Top 5 Seasonality Stock Management Tricks
Every year, sellers usually look forward to special events like Christmas, Black Friday, etc., or product-preferred seasons that bring considerable customers and revenues. However, there are some obstacles that sellers need to confront before gaining expected turnovers. They all relate to seasonality stock management. Today, we are here to help you prepare for the upcoming busy season with five awesome hacks for fulfilled seasonality inventory management. 5 Fabulous Hacks For Seasonality Stock Management Understand Your Supply Chain The supply chain plays a crucial and direct role in customers’ expectations. A smooth and trustworthy shipping process will ensure your product arrives at customers’ houses as scheduled without any mistakes. Choosing the third-party logistics company suitable for your suppliers and distributors will help you reduce additional costs in busy seasons and thus maintain lubricated workflow and productivity. Financial Track If you manage multi-stores in busy seasons, there are some arising financial accuracy problems. The more orders are, the more complex bills and financial statements are. Due to the large numbers of orders, a small mistake can lead to considerable loss. The fulfilled financial track and well-controlled seasonality inventory allow you to manage products and cash flow. Moreover, the specific and transparent financial reports will help you evaluate your companies’ cost-benefit in this hot sale season, predict new trends, and establish suitable policies. Optimize Inventory System As you know, the product is the backbone of sales. Manage products processes or control seasonality inventory well is the critical element for a successful hot sale season. In seasonality inventory management, there is something more than organizing the inventory. You will deal with an enormous quantity of products and must decide whether to store all of them or not. If you want to put all of them in your warehouses, the storage costs will be considerably high. However, if you do not store it, your product’s workflow and shipping process may be disrupted due to unavailable items. As a result, you need to take into consideration the significance of each kind of product, what products are in the top best-seller lists, and which potential products can help you earn a profit. Analysis and planning with automatic application supports will help you choose which product must be in your warehouses. Activate Backorders To be honest, over-purchasing is no longer a strange situation despite the careful seasonality stock management. Therefore, it would be better if you prepare some approach to confront this situation. Backorder is one of the powerful tools to help you tackle out-of-stock status in BigCommerce platform. It can allow your customers to buy unavailable items to help you gain revenue with nothing in your warehouses. To do that, you need to pre-set all of your products with Backorder. Whenever they are sold out, the pre-order status will be automatically activated. As a result, it helps your sales avoid being disrupted and enables you to reduce customers turnover rates. Try the app: Maximize Productivity Effective seasonality inventory management enables productivity optimization. The complete order fulfillment, real-time tracking, immediate support, and transparent reports will give you chances to reduce unnecessary costs, evaluate your companies’ performance and thus plan future directions and adjust something compatible with the current context. Conclusion We hope you already had some ideas to manage seasonality inventory to prepare for upcoming hot sale seasons with five proven hacks above. Moreover, we also believe that you will no longer feel it challenging to sell a large number of goods and services.
Outstanding Approaches To Enhance Website Security And Optimize Ecommerce Profitability
ECommerce activities seem to be prevailing over the world. Because of the large number of participants, eCommerce is genuinely competitive. Therefore, achieving eCommerce profitability needs more than you have imagined. They could be different from offline selling one that you need to pay massive attention to and invest appropriately. This article will point out some powerful and down-to-earth methods for you to improve and maximize your eCommerce profitability. Practical Strategies To Optimize Security And Profitability Of Your ECommerce Website Automatic Transformation The critical determinant to e-commerce profitability is effective and efficient work performance. Therefore, repetitive tasks or simple manual tasks should be converted to automatic charges. Applying cutting-edge technology to the operation process seems to take a long time and causes various problems. Fortunately, there are a lot of fool-proof and trustworthy automation applications that can help you maintain your workflow without human efforts. This innovation will help you reduce the labor cost and time and invest in them for more practical purposes. Another plus point for this transformation is eliminating human errors and enhancing every process’s transparency and consistency with a quick and neat procedure. Therefore, the smooth performance will hit the eCommerce profitability target. Take Advantage Of Outsources Internal resources sometimes can not meet all eCommerce profitability demands, and you need to find something compelling outside. They can be employees, software, services, etc. For instance, freelancers can work more at night shift than official employees, supporting your customers 24/7. Another point is that sometimes your eCommerce site can not run smoothly and sufficiently by itself. You need to use some support app like Atom8, especially on Shopify or BigCommerce platform. It can speed up your eCommerce activity through automatic transformation and achieve more profit. Your partners are also the supportive outsource who can help you to do some order-related stages like logistics. Search Engine Optimization Customers will actively find the products on the internet if they want to buy something. That is why you should invest in search engine optimization to reach more customers. You can create helpful content on multiple platforms for each target customer segment and can approach and find something useful. It is a chance for you to build customers’ trust, and thus they buy your products. Moreover, advertisement on social media platforms is another way to promote your brand and products, but you should notice that choosing target customers will gain more eCommerce profitability. Improve Site Traffic Shortening waiting time and bug reduction may be the key elements for your site improvement. The longer waiting time will make the customers lose their patience and come to competitors’ eCommerce stores to buy products. A lot of bugs in various procedures will create some misunderstanding and thus wrong results, which we need to take a lot of time and money to fix and improve eCommerce profitability. Enhance Customers Experience To optimize eCommerce profitability, you need to maximize the customers’ satisfaction extent. Besides giving them a smooth process and immediate support, you should enhance their experience in rush hours like the holiday sale season. Frequently updating your site and applications, collecting customer’ feedbacks will strengthen customers’ experience. Moreover, you can avoid making customers disadvantaged by allowing them to purchase out-of-stock items. If your eCommerce store is on a Bigcommerce platform, using Backorder may be a good choice. It will enable you to set products as backorder whenever it is unavailable automatically. The customers will receive notifications about the restock plan, and their order process will run as usual when the items are refilled. Conclusion We have researched and brought you significant ways to boost up your eCommerce profits. We hope you can apply them to reality, run your business in the most effective methods and finally develop and expand your eCommerce selling.
