Memorial Day Promotion Ideas 2021
Memorial Day is the day to honour fallen soldiers and an unofficial mark of summers. Small eCommerce businesses see it as an opportunity to attract new customers and increase sale. These businesses take advantage of Memorial Day by running promotion campaigns to earn more revenues. Here are some of the ideas to run as promotions on Memorial Day. Join a BBQ or Outdoor Events People often have a day off and are looking for a place to chill out. Thus there cannot be a better day to host an outdoor event to attract visitors. A party on the beach or a barbecue event, or a picnic in a park would do. Create email templates tailored as an invitation for Memorial Day promotion events. List all the fun activities like raffles or giveaways in your email templates to arouse your customers’ interest. You can also free samples or one-day discounts to people who attend your party. Highlight summer-related items Memorial Day is the best time to launch summer-related merchandise. Send emails to customers to remind them you are the go-to eCommerce store for Memorial Day goods. In fact, you can run Memorial Day-themed promotions with a focus on the summer season on your website. You can also offer them discounts or start a sale. You can craft email campaigns to highlight special summer discounts or to announce new launches on Memorial Day. Create a one-day deal for veterans Craft a new email template with a Memorial Day background, to send out to Veterans with promotional offers for them. One popular theme for this day is patriotism with red, blue and white colours. Offer special Memorial Day promotion discounts, giveaways or freebies to honour veterans on purchasing from your eCommerce store. Another approach would be offering an exclusive one-day deal for veterans, active military members, and their families will make them feel appreciated and show you care for the community. Happy Hour Happy hours are those special hours of the day when a customer gets a particular discount or offer on making a purchase. So, have happy hours on Memorial Day to offer an extra discount on every purchase. Use it as a topic for email marketing campaigns Email marketing campaigns never hurt your business and are a great way to engage with your customers. Send out emails to your audience with a promotional offer or an event or contests or giveaways. Memorial Day is a perfect occasion to also collect emails of visitors on your website by asking them to register in return for discounts etc. So, design memorable, engaging and personalised emails with Memorial Day promotion offers and send them to your customers to re-engage with them and offer them an incentive to make purchases from you. Conclusion Memorial Day is one of the big shopping weekends of the year. Small e-commerce businesses offer extra holiday day discounts on this day to attract new customers.
Best Themes For BigCommerce Stores
Do you have a product to sell online? Then you need a powerful online platform that will provide the best experience for your customers. BigCommerce provides fully-featured online stores and eCommerce websites with several kinds of themes for leveraging your store layout. To make it easier, we have selected the 10 best BigCommerce themes for eCommerce websites. Brooklynk Are you a fashion designer? Are you looking for a simple but effective eCommerce theme for your store? Brooklynk is one unique BigCommerce theme that is quite trendy for fashion stores. It has a clean and professional look to grab people’s attention at the first sight. The theme has an Instagram module that allows you to connect to your social feeds. If you already have a fashion website and are looking for an upgrade, this is what you need. Beautica Theme Do you want to run multiple stores? If you want to delve into fashion and beauty stores, then Beautica would be a well-suited offer. The theme is applicable for both fashion and beauty items – you can sell both clothes and cosmetics products. What’s more, the premium version comes with unique features such as an Instagram module, mega menu, logo slider, LookBook page, lazy loading images, product labels, and so on. SarahMarket SarahMarket is a perfect theme for your grocery store or supermarket. It is optimized for SEO and loading speed, which serves as an additional advantage. Additionally, you can showcase your products in several ways – product categories, new arrivals, and most popular products. Get the SarahMarket because it is highly responsive and comes with several customization options. ShopTown The theme is rather similar to SarahMarket but has a more modern and trendier design. For new online store owners, ShopTown is easily customizable with features such as a quick view option, zoom magnifier, vertical mega menu, product grids, and much more. Besides, ShopTown is highly responsive on mobile devices and optimized for SEO. Furnicom The name pretty much gives a picture of what the theme is about. Furnicom is your best theme for architecture, interior design, and furniture stores. Your store is bound to look great on all devices since it is highly responsive. Furthermore, it gives you total freedom to configure the theme the way you want. Jewelry Parallax Your one-stop online store theme for all jewelry-related items. It has a stunning parallax effect with elegant typography to captivate your audience. With fully responsive and configurable block sections, you can get the sales you desire. eMartica eMartica theme has a modern design that perfectly fits any online supermarket store. Easy to customize and fully responsive, you can find exciting features such as mega menu modules, product quick views, product display, and much more. Caros Theme With its elegant and simple design, Caros theme is an excellent choice if you deal in cars. It displays items boldly for your customers to see in several ways. Furthermore, you can choose from 3 different homepage layouts with 3 different product page layouts for your store. Take advantage of features such as newsletter popup, mega menu, and product upsells to leverage your sales. Mega Shop The Mega Shop theme is the complete package for all items you want to sell in your supermarket. Whatever the item or product might be, the Mega Shop theme allows you to customize it in a way that is relevant to your audience. With a responsive and powerful admin panel, you can display your product in several unique ways. Its features include a zoom magnifier, advanced search, and vertical mega menu. eMarket theme If you are looking for an advanced mega menu theme for your online store, the eMarket theme comes with something more. It is fully customizable and responsive for your eCommerce website. You can customer the fonts, colors, and other aspects of your store effortlessly. Furthermore, it loads faster to give customers an outstanding shopping experience. Choose the best BigCommerce theme for your store A suitable theme serves as a ground to build up your brand visualization. Therefore, it’s helpful to think through what you’re offering and how you want the customers to interact with your store in advance. BigCommerce free themes should be enough for your start. Yet you can always consider a paid plan for a fancier look.
