In today’s world, consumers invest their time and money between brick and mortar stores, online shopping with store pickup, and conventional eCommerce. According to Vijay Sundaram, Chief Strategy Officer at Zoho Corporation, consumers have transformed into ominichannel consumers. In other words, they now only make purchases and do their research before buying in various platforms. This has caused them to be more demanding, which has pushed retailers into a battle to keep their attention and loyalty.
With the objective of helping businesses to be successful in the era of the omnichannel consumer, we have summarized the following tips from Sundaram:
Create In-store Points of Sale and Orders
This will allow your customers to interact with your brand, try products, explore, and buy in innovative ways. A PDV system can offer personalized services, like order history, etc. This has the capability of offering suggestions that allow comparisons and convenient reordering, which will tell your customers that your business knows their preferences.
Offer Multiple Payment Options
Customers need payment options: credit and debit cards, “cash-based” cards, among others. It’s essential to ensure that each option is secure and trustworthy (with encoding, among others). It’s also recommended to use VPN to block cybercriminals from accessing the website and stealing sensitive information, including credit cards.
Other Shipping Options
You can do this through an integration with multiple shipping providers. Provide your customers options that go from free shipping (which can take some additional time) to express shipping (to an additional cost). Varied options will help satisfy the different needs that your customers have.
Be Clear About Your Sales Channels
You must configure your online store to sell through the channels that your business requires. Among those are the integration of your eCommerce platform, third-party marketplaces (Etsy, Amazon, etc.), and physical sales channels —even if they’re only used to create brand awareness—
Use Artificial Intelligence Tools
AI has become more present in businesses’ commercial processes and analytics, so it’s no longer a complex topic or a ghost from the future. Now, many software providers are integrating AI in their solutions, since it provides a quick and efficient way of analyzing their customers’ navigation and purchase behaviors.
AI offers information about the buying experience from start to finish: it discovers and solves problems, it helps to understand why visitors abandon the website and don’t finalize their purchases, and it detects shipping and return problems.
Sundaram concludes that it’s crucial to create an eCommerce store according to present standards and everchanging trends. So, it’s important to keep up to date with industry news and trends, and technological advances that could be integrated to your business. In addition, it’s advisable to maintain the habit of following websites that offer an excellent customer experience, which is described by Sundaram as “the heart of every business.”
To read the full article (in Spanish), click here.
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