Don’t Miss Out Top 6 Hottest BigCommerce Apps For Enterprises
6 Must-have BigCommerce Apps For Enterprises Today, more enterprises have expanded to eCommerce platforms to expand their selling rather than chains of brick-and-mortar stores. However, it is not easy to stay productive and maximize profits if you still run your online business in the same ways as offline. Therefore, you need some more supportive and innovative enterprise apps to enhance your work performance. Here, we will list out some BigCommerce enterprise apps with well-researched descriptions with the aim that you can choose something to make your company great. Backorder Backorder is a life-changing solution for out-of-stock products. It allows you to earn revenue even when the product is unavailable. The risk of unavailable products is enormous, opening the door for competitors to reach your customers. Backorders is a favorite application for enterprises as they usually handle high-value orders, large numbers of wholesalers, and retailers. Moreover, the enterprises usually set backorder status to buy products from suppliers whenever the items are ordered without any storage stages. All things to do to allow customers to buy backorder products are clicking items and setting backorder. When those items are out of stock, backorder status will automatically be activated. Your customers can still purchase items and receive the shipment on a particular day like normal. This app will help you maintain your operation and reduce the customer turnover rate. In addition, it also records the transparent status of sales and inventory. It then exports it to CSV for further analysis, which is fundamental for evaluating productivity and making decisions. Atom8 Manual business tasks can not ensure the best performance and profits, so everything should be done automatically. Atom8 brings us quick, accurate, and smooth automated workflows, including various fields: order processing, customer engagement, real-time notification, etc. It can visualize the selling data on Sheets to follow up and manage the automation workflow. Other remarkable points of Atom8 are generating or hiding content based on pre-setting and personalizing emails to each customer. Don’t worry whether your working structure is suitable with Atom8 because it has more than 100 templates in various fields. Therefore, it allows you to choose the best-fitted one for each department. Skubana Skubana has outstanding integration ability in enterprise apps, allowing you to optimize each task on various platforms. As an inventory app, Sukubana gives you the general view of form to detail the warehouse, selling, and more, from different channels. Skubana will help you inspect and manage your selling and your distributors and access to the storage to know about the stock situation. It does not only help you stay productive on one application but also interpret and analyze all of the data of your business and thus identify the best options for your sale improvement. Constant Contact Email marketing is no longer a strange strategy for the brand to engage customers. However, whether this form of marketing is effective depends on how to launch it. An enterprise app like Constant Contact will help you to make a successful email marketing campaign. With hundreds of pre-built email templates, you can choose one and freely edit it until it meets your demands. Moreover, Constant Contact also can track your email performance, report instantly, and analyze the data. Constant Contact also can design your eCommerce site with professional style and elegant themes to grab their customers’ attention and thus boost your sale. Furthermore, it can run advertisements on social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram to enhance brand awareness. TrustPulse Another supportive enterprise app is TrustPulse. The key feature of this app is trustworthy tracking. Every customer’s behavior is tracked, reported, and presented instantly on your site, which can help you establish some immediate approaches. Moreover, it can help you know about customers’ backgrounds or preferences by displaying their social proof. Last but not least, real-time notifications and action messages will help you follow up on your sales every 5 minutes and thus enhance customer support. ShipStation Delivery is the final but essential stage because it links directly to customers. The supportive enterprise app for this stage is ShipStation. It can do everything to raise your brand awareness, from email personalization, packing slip customization to branded tracking page and portal. At the shipping stage, it can send your products to customers in a transparent and smooth procedure: import, manage, print labels, and keep in touch with sellers and customers through real-time tracking reports. Conclusion Choosing the right enterprise app for your company on Bigcommerce may be the critical determination for your eCommerce success. It does not only help you stay productive but also helps you save time and money on the traditional manual tasks. We hope that we have given you some useful options and thus you can apply them to your enterprise improvement.
