—By Manish Patil
New Delhi, May 13: While online stores are becoming a preferred choice for shoppers, who are rapidly growing in numbers, Indian e-commerce firms are at the forefront of leveraging technology to power their business.
When setting up an efficient E-store, the look and feel play a very important role, but it is also important to understand human psychology – how people view, browse and use your site. All design aspects should ensure that the flow and functionality of your website are relevant to your business and enhance the ultimate user experience. There are a number of highly advanced platforms available for Ecommerce businesses which help in easy development of these websites.
Broadly there are two kind of technological solutions for powering an ecommerce website:
1. License based shopping cart software – This software is suitable for the businesses which have their own in-house technical team to set-up and manage the software and the server.
2. SAAS based solution – These kind of solutions are mostly business ready and let you launch your online business within a few days. Businesses using SAAS based solution don’t need to have technical expertise as most of the technical part is taken care of by the platform and the hundreds of advance ecommerce tools and features which come pre-integrated with it.
Here are some of the essential elements that should be present on an e-commerce site, powering the process and giving an excellent customer experience.
Payment Gateways
There are multiple aggregators that use secure technology to enable websites to accept online payments via Credit Card, Debit Cards & Net banking and even Cash Cards. Most of the banks today provide online payment gateway solutions, but it’s always advised to sign up with payment gateway aggregators such as EBS, PayU etc for the same. These aggregators provide secure technology and facilitate acceptance of Credit Cards, Debit Cards and Net Banking for most of the Indian and International Banks.
Logistics solution
The logistic service plays a pivotal role in the E-commerce business, while there are many challenges faced during E-commerce logistics, there are technological solutions provided by the logistic companies as well as third party companies to make E-commerce logistics hassle free. Depending on their delivery network, service level, cost of delivery and the speed of services one can define their efficiency. Therefore it’s advisable to sign up with multiple logistic partners. Also manually managing the shipment allotment based on deliverable region can be a painful and time consuming job. Today few companies such as browntape.com have come up with a solution that helps sellers to automate the logistic process. This tool automatically allots the shipments to various courier partners based on the region and the cost of shipment, saving you time and money.
SEO – Getting Traffic to your website
While there are number of service providers who provide SEO services to ensure higher ranks and listings on search engines, there are also a few easy tools and techniques that will help your website rank top on the search engines.
– Blogs: Regularly publishing original, relevant content is a great way to improve your search engine ranking. The best way to do so is to have an in-build blog on your website.
-SEO Friendly URL: Having a clean URL structure helps search engines crawlers index your pages in a right way. Many SAAS based shopping software’s comes with a feature called “SEO friendly URL”. This tool converts your complex URL structure into a clean structure and includes the product keywords in the URL making it easy for search engines to identify and index your pages resulting in better ranks in the search results.
-Tags & Keywords: It’s crucial to ensure that the keywords related to you product / service should be places in meta-tags, meta-description and SEO keywords section of your product. There are smart in-build tools on few SAAS platform that automatically generate keywords, description and tags for a portfolio of 1000s of product instantly.
– Google Tools: It’s very important to have your products listed on Google shopping to ensure optimization of your products on product search results. Today a number of SAAS based shopping cart makes it easy to integrate your store with Google shopping instantly.
Digital Marketing:
The other important aspects that powers an e-commerce website include:
– Social Media – An extremely powerful platform if utilized to its maximum potential, social media – today is one of the most effective and efficient way for your brand to reach out to millions of potential customers with an appropriate marketing strategy. There are multiple applications and tools such as punch tab or invite referrals that let you create engaging campaigns, loyalty programs and referral marketing programs across all social media platforms.
– Email Marketing – An effective mailer campaign would encompass approaching the right target audience, right mailing database, tracking and analytics of the mailer campaign, technology and techniques to ensure maximum deliveries to the right target etc. Today a few email marketing companies let you create you email campaign, maintain the mailing list and also track the performance in-depth giving you advance analytics on various aspects to help you plan better mailer campaign time and again.
(The author is Business Head, Ecommerce24. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views of Channel Times or any of the websites managed or operated by Trivone Digital Services)