Groomers Pro: Leverage Inventory Management With Atom8
About Groomers Pro Groomers Pro has been serving the professional groomer and dog show enthusiast since 2008 and is the proud distributor of grooming products for Chris Christensen, Nature’s Specialties, Crown Royale, Artero, Wahl, Andis, and many others. The need for automation When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the grooming industry was particularly hard hit – bottles suddenly became hard to source, with hand sanitizers and hand soaps taking priority. For Groomers Pro, suppliers could not fulfill purchase orders and products started going out of stock. Luckily they had installed a back-in-stock functionality, with their email marketing platform. This allowed customers to be added to a waitlist and receive an announcement when the item is replenished. To promote the waitlist availability, Groomers Pro’s staff were manually adding the promotional label “JOIN WAITLIST” to each out-of-stock item, and also manually removing the label when the product had arrived back in stock. The problem, however, is they were never sure which products were in or out of stock. As a result, sometimes the product never had the “JOIN WAITLIST” promotional label added, or worse it never got removed. Potentially, customers could receive an email stating that a product was available, but the “JOIN WAITLIST” label was still visible on the website. It was not clear if the product was available to purchase. There was the potential for confusion and also the loss of sales. Groomers Pro needed to find an automated solution for this issue. This is when they came across Atom8 on BigCommerce. At first, they’re generally worried about the effectiveness for this was their first experience with an automation platform. Yet, Atom8’s performance indeed exceeded their expectations. The Atom8 solution One of Atom8’s features is to auto-publish labels on predetermined rules, dates, and times. With this, whenever the inventory level lowers to a certain threshold, the system will automatically add the label. Customers then are aware that a waitlist is available if they want to purchase the product in the future. Later, as soon as the stock level is updated in the store backend, the label will be automatically removed. Simultaneously, by integrating Atom8 with their email marketing platform, Groomers Pro’s customers can still receive an announcement about their waitlist order. This is a perfect add-on to their previous solution. Besides, with a drag-and-drop dashboard and prebuilt templates, it didn’t take the team much time to get acquainted with the app. Now the process is fully automated and timely. Atom8 has positively transformed their work process. Potential future developments With Atom8 in place, Groomers Pro is freed from worrying about incompatible product labels. In addition, the Atom8 team is always responsive should they encounter any problem while running on the app. Operating strongly with the assistance of Atom8, Groomers Pro has now been able to serve even more customers. As stated by the Groomers Pro team: “If you are looking for a BigCommerce App to help with automating a tedious, problematic task, look no further than Atom8. Responsive (yes they provide support!) and helpful, at last, an app to rely upon.”