Things To Do With Your Packing Slips For A More Robust Brand
Packing slips are considered a vital document to ensure the accurate information of the orders to the customers and the shippers. Are there any other purposes for them? We have research and pointed out that packing slips are beyond simple documents. Because they can bring you more benefits than you have imagined. Today, we will help you open your mind with some striking tips to do with your packing slips that somehow enhance your marketing activities and business reputation. Level Up Your Packing Slips For A Stronger Brand Branding With Packing Slips Besides the order-related information in packing slips, you can add some brands’ information. It is not a long paragraph about your company or your products but the brands’ slogan or logo, which is enough for the customers to remember that identification and thus realize your brand the next time. Moreover, the consistent theme in the design will help your company to brand indirectly. One crucial point that you need attention to is not adding too much irrelevant information and focusing on what customers truly need. Giving the correct and trustworthy information will avoid misunderstanding and thus finish the order quickly and smoothly. Packing Slips Customization A unique, customized slip will make customers feel special. For instance, it is ideal for updating your packing slip design to a Christmas theme during the Christmas holiday sale season. This action seems useless, but its effects are considerable. With the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) phenomenon, the customers can post their special slips on social media. And thus your products will prevail online. Communicate With Customers Personalization also needs to be expressed in packing slips. You can allow customers to choose their favorite templates among the available ones for their packing design. Another way to engage them is by calling them their nicknames or some dear pronouns rather than “you.” In addition, encourage them to post status and photos of your products on social media platforms by giving them a discount code. This approach will allow you to track what they think about your products, your services. And furthermore what features of the next edition they look forward to. Building Long-term Relationships With Customers Packing Slips also help you recommend and encourage customers to order the next time. You can suggest some relevant products and some persuasive short descriptions to convince customers. Also, pre-order new items or out-of-stock items should be included in your slips to help us gain profits from unavailable products. This procedure seems sophisticated. You may wonder how we know about the restock plan, how to estimate when it will be available, and how to notify customers. If your stores are on BigCommerce platforms, you should try to experience Backorder, a supportive assistant to cross out all your concerns above. Conclusion The packing slips seem like a standard notification about orders until we have some exclusive approach to utilize it and thus enhance customer engagement. As we say above, there are various ways to empower the packing slips. So you would better choose the best suitable ways with your business style to maximize future sales and brand reputation.
Top 10 2023 Best Empowered Productivity Tools For Small Businesses
In the competitive world, running small businesses efficiently and effectively is not easy. Possessing significant capital like high-quality labor or enormous financial resources seems not enough. Along with cutting-edge technology development, some productivity apps can support your company’s operations and boost profits. Today, we are here to recommend to you some striking productivity apps with detailed and reliable reviews. Also, we hope that you can find your items to accompany your businesses. 10 Best Productivity Tools For Your Small Businesses Reviews 2021 Trello Trello is one of the best productivity apps which can help your teamwork run smoothly. It brings users a coworking space, including a dashboard, virtual workplace, calendar, etc., to help your teammate keep track and follow up on the assignments and projects. You can also customize the Trell Card feature to add the information you like and hide the useless announcements. Moreover, with Trello, you can connect with other popular working apps, contributing to multitasking and taking advantage of other apps. The most outstanding feature which makes Trello become the best for working in a group is productivity calculation. Based on your progress, Trello can track and evaluate your performance with productivity metrics. Therefore, you can check whether the tasks meet your expectations and take measures to power up productivity. Last but not least, if your team is often disturbed by some unnecessary tasks, Trello can help you ignore them by its built-in automation. Asana Asana has come to us with a wide range of attractive functions. Besides its tasks management, workflow customization, and keeping employees’ tracks, it also allows users to automate routines and make the crucial tasks on top, which helps the workers pay more attention, finish them on time and stay productive. Another good point for Asana is its interface. Asana provides colorful and foolproof templates, which help everyone get to know it in a few minutes. Base Camp Another productivity app for teamwork is Base Camp. If you usually get lost when doing a lot of work together, Base Camp can rescue them from that maze. It can organize all your tasks with a specific due date, requirements, files, messages, meetings, and other related information. As it can raise your team interaction and communication when working remotely, your work procedures become transparent and clear. Hence, it enhances productivity. Atom 8 The most effective way to boost productivity is automatic transformation. Atom8 is considered the best productivity app for tasks automation on BigCommerce and Spotify platforms. With Atom8, the work procedure is genuinely sped up and accurate. Hence, you no longer worry about difficult or time-consuming tasks like manual operation. Also, it is easy to keep track of the work progress as every step is all illustrated on the dashboard. Atom totally can create the most convenient working ecosystem for your business. Thanks to its great integration, you can also complete tasks on other platforms like Google Sheets, Hubspot, etc. This feature helps your business optimize time and effort, which leads to profit improvement. It is user-friendly too! No matter what field your business is in, it provides a wide range of templates suitable for different business types, including