Getting Into the Unicorn Circle

Whether it’s through commissions, asset sales, subscription plans, ads, usage fees, licensing and rent or lease, getting into the unicorn circle is not just about following a model. Ecommerce businesses like Amazon don’t follow one model. They follow many in a hybrid way, unlocking value in the long term. Here’s what drives ecommerce money-making ventures:

#1 Fixed Subscriptions

Registered sellers can host products on the ecommerce platform for a fixed rate of subscription. Fixed closing fees may also be charged by the ecommerce company.

#2 Commissions

Based on the product category, the company charges registered sellers certain percentage commission based on the value of the product sold. This commission generally ranges from 5 to 20%.

#3 Logistics

Logistics and shipping are addition sources of revenue for ecommerce companies. The ecommerce brands like Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal, Myntra or even Jabong earn delivery and shipping fees.

Trustable Ecommerce App Development Companies

#4 Deep Discounting

Justification for deep discounting of products for online retailers is that discounts are being offered, in turn, by the registered seller. The benefits of deep discounting benefit every ecommerce business from Flipkart and Amazon to Snapdeal and Myntra. The ecommerce brands come equipped with cutting-edge analytics capabilities and dedicated resources for comparing prices of products across stores and websites. Based on the price-linked research, registered sellers can then peg their price. Further, sellers get compensated for discounts offered by online retailers, leading to a win-win outcome, besides a level playing field for even the smallest ecommerce seller.
Online shopping remains at the core of successful ecommerce businesses, which essentially focus on buying and selling of goods or services online. Given that ecommerce is the fastest growing retail market, estimated to reach USD 4 trillion in sales by 2020, the question “is ecommerce profitable?” is just an empty one!

#5 Finding the Right Niche

Before they build their online stores, these ecommerce businesses focus on what to sell and how to source it. Finding a successful niche is the key to mastering the markets. Keeping a finger on the social media pulse can also make sure your ecommerce business is heads and shoulders above competitors. Suggested products, reviews and YouTube videos can prove to be valuable for researching which niches to concentrate on.

#6 Tapping Social Media

Once the store is up and running, all you need to know is spread the word. For this, social media remains a powerful marketing tool. Leading ecommerce brands like Amazon and even niche sellers have their own Facebook business page. Cashing in on Instagram influencers is another key to successful ecommerce growth.

#7 Targeting the Right Audience

Leading ecommerce retailers target the right customers. For example, if the ecommerce business is selling fitness watches, the focus is on active people who visit the gym regularly. If diet formulas are being sold, your target is those trying to lose weight.

#8 Reinvesting Profits

As the business scales and demand grows, reinvesting profits makes sense. After all, ecommerce businesses will only sustain the growth momentum if they put money back into the business to cater to a new influx of customers.

#9 Using Marketing Collateral To Drive Traffic

The hardest part of an ecommerce business is the generation of traffic, whereby most online retailers rely on exceptional marketing collateral to cut through the noise and build a powerful voice and brand narrative that resonated with customers. An effective inbound marketing campaign drives growth. Content marketing by these ecommerce giants focuses on the customer research journey and addresses the client’s pain points.

#10 Set Up Targeted Ads

Another way ecommerce businesses make money vital to their long-term growth is through targeted ads that aim for customers and profitable niches right from the start. Using product specific ads has helped ecommerce companies to grow. Remarketing ads have also served as catalysts for the growth momentum.

#11 Using Multichannel Product Distribution Methods

Ecommerce businesses need to be in more than one location online to propel growth. Growing the ecommerce business commences with diversification, backed by clear channels of distribution is the key. Whether it’s Amazon, or eBay, Walmart, Rakuten among others, companies that focus on optimizing and listing products on multiple channels win hands down. They also have registered trademarks and warranty when products are sold through authorized resellers. Clear distribution agreements also are in place with retailers and distributors regarding what they can and cannot sell including quality control, measures and anti-diversion. This remains an awesome strategy for growing your ecommerce brand.