Inventory Management Challenges for Online Stores
Managing inventory effectively can be challenging, especially for eCommerce retailers with an omnichannel strategy. eCommerce businesses come across various inventory management challenges every day. In order to maintain sustainable growth, they have to find an out-of-the-box solution to streamline the process. In this blog, we’ll outline the five toughest challenges faced by e-commerce entrepreneurs and how to deal with them effectively. Inventory management challenges faced by online stores 1. Unqualified staff The most common mistake businesses make when it comes to inventory management is to hire unqualified staff to carry out the tasks. Underskilled staff is incapable of evaluating suppliers, preparing the proper documentation, making correct forecasts, purchasing new inventory, or handling inventory. As a result, your inventory management system becomes reactive rather than proactive. This might lead to unreliable system information, high levels of expired inventory, build-up of obsolete inventory, and over or understated inventory valuation. Inventory management issues will arise because of incompetent staff, and it will be destructive for your business. 2. No KPIs or too many KPIs KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. An inventory management KPI is a metric that a company uses to analyze its stock management efficiency. Using too many KPIs may confuse your staff about the most important aspects to focus on. Meanwhile, no KPIs will cause stockouts or result in excess stocks. Either case would adversely impact a business. There are many performance KPIs that a company can use to optimize inventory. Still, it is vital to choose the right metrics for your business for inventory management issues that can decrease the efficiencies and dig into your profits. 3. Manual management process Another challenge faced by e-commerce companies is a manual management. It is possible to track and manage stocks manually in the early stages of an e-commerce business. But as the business scales, managing inventory manually becomes more and more complex. As the company grows, paperwork and other manual processes turn out to be tedious and burdensome. Automating the inventory management process not only helps you save time but also limits errors caused by fatigue. 4. Deadstock When it comes to inventory management challenges, deadstock refers to a product that has not been sold and keeps lying on the shelves for a longer duration than anticipated, and the chances of it getting sold are very weak. In the absence of good inventory management, businesses often end up stocking excess inventory. Deadstock might be the result of poor forecasting, lack of demand, over-ordering, etc. If not tackled properly, it would lead to huge losses to a business. 5. Irregular stock tracking To maintain an accurate picture of the stock, it is important to count your stock regularly. It helps you to figure out any discrepancies between the book and actual inventory. There are times when un-trackable stock such as exchanges or pilferage are not entered into the system. This type of error would cost you tremendous time and effort to fix. Therefore, a frequent stock audit is highly necessary to ensure sufficient inventory. Back up your store with BackOrder BackOrder allows users to assign any product to a backorder status when the inventory level reaches a certain threshold. This means customers can still place an order for out-of-stock items and have them delivered later. In addition, you can set up the system to notify your staff whenever a new request is submitted, preventing you from missing out on any potential customers. What’s more, BackOrder can now be integrated into Atom8. This creates a centralized management system without you going back and forth between different platforms. Streamlined Backorder Management Atom8 enables seamless management of backorders by automatically tracking and updating inventory levels in real-time. This ensures that customers are promptly notified of product availability and allows for efficient handling of backordered items. Optimal Inventory Planning By leveraging Atom8’s advanced forecasting capabilities, you can anticipate demand for backordered items and adjust inventory levels accordingly. This proactive approach helps prevent stockouts and ensures timely fulfillment of customer orders. Enhanced Customer Communication With Atom8, you can automate communication with customers regarding backordered items, providing transparency and reducing customer inquiries. By keeping customers informed throughout the backorder process, you can maintain trust and satisfaction. Integrated Order Fulfillment Atom8 seamlessly integrates with your existing order management system, allowing for streamlined order fulfillment processes. Whether fulfilling in-stock or backordered items, Atom8 ensures accuracy and efficiency throughout the order fulfillment process. Conclusion In conclusion, overcoming inventory management challenges requires a combination of strategic planning, process optimization, and leveraging innovative solutions like Atom8 and Backorder app. By addressing these challenges head-on and implementing effective inventory management strategies, online retailers can optimize their operations, minimize costs, and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
How To Prevent Regular Stockout