marketing, operations, customer service, etc. Zapier You also can automate your business with Zapier. This productivity app may be a good choice if you pay significant attention to customers and your companies’ data security. Also, with over 3000 connections with other apps, Zapier helps your business from A to Z automation. Additionally, this app is compatible with multitasking processes from email sending to data converting. It can help you effortlessly organize and control your tasks with intelligent workflow building, analyzing your conditions, and recommending logically sorted steps. Slack If you feel annoyed when using various apps at once, Slack will help you stay focused on one app but having enough tools and resources to finish your assignment. Slack also offers you a chance to connect with other teams from different companies so you can meet and discuss your partnership from everywhere. Its workflow builder is key-driven to organize your routine and messy tasks. In addition, Slack is a productivity app for small-sized businesses and an excellent solution for any enterprise at any level. Microsoft Teams Whenever considering productivity tools, it is a mistake to ignore the Microsoft ecosystem, especially Microsoft Teams. This app makes your meetings, discussions, and conferences more effective and smooth. The high-resolution video call and animated stickers in the chatbox make your online communication exciting and lively. Moreover, you can also store files and folders for future discussion and assign work for your team with only one click. You also can record every meeting and keep it for other purposes. Notion If you are creative and want to customize your business’ coworking spaces in a unique design, it would be better to choose Notion. Notion allows you to design and compose your templates which fit your business’ fields. For small companies, it offers three functions: Team Wiki, Project Management, and Shared Docs. Team Wiki helps your teammates comprehend the company, goals setting, natures, and regulations to ensure they do well in following tasks. Project Management and Shared Docs, which include all-in-one, help your teams avoid being disrupted by external factors and stay productive in one place. Tide Have your businesses faced some accounting-related problems? Tide can be your virtual accounting department. It allows you to set up payment schedules, flexibly transfer and connect with other accounting apps. You can add up to five companies in an account and neatly manage all of them. Also, your employees can access the company account to follow their annual payments. Wave Accounting This productivity tool is ideal for entrepreneurs’ accounting. Wave Accounting is a supportive assistant for tracking all the expenses and incomes, managing payments and invoices. It is a plus when it can do everything automatically in an app that helps your company save a vast amount of time and effort. Moreover, it also allows users to create and professional invoices with available templates
Practical approaches to B2B eCommerce for distributors
The demand for eCommerce has allowed B2B distributors to grab their target customers easily. Today, most buyers prefer online marketing and this creates the best platform for a distributor to sell their product online. You have to choose the best B2B platform for solutions. Like Bigcommerce there are several other online platforms available that support both SAAS deployment and on-premises and provide the best performance for B2B buyers. Create a detailed plan with requirements Proper planning is always important. You have to make an executive summary. You also need to determine the purpose of the business plan and then create a solid business profile. What kind of information need to be stated on your sites, how can customer place an order. Or essential features to create the best user experience on a website. That helps distributors to sell their product more at B2B platform and it helps to make more revenue easily from eCommerce websites. Determine the right technology Technology is at the core of eCommerce. Therefore you should invest effort in researching for the right platform, tools, software that can help you create a powerful website and enhance operation efficiency. If you are serving buyers for large orders, then the best practice should be to compare the top B2B eCommerce platforms. Then it comes to ERP, CRM, security measures, marketing tools, etc. If you choose BigCommerce or Shopify as your platform, Atom8 can be a valuable tool to take eCommerce operations to the next level with automation. Build an eCommerce team To grab B2B market, most of the distributors want to create a team to manage their eCommerce portal properly. Their main purpose will be analysis online, research and identify potential clients, collect data, and contact potential customers’ requirements for selling the products. Train operational and customer service team Customer service plays an important role. Before providing bulk orders, all the distributors’ houses always want to deliver strong customer care service within their eCommerce website. Whether you can provide strong customer care service or not, that’s very important. During order place or after placing an order customers always want to contact the customer care number. Run marketing campaigns for new and existing customers For bulk orders, it’s essential to contact small and medium-size companies and be aware of your eCommerce site. You have to set different paid campaigns and non-paid campaigns for marketing and promoting your product lists using an eCommerce website. Using social media, websites, and search engines, you can run different marketing campaigns always. So, it’s better to create an eCommerce platform for your business now. B2B eCommerce for distributors is ideal because in this way distributor houses are able to grab B2B buyers very simply. eCommerce platforms provide several opportunities to distributors for their website. Then, you can implement search engine optimization. Through this process, you can increase website ranking and generate traffic to your website. It’s a constant process and you can follow the contact process always. If you’re planning to establish your B2B eCommerce business, make sure to read our post ‘Best B2B eCommerce platform in 2021‘! Final note Proper marketing, advertisement, promotion, and search engine optimization or social media marketing always help to achieve more target customers. The B2B market is trending and the demand for the B2B market is increasing. Given these points, contact with proper channels, analyze the market, and target business organizations to get bulk orders using the eCommerce platform.
