some niche marketplace ideas. The marketplace model offers an array of benefits to the merchants and the customers, and all of them could encourage them to come along with your platform:

  • A combined channel: You could offer a hybrid channel to small retailers and merchants to generate sales from both online and offline markets.
  • Better exposure: Selling on a marketplace platform reveals new doors to the merchants who have been relying on traditional channels. They can even expand their business internationally.
  • Reduced marketing cost: Merchants need not spend a fortune to build eCommerce sites and then marketing them. They can save all these costs by simply signing up on your marketplace.
  • Established trust factors: Retailers get access to an established platform, which its customers already trust. This trust factor is induced to the sellers of the marketplace, too.
  • Competitive product prices: With so many sellers available for a single product, the prices are l always competitive. It encourages more customers to shop from your site.
  • Multiple revenue channels: As a marketplace owner, you need not depend on commissions alone to make money. You can make money from several non-traditional channels, such as showing featured products, sponsored products, and selling membership subscriptions for added benefits to sellers and the customers.

No doubt, the above benefits for everyone lay down the foundation of the marketplace model, but it’s not all breezy either. There are some pitfalls too that require strategic resolutions:

  • It’s all technology: The core that drives an online marketplace business is pure technology. From the marketplace software to web-hosting, content delivery networks, third party APIs, and compliance with the laws, everything is driven by technology. That makes a competitive marketplace setup quite expensive, complex, and workforce-extensive.
  • Chicken and egg problem: Sellers won’t board your marketplace until you have enough customers to make good sales, and customers can’t purchase until you have sellers. It makes the opening days for a marketplace business pretty complicated. You would need a significant amount of investment to market your platform, and then acquire sellers through handsome incentives.
  • Data security: When you are managing a massive marketplace with so many merchants, customers, and sensitive information onboard, there is a high risk of data security. Since the only asset you have is your platform and data, you have to be very particular about keeping it secure.

How you can start an online marketplace business?

It’s a big question – how to start an online marketplace business? There is the technology and there is business process development, both go hand-in-hand to form a complete marketplace ecosystem. If you have a business plan or a niche in your mind, you need to focus your efforts on handling the following four challenges first, and you could own a great marketplace business:

Note: You need to manage these challenges keeping your customers and sellers/merchants in thought. You can’t start a marketplace by conciliating with the needs of any of the two stakeholders.

Marketplace Software

Marketplace software constitutes your entire platform. You would need a collection of different marketplace solutions that work collectively to build your marketplace platform. One of the major constituents is – the marketplace website.

Marketplace website builder: You can develop your marketplace platform from scratch by outsourcing your project or hiring in-house developers. However, this would be a highly expensive and time-consuming undertaking. Instead, you can purchase a ready-made, open-source, multi-vendor eCommerce script to set up your platform in a few hours. There are various clone scripts in the market; you can get one of them and build your website. These scripts will provide all the fundamental features you need to build your platform. Since they offer open-source code access, you can also customize them the way you want.

Another alternative is using a free eCMS like Magento, PrestaShop, or OpenCart. However, these Commerce platforms are mainly suitable for inventory-based eCommerce sites, as they do not provide multi-vendor support out-of-the-box. You will have to purchase a corresponding multi-vendor module or extension from a third-party vendor to add marketplace features. They are open-source too.

Some SaaS solutions are also present in the market with ready-made marketplace sites. If you are ready to pay a monthly recurring fee, transaction fee per-sale, and can do with limited control over your site, this could be one of the fastest ways to build and launch your site in a day. These solutions are closed-source.

The choice is yours, you can use any of these options based on your preference and requirements. Do some research and select the most suitable option, as it would be a long-term commitment. You can’t switch your marketplace software every now or then.

Branding and Marketing

Be advised that customers don’t remember the seller but the marketplace platform itself. Therefore, every bad experience customers receive from your sellers directly affects your business image. All the discounts, Ads, and promotions, happen in the name of the marketplace platform. If you can’t get your customers to remember your brand identity, know that there is something wrong with your marketing and branding activities.

Supply-chain and Demand

The sole purpose of a marketplace platform is to fill the gap between supply and demand. Both the buyers and the merchants are your customers. You need to maintain a steady flow of demand and supply to keep both of the ends happy. Without buyers, you will lose customers and demand; without sellers, you will lose the supply-chain. Happy customers create demand, and sellers create the supply. You have to maintain an optimum balance between the two entities to succeed.

Flawless Customer Support

For both the buyers and the sellers, customer support is the most volatile constituent that might just ruin everything at any stage. There is a need for offering continuously impeccable customer support to the stakeholders. However, it cannot happen unless your sellers are supportive to the customers. You might try your best to give flawless experience to the buyers, but everything stops if your sellers don’t do their part. You must create an environment where everyone is doing his or her jobs properly. From quality control to addressing queries, processing refunds, and undertaking replacements, everything should work in harmony with each other. Consider professional grade customer service software or hiring professionals to build you efficient systems to reduce customer support issues.