Stockout hurts your business and negatively impacts your brand image in the eyes of your customers. Identifying the causes of stockout empowers you to overcome inventory issues and have sufficient stocks to meet demand. One of the major reasons for regular stockout is incorrect data. Complicated as it may sound, retailers can overcome this by implementing inventory management systems. Let us look at how to prevent inaccurate data from causing stockouts. 1. Use a Modern Inventory Management System By implementing a modern inventory system, you can avoid stock discrepancies. Maintaining ledgers or excel spreadsheets is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. Modern apps often operate on a cloud-based system, enabling you to manage and edit inventory remotely. In other words, it can automatically modify stock levels when a transaction is made, saving you from manually updating the database. It is also exceedingly beneficial for omnichannel operation. Today, inventory tracking systems can be integrated into other systems such as point of sale and order management. Moreover, retail point of sale allows you to create order recommendations when stocks go below pre-determined levels. Thus implementing a modern inventory system will provide you with accurate data and help you avoid stockout. 2. Connect Inventory from Different Platforms Manual management can’t particularly deal with a complex business model. Therefore, you need management software to take care of your real-time inventory. By constantly updating the stock level, it helps you manage your supply chain and avoid being out of stock. If you’re selling across multiple channels, you should connect all your retail platforms to ensure accurate sync of data whenever a transaction is made. This integration of different points of sales with your e-commerce website is called omnichannel inventory management. 3. Count Stocks Regularly One of the reasons for a stockout is the discrepancy between the data in your system and the actual stock number. This might be due to human error, technical issues, shrinkage, loss, or theft of goods. Conducting frequent inventory audits will help you avoid stockouts, especially before the peak seasons. 4. Simplify Processes Done by Human Never forget to examine your staff’s work scope on a regular basis. This helps point out the repetitive tasks that can be automated so that your employees can focus on the bigger picture. 5. Label and Place Inventory Strategically Labeling the goods using barcodes and RFID ensures a high level of inventory accuracy. RFID technology allows storing and tracking product information in a chip embedded in an item’s tag or packaging. Strategically labeling and placing allow for faster monitoring and search whenever in need. In this sense, marking the stock is probably the best solution for avoiding inventory data inaccuracies. Besides the warehouse, you should also label your product in the backend of your online store. This can be quickly done by integrating Atom8 into your website. All you need to do is set up workflows based on your current business activities. Then whenever the triggers are met, the app will automatically tag products and orders accordingly. In other words, there’s no need to manually look at every item and place a label anymore. You save a lot of time and resources needed for more impactful decisions. Conclusion Out-of-stock products not only lead to a loss in the sale volume but also result in poor customer experience. Therefore, effective inventory management techniques are a must to prevent regular stockout.
Online Consumer Behaviour Trends in 2021
The eCommerce industry is ever-changing and ever-evolving. Online consumer behaviour is also altered over time. Monitoring and incorporating the latest e-commerce trends will help you stay ahead of the competition and provide more value to your visitors. Machine Learning and Automation Machine learning and automation empower customers to have a seamless and personalised shopping experience. AI offers tailored guidance and recommendations to shoppers based on their past purchase history and browsing behaviour. Machine learning and AI analyze data and showcase products that are more likely to be purchased. Implementing automation into your eCommerce store will help you increase the conversion rate, run more relevant marketing campaigns, improve in-house operational efficiencies and make more informed decisions. Moreover, this technology helps improve your customer service. Automated problem-solving solutions are the key to streamlining the sales process, which can be efficiently done with AI. Integrating AI into CRM will let you get in touch with your customers and predict online consumer behaviour. If you are BigCommerce merchant, Atom8 is the ultimate automation tool that solves your business problems and significantly boosts up your profit! Explore here: Atom8 will greatly enhance customer experiences thanks to AI. Social Shopping The number of social shoppers is increasing rapidly. The goal of social shopping is to encourage people to make more purchases via social and turn them into brand champions/evangelists who are willing to back your brand. Promoting brands socially needs to be done very carefully as it can impact online consumer behaviour. You have to ensure you do not spam your followers or prospects while driving social purchases. There are many smart marketing techniques e-commerce companies can use to promote social shopping, such as mass marketing via messenger, chatbots, quizzes, user-generated content, shoppable feeds and one-click purchases and socially integrated shops. Social shopping is more about creating experiences RFID Inventory Tracking Delivering compelling experiences in both the online and offline world is important to keep the customers engaged. Retailers are filling the gap between online and in-person shopping by converting their brick and mortar stores into smart stores. One solution for this is the IoT strategy using RFID. RFID tags are used to collect data and generate analytics about inventory and customer interactions. Furthermore, customers today often use one-click checkouts. Therefore, retailers with RFID checkouts deliver quicker checkout for it reads all the items in the basket simultaneously. In other words, RFID technology helps retailers create a smarter digital store, especially in inventory management. Visual Search Images are the key to shopping online. A visual search allows users to carry out an online search based on images. A new trend in online shopping behaviour is to use an image rather than text to search for the product. With visual searches, relevance becomes more essential. Hence, you should take into account that suggesting products that are nowhere close to the image will damage your reputation. Contactless Shopping This is a new trend as a result of COVID-19. Contactless shopping is a retail experience that maintains the minimum level of physical interaction. There are many ways consumers can do contactless shopping, such as catalogue shopping, eCommerce, mobile payments, curbside pick-up, checkout-free retail. These are some of the trends of 2021 that you can leverage to provide a better experience to the customer and stay ahead of the competition.