B2B order management best practices
B2B order management is more complicated than the average B2C sales. The order value is typically higher, the average buying circle is much longer, and involves technologies such as punch cards, RFP, and EDI. To effectively manage B2B orders, businesses should be aware of the current challenges and solutions. B2B order management challenges On-time delivery Late delivery is disgruntling for every customer. Yet in a B2C world, most of the time you can make it up with a simple coupon, worth only a few dollars. However, this is not the case for a B2B relationship where the stakes are much higher. Failure to meet the promised delivery date may result in a refund or in the worst-case scenario, cancellation of the contract. And because of the large order volume, a single customer can represent a large percentage of your business, which can be catastrophic. High-standard purchases B2B customers often make a large and high-valued order and are looking for long-term suppliers, their standards are usually much higher than your B2C customers. Furthermore, B2B buyers these days want an experience that reflects B2C. Including easy browsing, fast checkout, fast shipping, and first-class customer service. Yet one-to-one sales meetings, attractive discounts, personalized service, and efficient ordering processes remain the key to win a deal. Therefore, your company must be able to cope with these high demands. Failure to fulfill their needs risks payment refusal and cancellation by important customers. Here, the key is to have an efficient order management system and an e-commerce platform that provides internal support for your unique business type. The diverse customer demands Just as B2B customers have different needs when reaching out to your store, they might require special treatment, such as: A product needs configuring but only a part of the configuration is available Customers may qualify for volume-based pricing They may qualify for special pricing Customers require a variety of payment options and credit terms. Such as proforma invoices, deposits, split payments, and payments on account Or even matching the price with the market fluctuations Available B2B order management solutions Standalone order management software A quick solution is to install B2B order management software into your current e-commerce platform. Software like Atom8, BackOrder to centralize your order across all channels. More advanced apps even allow for inventory management and real-time reporting. You can discover Atom8 and BackOrder on BigCommerce platform here: Atom8 on BigCommerce: BackOrder on BigCommerce: However, you need to make sure that the new configuration goes along well with your existing system. Check if the app aligns with your delivery and other management software as well as your accounting system. This might be consuming as you have to compare data across departments and work out the most feasible solution. ERP software Another popular method companies use when they encounter operational inefficiencies is enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. This system covers a wide range of functions, from order and inventory management to financial management, procurement, CRM, warehousing and logistics, and even human resources and payroll. However, despite having a large number of functions, ERP software is generally not tailored to specific industries and types of businesses. This means that you might have to pay for features that you will never use or need while missing out on industry-specific practices. In addition, they often come with complex navigation and learning systems, and the implementation time is much longer than that of other B2B technologies. Final note All in all, B2B is a massive opportunity for your business. By understanding the bottlenecks and applying the right solutions, you will be able to pursue world-class B2B order management. While large corporations often build their own services, standalone order management software is more cut out for small and medium enterprises. Start thinking about automatic order management today should you plan to fully capitalize on the growth of B2B eCommerce.