To Conclude

Overall, the marketplace is a challenging business. However, easy businesses don’t furnish good returns. You can win this war with technical advancements and customer-friendly policies. If you want to create a hub of customers like Amazon and eBay, you shouldn’t arbitrate on the above four fronts. Invest in innovative marketplace software solutions, bridge the supply-demand gap, market your business, and extend the best customer support –this is the optimal way to command the new challenges of marketplace business and succeed effortlessly.

About the Author

Jessica Bruce a professional blogger, guest writer, Influencer & an eCommerce expert. She is currently associated with ShopyGen as a content marketing strategist. Jessica also reports on the latest happenings and trends associated with the eCommerce industry.

Follow her on Twitter @Jessicabruc (https://twitter.com/Jessicabruc)

Talking Shop – What Your Ecommerce Site Can’t Do Without

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If you’re reading this then you know that the future of shopping is well-and-truly online. But not every shop is created equal. The ecommerce businesses that keep the tips below in mind are going to see much more success with their customers.

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article

Focus on the user experience first and foremost

This should be a given for any site but in the world of ecommerce, it’s actually easier to lose customers. Beyond categorization for products that makes sense and smart advanced search options, take an in-depth look through the whole process of buying items on your store. Think about where you can trim the fat, where another page or another click might not necessarily be needed. Putting customers through too long a process puts you at real risk of shopping cart abandonment. Another way of fighting it is by using breadcrumb navigation that shows customers at what stage they’re at through every part of the process. User friendliness must be your first and last concern.

Work to your product

No two ecommerce systems should work alike. In fact, if they have different products and different target markets, they should be wildly different. Beyond good navigation, you need a focus on the value proposition of the site and the individual products. For instance, the front page should be loud and clear with the deals on some of the most popular product types on the site. A front page that says nothing about the products is going to result in a lot of confused visitors. But attention to detail should go deeper than that. For instance, writing great product descriptions depends wildly from product to product. Lifestyle and fashion products, for instance, rely more on greater visual detail. Meanwhile, tech like computers and TVs need the technical details up-front. We’re talking resolutions, gigabytes, and compatibilities. You can’t sell two different kinds of products on the same selling points.

Have a site that works with you

Even worse than a site that’s confusing to customers is one that’s confusing to you. Not just in terms of design but management. Nowadays, there a lot of ecommerce hosting options that make it a lot easier for site owners to choose a platform built specifically for hosting ecommerce pages, with all the various sub-pages that go with it. Continuous, never-ending testing of the site is essential, too. Not just to make sure all pages are working. Methods like A/B testing also help you better understand how to make the site much easier to use for the customer.

Watch and learn

One of the best things about running a shop online as opposed to in the physical world is how much easier it is to store data on not just your customer base, but individual customers, too. Measuring the whole gives you a finger on the pulse of the market, seeing the trends from the customer’s’ point of view that can help you decide on which new stock might work best for the business. Building individual customer profiles, however, lets you go even further. You can specialize offers and create a bespoke browsing experience for each user that makes them a lot more likely to see something they’re tempted to buy.

How Social Media Benefits Your Business

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When it comes to designing a fully comprehensive marketing strategy, you have to include social media. Social media has given companies a level of access into human behavior unparalleled in the world before. It also gives companies huge scope to widen their reach and attract new customers. There is also scope to use the insights you gather to create better marking material going forwards and connect with your potential customer base in a more meaningful manner. Therefore it is a vital tool for showcasing your brand and increasing awareness.

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | How Social Media Benefits Your Business

Align Messages with Core Values

Whenever you post something meaningful on social media, ensure that it relates in some way to your core values. Core values represent the underlying ethical principles of the organization. It helps if these values are present across all your campaign material and website. By using social media, you will express your key messages and communicate and connect with people from all walks of life. When people visit your website as a result of this material, they can see that you are exactly what you say you are. Having a coherent strategy is essential in order to get your messages out there and appear genuine. This builds trust, and therefore loyalty and social media is a huge asset in this way.

Boosting Brand Awareness

When you upload a post on social media, you don’t really know where it will end up. What that means is that the reach social media gives to your material is extremely large. Users have the chance to share, comment, and likes which keeps the posts relevant. You need to have a great social media strategy to keep people interested; you need images and stories to share. You need to post regularly up to three times a day to become recognizable. It takes at least seven viewings of your brand name to become a recognized brand, so you need to keep posting. But social media is a way to get your brand out there and in people’s heads.