eCommerce Automation Beginner Guide
An eCommerce store operates on a 24-hour basis. The online environment makes it almost impossible for a break. While you can’t make a human work all day long, eCommerce automation can help. Automation makes online business easier than ever. A part of the operational process consists of repetitive tasks. Hence, automating this tedious task would pave the way for a smooth and subtle business. After that, you can channel your energy and resource to other vital things that will help improve customer’s experience. Busy multitasking? Listen to this blog post while doing other works here: What is eCommerce Automation? eCommerce automation involves using technology to increase staff productivity and grow sales. Generally speaking, eCommerce automation comprises three important components: The triggers The condition that defined the automation The outcome of the action How to use Ecommerce Automation Some of the benefits of automation are: Minimizing order cost Delivering personalized customer experiences Reducing workload Increasing performance efficiency To achieve all of these, you have to understand the steps to automating your eCommerce business. Identify what you need to automate your eCommerce stores Manual activities that take up a large amount of time per day should be automated. For instance, order tracking, order processing, or keeping track of inventory can be assigned to technology. What do you need to automate? Is it the pricing, product information, or payment option? Identify what you need to start your automation process. Automation applications are limitless and depend greatly on your unique business processes. For examples, tasks that can be automated are: Product management: auto-merchandising, publishing/hiding products, changing descriptions or tags Order management: auto-changing order status, notifying orders needing special attentions Customers management: auto-grouping based on account information or purchase behavior Performance management: auto-notifications for respective team members, manage tasks with Trello Schedule promotion campaigns: changing store designs, setting discounts or price changes And a lot more up to your creativity! Choose the right eCommerce automation platform Today, there are several eCommerce solutions available for store owners to choose from. Therefore, it is challenging for newcomers to select a reliable automation tool that can guarantee their success. Explore various options, check reviews, and ask for testimonials or case studies. Furthermore, don’t hesitate to ask the provider to clear your doubt if you have any questions. If you’re looking for an easy-to-use platform, Atom8 is beyond suitable. Some of the app features are: Auto-publish products Auto-categorize orders (based on value, locations, etc) Auto-segment customer (based on demographics, spending, the total number of orders, etc) Auto-tag customers on CRM, email marketing, and delivery platforms Auto-generate reports & lists on Google Sheet Auto-notify of low-stock items, abandoned cart, or high-value orders Auto-detect and halt high-risk orders You can build your own workflow easily with our drag-and-drop dashboard. Otherwise, you can make use of the pre-built templates. Discover more at: Look for pre-built connectors If you already have ready-made connectors, you can integrate them with your eCommerce platform. In other words, you don’t have to hire a third party to integrate your system. However, make sure your eCommerce solution comes with a connector that can reliably transfer product, customer, order, and information between your systems. Monitor and validate data Businesses need to transfer data across various systems. It means a high level of accuracy is required. When opting for an automation process, look for one that allows you to resend, repeat, or recheck activities manually. Furthermore, ensure you have a process that checks and maintain the security and quality of your data. Set up a winning team The automation process won’t work perfectly without a good team. You should be able to add multiple members to the system in case of technical problems. Setting up a team allows you to respond quickly once an order or return fails. The team can quickly resolve the issue or notify the customer when it will be resolved. Final note Now you know how automation work in the eCommerce industry. Whereas 80% of automation users see an increase in the number of leads acquired, 77% experienced a rise in conversion rates. So, install an automation platform today and have the work done quickly and accurately.