A guide to auto-grouping B2B customers on BigCommerce
Customer segmentation plays an important role in maximizing customer satisfaction as well as profitability for online merchants. On BigCommerce, segmentation is also essential for providing different value propositions to each customer group. Groups are critical for eCommerce businesses with B2B customers, since they might need totally different experiences on the same website. For example, access to specific products, price lists, or promotions. In order to do this, merchants need to invest time and effort to tweak their online stores. Depends on your business operation, there can be several ways to group wholesale customers. Let’s look at how you can do this with an automation tool, minimize manual edits and create a seamless user experience. If you are unfamiliar with eCommerce automation, check out the following articles: A beginner guide to eCommerce automation 3 common types of eCommerce automation eCommerce automation checklist Auto-group customers by email domain When a wholesale customer has several team members making purchases on your site, the following automation workflow can help to assign their account to the right group. Trigger: Customer created Condition: Email address includes certain text Action: Assign customer to group By using this, you can skip several steps from manually checking order email, navigating the customer list, and assigning groups. Also, any new account created by other members will be automatically added to their group and can access exclusive benefits in no time. Auto-group customers by company name Company is an optional field and customers can type differently, but you can use the following workflow in case this field works in your favor. The app will automatically check your customer accounts and move them to respective groups. Trigger: Customer created Condition: Company includes certain text Action: Assign customer to group Auto-group customers by total spending Customers reaching a certain spending level can be moved to another tier. Merchants can use the following workflow to systematically switch customer group on BigCommerce and allow access to higher rewards and benefits. Trigger: Customer created Condition: Total spending is greater than a certain amount Action: Assign customer to group Auto-group customers by the number of items ordered A common characteristic of B2B customers is placing a large order. Therefore, you can use the minimum number of items needed to categorize them as a wholesale buyer in the workflow. Trigger: Order places Condition: No. of items is greater than a certain amount Action: Assign customer to group Conclusion There are numerous other ways to segment customers according to your business needs. Atom8 can be a helpful assistant to auto-group them based on information and purchase behavior. Curious what else the app can automate? You can visit here: Atom8 helps repetitive store management tasks effortless by automation
Hobby Store Group: Performance Push with Automation
About Hobby Store Group Hobby Store Group is one of the European leading transporting toys and gift retailers. The company prides itself on stocking and delivering some of the famous model railway and aviation brands in more than 100 countries. Both of their stores – Aircraft Model Store and Railway Model Store – are implementing Atom8 Automation in daily operations. A push in business performance Being a large transportation model retailer, Hobby Store Group has to deal with thousands of orders per day. The listing and fulfillment process took up a lot of time and human resources. The company’s staff had to repeat the same tasks over and over again, from labeling products to adding order notes and informing the delivery partner. Manual operation is clearly not an appropriate choice for the business. If they want to make a leap in business development, automation is required for as many repetitive tasks as possible. Automation in inventory management One issue within inventory management is to highlight new products on the storefront so that visitors know about your offer as soon as they arrive at the website. Initially, staff had to go through every product page and add them to a category. However, for a store with hundreds of products like AMS or RMS, manual adding and removing is extremely daunting. Therefore, the solution is to set up a workflow to put a product in a given category when the inventory level is updated in the store backend. With this, their staff only need to fill in the stock level without worrying about the later steps. TRIGGER: When the product information is updated CONDITION: If the inventory level is greater than 0 ACTION: Add the product to a category: New arrivals DELAY: After 30 days ACTION: Remove the product from a category: New arrivals Automation in order management HSG was able to decrease the inbound number of tickets from customers by automating their email chains. Customers are informed immediately of their order status and any potential delay. On the other hand, Atom8 can also notify their internal team of special orders, important tasks without having to check every day and get their hands off various manual tasks, for example: Segment customer by purchase history Email promotion to customers when they met the condition Auto-merchandising according to inventory level Wrapping up Overall, Atom8 was “a very good software that allows us to create automation for repetitive tasks. The software is very easy to use and gets quite a lot done”. Hence, HSG was able to get started quickly even when they had no prior experience with any automation app, especially with complimentary customer support to make sure all confusions and issues are cleared asap.
eCommerce holidays shopping 2021 trends and recommendations for merchants
The pandemic has made 2020 unpredictable for every industry. However, experts have been anticipating the immense growth of eCommerce. And it’s true, it has been a remarkable year for online shopping. Year-over-year online sales rose 20.6% in the U.S. during Cyber 5, and 60% during Black Friday weekend sales on Amazon. This year, with restrictions still around, eCommerce merchants might want to watch out for the following eCommerce holidays shopping 2021 trends. Early bird gets the worm Most customers might choose to shop early before items go out of stock since 70% of them chose to do so and avoid the crowd last year. To catch up right when they start, make sure you keep track of what people are searching for on your website, asking your customer service staff, or what your competitors are doing. Furthermore, you can even use your own discounts and promotions to encourage them to shop earlier. This also means that you might need to prepare inventory early. There is still plenty of time between the busy summer sales and holiday season, so make sure