Customer Engagement

One of the major advantages of social media is the scope it gives you to embrace customer engagement. Never has it been so easy to communicate with your potential customer base. You can talk directly to people in a fun and social way, which engenders meaningful chat. It is through this type of engagement that valuable insights can be gathered. Arguably the most important aspect is that you will really come to know your key customer type. You are likely to be engaging with people who have a stake in what you are offering, so you will be able to create an ideal customer profile through this. With this information, you can create better products and services which suit your customer’s needs better, and you can create better marketing material that powerfully speaks to these people. Customer engagement offers a whale range of other benefits, too, such as humanizing your brand and having that emotional connection. If you want more help with building this sort of engagement, why not try some community software.

How Social Media Benefits Your Business

With the development of sophisticated communication apps that connect millions of people, businesses can now maximize and reach a wider audience with strategic marketing. However, sometimes it may be challenging where to start and what methods to use to get a specific group. So, begin by solving seo challenges by having a professional seo service provider run this process.

After you fix your seo, you’ll be able to tailor your marketing to a specific audience. Therefore, you can be assured of increased traffic to your website and increased sales in the long run. But, of course, you also want to incorporate other methods to give your business more traffic and exposure.

GetInsta Changes the Way You Live on Instagram

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, GetInsta Changes the Way You Live on InstagramToday you can find a brand new world of influencers come out of Instagram. Every person holding an account on Instagram believes that it covers all their needs concerning information, interactions, and sales.

However, it’s becoming more and more difficult today to attract new followers, not to say free Instagram followers or likes. People start to find new ways to increase their fans. That’s why Instagram followers apps such as GetInsta have become one of the world’s most renowned applications that work in all smartphones.

In this article, we will discuss the Instagram platform deeper and also give you some fresh ideas about how you can become more popular on it. Let’s dive right in.

How Instagram Interacts With Our Need for Information?

People used to need information ever since the first newspaper has been invented and introduced to primary societies. That information should be as objective as it can to ensure that all people enjoy the same level of joy and happiness. Even after the TV era, Instagram has been one of the most popular social media to interact with others and learn about what is going on in the world.

Most Instagram users are reluctant to check their news feed on other sites due to biased results. The need for an objective source of information that bases its culture on the image is what Instagrammers are looking for. People who have seen Instagram influencers before state that the power of images and videos overcomes any difficulty in language and location.

There is also a covered need on the part of the influencers to promote new services and goods. That is included in the mainstream marketing abilities and gives us more incentives to attract followers online. Having an application like the GetInsta to offer you increased value information about the location and preferences of your audience places you in a dominant position.

More Instagram Likes Mean More Money?

Likes are what make the world turn around on Instagram. There is no way to have a successful Instagram account when you have fewer free Instagram likes and interactions throughout the day. That’s why you need to be always on top of things and run surveys about your audience’s needs and preferences. Marketers always like to invest their money on Instagram account with a wide followers’ base and many likes.

Like is the well-known heart symbol that makes the Instagram experience a lot more fascinating. People like to give hearts to the images and videos Instagram influencers upload, which is the fuel for growth. More followers can give you extended satisfaction and an increased money flow to your account.

How Can Applications Like GetInsta Charge You Less for More?

The GetInsta application is easy to download to any smartphone or tablet. It gets on well with all operating systems, especially the popular Android and IOS. You also need less memory space to store the application and start using its friendly interface. You only need to identify the logo of this app and always paste it as wallpaper to the main operating screen of your smartphone.

The basic features of the application are always offered for free. Besides offering you the ability to get Instagram followers free, It also takes you millions of interactions before you actually start paying for these services. The return on your investment would then become massive and give you more incentives to start spending on these apps. As a paid member, you will have access to metrics and analytics about your Instagram account and its potential to penetrate different markets. After all, it’s worth paying for an application that shows you the daily trends and gives you more weapons to be competitive in the world market. That’s why the applications are now becoming more organized and well-structured to serve the upraise in local and global demand.

GetInsta Is Your Guide to Instagram Supremacy

Have you ever thought about why some Instagram accounts fail? They usually belong to the ones that have no connection to the Instagram applications like the GetInsta. There is no way to become profitable when you don’t use the right applications. Having your followers loyal is more important than attracting dozens of new ones throughout the day. It would be best to see fewer unfollow messages, which could only happen when you know what to serve your followers.

With GetInsta, you can proactively monitor all your followers and find the right way to interact with them on a stable and permanent basis. People who look at your account daily do so because they like your content. If you lack fresh ideas, then you should rely on the information coming from the GetInsta application that has taken the market by storm. It would help if you had a correct idea of your audience’s needs and how you will make your pics and videos more appealing for those people. It’s the application that makes you more profitable in the long run!