eCommerce Supply Chain Optimization Tips
How you manage your eCommerce supply chain varies depending on the business model you’re implementing. No matter you’re running B2B or B2C, it is essential to understand how products move from manufacturer to customer. There are multiple approaches to supply chain management. Online store owners sell products through mobile apps, social platforms, and websites. Digitally native brands often add a step forward by taking complete control of their distribution from factory to consumer. Meanwhile, marketplace sellers allow third parties to take part in delivery to reach a wider customer base. Identify the customer needs All supply chain model is designed to meet a particular goal – to satisfy customers. Your customers probably have high expectations when buying online. They often do extensive research, looking through every review and social comment before making a decision. Before placing an order, they want to know if the item is available. They also want to have a seamless experience across platforms and devices. They expect your website to be responsive, even during the peak seasons. Furthermore, most customers have become accustomed to fast and free shipping. Once they are unhappy during this process, they might never come back to you. At the same time, they want to return the item conveniently without spending any money, should it fail to meet their expectations. There are a lot of different things that customers want. The key is to know what the most urgent and important needs are to fulfilled. Then you can work on the others on your way. Effective warehouse design A warehouse design can directly or indirectly affect your supply chain. In detail, you should design your warehouse in a way that allows you to increase storage density and capacity. Some helpful features to be installed are a strategic racking system, narrow aisles, and a mezzanine level. You might also want to consider hanging shelves or bookshelves. Invest in innovative technology Another way to optimize your eCommerce supply chain is to invest in innovative technology. Investing in modern technology will help improve performance. You can utilize a warehouse management system to take care of your daily warehouse operations and inventory management tasks, including ordering picking, EDI capabilities, and replenishment. Furthermore, depending on the size of your business, you can acquire an order management system to help optimize inventory and provide visibility for your store. With this, you can view several fulfillment sources to help prevent overstocks, stock-outs and minimize inventory carrying costs. Reverse logistics To ensure your customer has access to quick refunds and hassle-free returns, ensure you have a reliable information system, transportation capabilities, and distribution network. In this situation, an order management system will help streamline the return process. To make it easier, you can set up distribution centers near your customers to help speed up return processing and reduce transportation costs. Expand sales channel Most online eCommerce store owners expand their physical locations like pop-ups and boutiques. If you don’t have a brick-and-mortar store, you must ensure your eCommerce supply supports or allows multiple order profiles and sales channels. Conclusion All in all, it’s not easy to have an effective eCommerce supply chain right at the beginning. However, you should always look through your process, communicate with your team to identify bottlenecks, and find a way to optimize them. This way, you don’t have to waste too much thinking about how to streamline your supply.
eCommerce Challenges And The Automation Solution
Each online merchants executes over a thousand small tasks every day. If not managed effectively, these tasks could hinder productivity and stampede growth. In other words, operational management is one of the biggest challenges for any eCommerce store. Instead of focusing on incremental changes, businesses should focus on improvements, changing how a company operates. Today, eCommerce automation is giving stores an optimal solution for their challenges. It unleashes the time needed to invest in crisis communication, working climate, dealing with new suppliers, retraining staff, sales, marketing, and HR challenges. What is eCommerce Automation? Running an eCommerce store comes with a lot of challenges. Automation is the use of software in the replacement of human agents in certain work. In this sense, eCommerce automation is software built to convert campaigns, processes, or tasks within your business into automated workflows that execute when needed. It entails how businesses can do more without human intervention. eCommerce challenges that automation can conquer eCommerce stores always have to face up multiple problems. As the business expands, the complexity, demands, and repetition increase. Previous systems that used to work effectively become inefficient and eventually break down. In trying to alleviate their current issue, they turn to time-consuming works, affecting the overall business. Meanwhile, the most powerful resource of any business is their time and energy. Let’s look at the challenges that automation can conquer if you want to start a new eCommerce store. Complex and time-consuming manual processes working with multiple systems Several eCommerce sales reps spend half of their time communicating with customers. Nevertheless, paperwork is no longer effective these days. It is hectic, especially if it’s a repetitive process as it takes a lot of time to complete. If you want to operate faster and easier, you need to automate your system to reallocate time, money, and human capacity to other aspects of the business. Lack of data and insight Once your business grows, the time and operational costs increase accordingly. The same goes for data generated in your inventory, operations, and finance. In this case, the right eCommerce automation tool will help you leverage data processing and make wiser decisions. Once you have accurate data, you can create relevant and contextual reports. This allows your staff to stay ahead and provide a better customer experience. Lack of personalization and transparency in customer experience When it comes to online transactions, customers want as much control over their data as possible. Transparency is also an important factor. They want access to every piece of information about their order and the freedom to change it when necessary. Furthermore, they expect responsive interaction from customer service. With automation, it is easier to allocate resources that will better understand your customers and improve their satisfaction. In the end, it helps boost sales in your store. Overcome challenges with Atom8 Atom8 is the workflow automation platform that can be integrated into BigCommerce and Shopify. The app optimizes your business by automatically reorganizing tasks, streamlining processes, and feeding data to other customer-facing applications such as Mailchimp, Google Sheet, or ShipStation. It empowers you to be more productive and fosters time-saving work. Some of the app features are: Auto-categorize orders (based on value, locations, etc) Auto-segment customer (based on demographics, spending, the total number of order, etc) Auto-tag customers on CRM, email marketing, and delivery platforms Auto-generate reports & lists on Google Sheet Auto-publish products Auto-notify of low-stock items, abandoned cart, or high-value orders Auto-detect and halt high-risk orders