your team can catch a breath as well as plan carefully for the coming hectic period. Inventory should be recounted, reorganized, and restocked. Moreover, you can discuss with suppliers and arrange means to take backorders if popular items go out-of-stock right in the middle of sales programs. Knowing that it’s going to be lively, don’t let yourself be overwhelmed and start looking for strategies to improve productivity. An advantage of eCommerce is the huge number of tools you can find online. So if you encounter any bottleneck, you can always find tools like automation to help with it. Unique customer experiences During the peak season, it’s going to be extra difficult for merchants to compete on prices. Therefore, make sure you focus on creating exceptional customer experiences, retaining current customers, and then attracting new customers. Convenience should be the top priority of both merchants and customers. It’s best practice to analyze consumer’s behavior from last seasonal sales and create a policy with various scenarios of customer requests. Customers surely will favor a site that allows them to shop when and however they want, be it pick up in-store, instant delivery, or easy exchanges and returns. Mobile-first has been constantly recommended to online merchants since more and more people are shopping on mobile devices. However, it’s important to note that the cart abandonment rate is also high on mobile. Therefore, capture those leads with a form or coupon code before they leave your site. While preparing for the next season, remember to ask your current customers to leave reviews for their last orders. Testimonials are powerful for increasing conversion rate and trust for any eCommerce business. Essential marketing channels Omnichannel marketing contributes greatly to creating a seamless customer experience, by providing consistent interactions across online and offline channels. This can be achieved with a suitable buyer’s journey, clear brand messages, and touchpoints, as well as personalization. Experts have found that the pandemic empowered SMS marketing and social media. So merchants should be optimizing these channels to sell more this season. Top-notch social media content can help more shoppers to discover your brand and products. Plan for other shopping channels That said, it doesn’t mean that retailers should focus only on online channels. Customers can gather information on your website throughout their decision-making process and choose to pick up in-store instead of waiting for shipment. While some prefer to shop online for safety, others might be eager to go out. So, make sure that you can adapt fast in case consumer behavior changes again. Be sure to check out the 2021 holiday calendar and other helpful eCommerce tips on our blog.
Top 10 productivity apps for small businesses
As a business owner, you have to deal with a lot of work a day, from order management to delivery, from marketing to packaging. It’s hard to focus on everything at the same time and be on top of the game. That’s why people are longing for automation these days. With the best productivity apps, you can save time on repetitive tasks to invest in more impactful business activities. This article outlines the 10 most popular and effective apps that are free to use or only costs a little to implement. We believe that they can help you leverage your performance and grow your business faster. Trello Trello is among the best productivity apps used in modern workplaces. It helps transfer the tasks from one person to another and between different teams smoothly on one screen. You can create different channels for each step in the process, move tasks from one lane to another when each work is completed. You can also assign tasks to whoever is in charge and mention them in the comment section to ask for opinions. The app is particularly beneficial for work involving numerous stages such as content marketing or recruitment. For example, in a marketing team, writers, editors, and graphic designers participate in creating the promotion campaigns. In this case, Trello ensures that people are aware of the working process and finish the job in time. Todoist Todoist serves as a free assistant to manage your to-do list. A free plan allows for creating up to 80 projects, making it easier to divide your tasks into as many lists as you want. Different lists are available for work, family, household chores, emails, even specific projects, and long-term goals. The app is also known for its simplicity. You can work on Todoist like a hand-writing to-do list. It only takes a few steps to outline what you need to do and remove it when you’re done. Gmail Gmail is the largest email platform these days with over 1.8 billion users worldwide. The app works excellently in distributing and storing emails for a long period of time. Besides the basic function of sending and receiving messages, you can add emails to reference groups by using labels and forward emails. You are free to customize your recipient list as well. Furthermore, Gmail provides users with a lot of plug-ins to create tasks in other project management apps like Trello and Asana, send messages in Slack, or add emails to Evernote. Evernote The specialty of Evernote is that it helps keep your storage organized, thus making it easier to find any document whenever in need. The app allows you to take notes by text or voice on any device and save them to your account. Meanwhile, you can integrate it with Google Drive, Gmail, and Outlook to save documents and emails that you may need to refer to later. You can also save a full copy of web pages to your Evernote account. Zapier Zapier works as a connect portal between different apps with no need for coding experience. The app is connected with more than 1500 platforms to help you create e-commerce workflows. For example, Zapier Shopify’s integration allows for automatically exporting order information in a spreadsheet, adding new customers to your email marketing tools, and publishing product descriptions based on a predetermined time. Slack Slack is a popular app for real-time communication. The app allows users to send an instant message to other team members without the formality of emails. You can also create a common discussion channel for everyone. It comes with free and paid add-ons that help automate the communication process. You install a plug-in to automatically collect daily meeting updates, distribute orders, or send weekly employee engagement surveys. Another plus point of Slack lies in its wide-range integration with other apps. Besides chatting, you can save attachments directly to Dropbox and Google Drive, or add Slack’s to-do items to your to-do list, among others. Notion Notion is becoming more and more widely used these days in team management. The app helps ensure every team member has access to a