How To Select The Best eCommerce Platform
In 2020, eCommerce sales accounted for 15.5% of total retail sales worldwide, and it’s about to grow even faster. If you’re selling any product, having a website is important if you want to capitalize on the massive sales available online. Fortunately, there are multiple platforms to house your business. The question is how do you scale through to get the best eCommerce platform? Undoubtedly, the online market is competitive, and you need the best platform to stay on top of the game. You should always consider an advanced feature platform that comes without additional costs. Fortunately, there are some criteria to help you determine the most suitable platform. In this write-up, you will discover important things to look out for when selecting the best small business eCommerce platform for your business. Pricing Price is the primary factor most online business owners consider before choosing a platform to house their business. Cost cuts across various things because the platform isn’t free. When using a platform, you’re paying for hosting, PCI compliance, payment system, analytics, fraud protection, DDoS attacks, and many more. However, the pricing model varies across platforms. Thus you’ll need to do some research to clarify your options. Remember, the more functionality you need, the higher the price is. Speed and performance Performance and speed are other considerations when choosing an eCommerce platform. You need a platform that responds quickly when information is required. During holidays or festive periods when the demands are high, you’ll risk losing customers if the platform doesn’t perform in a timely manner. Scalability You might want to start small, but over time, your eCommerce store will scale. It is crucial to choose an eCommerce platform that enables you to grow your customer base. Additionally, you need more than a static page, an ideal platform allows you to customize features. You need to ascertain the kind of support and integration that comes with the software. For example, most brands utilize APIs to automate and personalize their eCommerce stores based on what they require. Ease of use The ease of usage deals with the way you or your team use the platform without technical knowledge. You don’t always have time to learn to code. When you opt for a small business eCommerce platform, you need a platform that comes with easy navigation and is adequately set up. What to look at include: Does it offer a simple installation process? Are the payment and domain name registration easy to follow? Built-in features The final thing to consider is the inbuilt features that come with the platform. When selecting the right small business eCommerce platform, you should look for one that allows add-ons or comes with inbuilt features. Conclusion Choosing an eCommerce platform shouldn’t be taken lightly because it can affect your growth and sales revenue. Therefore, making a decision, ensure to look for features such as speed, performance, ease of use, built-in feature, scalability, and pricing.
How To Ask For A Customer Review
Why is it important to get a customer review? Customer reviews are the honest evaluation of your product or service. The impact of review is very powerful. They can influence consumer decisions and can also make or break a company’s credibility. Positive reviews help generate customer trust and foster positive word-of-mouth, thereby increasing sales volume. On the other hand, negative reviews might drive your customers away. What is more, customer reviews provide valuable insights that can be used to upgrade your products or services or develop new items. These reviews can also be used to address customer’s pain points or complaints. How to ask for a customer review? There are several ways to ask for a customer’s review. Target happy customers Targeting happy customers is the easiest way to get positive reviews for your business. Satisfied customers are more likely to write rave reviews about their experience with your business. Encourage them to write a review but do not be pushy. The key is to ask at the right time. Also, don’t forget to thank them for appreciating your services. Contact customers on social media Reviews on social media platforms serve as social proof for your company. You should continuously engage with your customers on these platforms, keep posting content, encouraging the users to leave a review on social media. Furthermore, it’s a bad idea to delete negative reviews on social media. The audience might think that you’re trying to deceive them with positive information only. Instead, immediately address those customers and resolve their issues. Add review CTA on thank-you page Adding a review CTA button on your thank you page allows the customer to leave a review immediately. This kind of customer review is helpful because the experience is still vivid in their mind when the purchase has just completed. Send an email after the order is completed Sending them a message after an order is completed is a solid approach. This ensures the product meets up the customer’s expectations while subtly asking for a review. However, asking for an online review through email is a bit trickier. You’ll need to pre-screen your database in advance. Though unhappy customers are likely to leave negative comments, you’ll want to gather them to fully assess the performance of your products or service. Create an automation workflow Important as it is, it’s also extremely tedious to send an email to each customer asking for a review. Hence, companies are automating this process to make it more efficient. For example, the workflow below tells the system to send an email whenever the order is completed. This way, you can receive customer feedback without keeping an eye on it every time. Conclusion Reviews are a powerful tool any business should employ to build credibility. As customers value the views and feedback from others while making a purchase decision, online reviews can have a tremendous impact on your sales revenue.
Signs Of A Weak BigCommerce Stock Management System and Solutions
Managing inventory is key to running a successful eCommerce business. With 43% of small businesses not actively monitoring their inventory, the consequences can be severe, including missed sales, increased costs, and damaged customer relationships. A strong stock management system ensures that products are available when customers want them, reducing lost sales and keeping operations smooth. On the other hand, a weak system can lead to wasted resources and unhappy customers. In this post, we’ll discuss the common signs of a weak management system and offer solutions to improve it. Recognizing a Weak Stock Management System It’s essential to recognize when your stock management system isn’t working well. Below are some common signs that your system may need improvement. Frequent Stockouts and Overstocks One of the first signs of a weak stock management system is frequent stockouts or overstocks. Here’s why these issues are a problem: To solve these issues, consider using BigCommerce BackOrder from GritGlobal. This tool allows customers to place orders even when items are out of stock, reducing missed sales. It also helps improve inventory turnover by ensuring that products don’t sit on shelves for too long. Inaccurate Inventory Data Another clear sign of a weak stock management system is inaccurate inventory data. Here’s how this problem can affect your business: Using Atom8 – BigCommerce Automation from GritGlobal can help address these challenges. This tool automates stock updates, ensuring that your inventory data is accurate across all channels. With Atom8, you’ll always know exactly how much stock you have on hand, reducing the risk of errors and improving overall efficiency. Manual Inventory Management Processes Manual processes in your stock management system can lead to many inefficiencies. Here are some of the key issues: By switching to Atom8 – BigCommerce Automation, you can reduce the need for manual inventory processes. This tool automates repetitive tasks like updating stock levels and categorizing new products. This not only saves time but also reduces errors, leading to a more efficient operation overall. Poor Inventory Turnover Rate A low inventory turnover rate is another sign of a weak stock management system. Here’s why it’s important to address this issue: To boost your inventory turnover rate, consider implementing a better stock management system that includes demand forecasting and automation tools like Atom8 and BigCommerce BackOrder. These tools can help you maintain the right stock levels and move products more quickly, improving your overall business performance. Solutions to Strengthen Your BigCommerce Stock Management System Improving your stock management system is essential for running a smooth and successful eCommerce business. Below, we explore some effective solutions that can help you enhance your system and avoid common issues like stockouts, overstocks, and inaccurate inventory data. Implement Automation Tools Automation tools can make a big difference in how you manage your stock. They help you handle repetitive tasks with ease, reducing the chance of human error. Using tools like Atom8 – BigCommerce Automation and BigCommerce BackOrder can greatly improve your stock management system. They help you manage stock levels and backorders automatically, which not only streamlines your operations but also improves the customer experience. Utilize Advanced Demand Forecasting Accurate demand forecasting is key to maintaining the right stock levels in your stock management system. By predicting future demand, you can avoid both stockouts and overstocks. Atom8 can integrate with various forecasting tools to automate your demand planning. This ensures you always have the right stock levels, which helps you avoid the issues of overstocking and stockouts. Real-Time Inventory Tracking Across Channels Tracking your inventory in real-time across multiple sales channels is crucial for accuracy and consistency. Without it, discrepancies can occur, leading to customer dissatisfaction. Atom8 is a great BigCommerce Automation tool for supporting real-time inventory tracking. It keeps your data consistent and accurate across all channels, which is vital for a smooth stock management system. Regular System Audits and Optimization Regularly reviewing and optimizing your stock management system is important to keep it running efficiently. This ensures your system remains effective as your business grows and market conditions change. By conducting regular audits and optimizing your system, you can maintain a strong stock management system that adapts to your business’s evolving needs. Conclusion Recognizing the signs of a weak stock management system is key to keeping your business running smoothly. Issues like frequent stockouts, inaccurate inventory data, manual processes, and low inventory turnover need immediate attention. By using tools like Atom8 and BigCommerce BackOrder, you can address these challenges effectively. These solutions help automate tasks, improve accuracy, and ensure your inventory is always managed efficiently. Taking action now will lead to better stock control and a more satisfied customer base. If you’re ready to enhance your inventory management, contact us today!