central source of information, thus boosting the overall performance. Basically, it enables users to create an internal knowledge base that anyone in the company can search and access. You can also build up distinctive workspaces for different teams, such as HR, marketing, sales, and customer service, and quickly look for information recorded by any of them. Notion’s free plan allows for adding unlimited team members and creating up to 1,000 storage pools, which is good enough for a growing business with a limited budget. Wave Accounting WaveAccounting is one of the best productivity apps in terms of financial management. The tool enables business owners and their financial teams to jointly track sales, invoices, expenses, and profits. Using Wave’s free plan, you can get unlimited bank account transactions, billing, and receipt scanning. In other words, you can easily collect and integrate all your business income and expenses in a central system. Your employees can add their business credit cards to record the expenses and submit an image of the receipt on the Wave mobile app. Wave also allows for accepting payments with a number of transaction fees. The advantage is that it can automatically convert the payments into foreign currencies. Finally, you can integrate your accountants and bookkeepers into your system, and set permissions to ensure that everyone can only see what you want them to see. Asana The most obvious advantage of Asana is that it allows your team to create your own workflow instead of following a prefixed model. You can choose to present your project in a Kanban dashboard like Trello, or simply view tasks in a traditional to-do list or even a calendar. The app allows you to manage multiple projects from one central view, whereas in Trello, you need a separate dashboard for each workflow. Furthermore, Asana lets you assign tasks from any project to anyone
Top valuable customer email segments
The more relevant your message is to your target customer, the easier it is to persuade them in favor of your offer. This technique has been widely used in marketing activities, especially email marketing, with the help of distribution tools. Most email marketing tools enable marketers to identify and target many segments of customers. The goal is to generate more sales and build a stronger relationship with all of your audience. However, email segments vary from business to business with different goals, customer characteristics, and pain points. This article looks at some customer segmentation strategies that can be applied regardless of your industry. VIP customers VIP customers are people that need to take better care of. These customers have a higher value than others because of the larger amount of time and money they spend on your website. They might have made a higher-than-average order value, or they might have purchased premium products or subscriptions, or they just frequently buy from your store. Depending on your brand identity, you can name them as either VIP customers, or gold, or platinum customers. Whatever the case, Mailchimp allows you to add users to a VIP list to target with special messages. You might want to express your gratitude towards their spending on your store. Also, let them know that they’ve earned access to exclusive products, services, and offers because of their loyalty. This increases your offer’s specialty and incentivizes them to purchase, especially when they are already a loyal customer. Users with similar demographic information The easiest among email segments might be based on demographic data. People living in the same region often experience the same weather patterns and the surrounding shopping trends. For example, you can establish a promotion campaign amind a local holiday. Statistics show that people are more likely to spend money on special occasions as gifts for friends and relatives. A lot of people looking for shopping deals at the same time í a great opportunity for you to boost sales. If a universal program is not fascinating enough, you can consider discounts on the customer’s birthday. Everyone likes to receive something on their birthday. This shows that you care about every individual that comes to your stores, thus increasing the conversion rate. We recommend gathering all of the basic information upfronts when someone signs up in your store to make it easier for personalization. Inactive subscribers Inactive users are defined as people who haven’t responded to emails or purchased from your store within a period of time. Many people ignore inactive users thinking that they’re off value for their business. However, this isn’t necessarily the case. Some customers have the potential to be a gold mine if you have the right strategy. Fortunately, it is totally possible to target inactive users with Mailchimp. What you need are an attractive tagline and a captivating offer. Consider something like “We miss you! Take 15% off.” or “How have you been? Don’t forget to order soon”. These are designed to bring back customers and are much cheaper than acquiring new ones. Users who abandoned their cart The average shopping cart abandonment rate across all industries is roughly 70%. There are many reasons why people left without completing an order. It might be due to a low response check-out process or credit card issue. Technical problems can be dealt with by adding a new payment method or lowering the price or adding more benefits. It is the customer’s personal issue that is hard to handle. You might want to send a reminder a couple of hours or days after the customers abandoned the cart. Remember to keep your message friendly and avoid being too dominated. You can always accompany a discount in the message to make the offer more appealing. Users who opened but didn’t click on the link There are people who read your email but did not click on the CTAs or internal link. Which means that they’re interested in your product or service but you need another shot to win the deal. The best way to crack the sale is to create a sequence of emails with different CTAs. Once activated, you can create a campaign that allows for targeting customers who did not click on the link in the previous emails. Streamlining data with Atom8 Customer segmentation is clearly beneficial for your business. However, it requires pooling a lot of data from your backend to an email marketing tool. With Atom8’s email marketing integration, this is no longer a worry. Besides Mailchimp, you can connect your store with Sendgrid or Klaviyo based on your needs. Then you can set up a workflow to pass the customer’s information to these platforms whenever it is updated in your store’s system. All in all, audience segmentation has a big effect on your email marketing performance. Therefore, it’s worth investing time and effort in categorizing your customers as soon as possible.