#12 Automate Processes

The more ecommerce processes are automated, the faster and easier it is to grow for the business. Setting up systems can be time consuming, but it’s well worth the effort. From order fulfillment to accounting and marketing, automation can make a huge difference to efficiency, bottom lines and profit margins for any ecommerce startup. For instance, sales data are automated from the ecommerce cart onto accounting software. Email follow-ups are also automated based on customer behavior and profiles. The more automated processes and systems are, the more ecommerce entrepreneurs can focus on high value growth activities for their business.

#13 Invest in Search Marketing

Organic reach notwithstanding, platforms like Amazon rank products as well. So online retailers need to be clear on search marketing strategies relating to the store and industry keywords. Software tools, case studies, reports, metrics and data are equally essential.

Case Study 1: Flipkart

B2C ecommerce company Flipkart offers sale of products through multiple channels, such as websites, apps(mobile and web), tele sales, affiliate networks and social buying. Percentage commission depends on product and sale type. It can range across 5-20% depending on taxes and discounts as well. Flipkart is a Singapore registered company with Indian subsidiaries to carry out diversification and derisk the revenue model from competitors. The web portal is the prime source of income. There are listing fees and convenience fees levied alongside as well as shipping and delivery charges.
Flipkart operates its own payment gateway, logisitcs, digital media and wholesale division. It also competes in the fashion category through companies like Myntra. Phone Pe is its mobile payment interface which directly competes with Paytm and other mobile payment apps.
Flipkart also sells co-branded banner opportunities on its home page, besides targeted search results and physical products on an online platform, deriving ad revenue from this. Flipkart’s enormous user base, daily visits, page views offer incredible returns. A case in point is Flipkart’s partnership with Xiaomi in India.

Case Study 2: Amazon

Driven by Jeff Bezos’s vision, a customer-centered focus is the defining strength and USP of Amazon. Amazon identifies strong trends to embrace these. Consider its focus on AI and machine learning to accelerate business growth. As per Similar Web estimates, Amazon notches 2.7 billion visits per day in the US alone. On an average, people spend more than 6 minutes on the site and look through as many as 9 pages to purchase what they want! Amazon is the 4th most popular ecommerce site in the United States.
The focus for Amazon is on selection, price, convenience, and by extension customers. The website is designed to allow easy access. Amazon is also a manufacturer on the side, selling electronic devices like Kindle e-readers and Fire tablets. Deep discounts, free shipping courtesy Amazon Prime and a host of customer-focused initiatives make Amazon an exceptional ecommerce player.
It also offers programs that enable sellers to grow their business, sell products on their sites and their branded websites and fulfill orders through Amazon. For its seller programs, Amazon earns fixed percentage fees among other types of compensation.
Amazon also serves developers and enterprises of different sizes through its AWS or warehousing system. Broad set of global compute, storage, database and service offerings are available.
Through its Publishing service, the ecommerce business model it follows lets authors and publishers choose a 70% royalty option and make books available through Kindle and Amazon Publishing. App developers, musicians, filmmakers further publish and sell content on Amazon.
In a nutshell, Amazon works to generate value for several stakeholders.

How Does Amazon make Money?

Amazon makes most of its revenue from product sales. Products have high costs, so margins Amazon makes on them are thin. Their operating income is powered by services like AWS, Amazon Prime and seller services. Amazon’s business model derives its profits from Amazon Advertising, Amazon Prime, Amazon AWS which run with higher margins. The online stores are a foundation for further growth.
Amazon collects payments from customers fast, then paying vendors with longer payment terms. The short term liquidity is used by the ecommerce giant to invest back to speed up its growth. Through this, Amazon has become a disruptive force, offering agility for the entire industry.

The Numbers

Amazon has doubled ad revenues from the first 9 months of 2017 as against 2018. Revenues went up from USD 2.92 billion in 2017 to USD 6.72 billion in 2018. Compared to Facebook’s USD 38.37 billion and Google’s more impressive USD 83.68 billion, Amazon is still an emerging player. But given that it runs a diversified ecommerce business, with several revenue streams, Amazon has donned many avatars. It’s mantra for success is its ad business which netted USD 6 billion in revenue in the first few months of 2018 alone, besides its impressive infrastructure. Amazon Prime remains a powerful business catalyst as does Amazon AWS, the latter being worth USD 17 billion in 2017.

The Bottom Line

Affiliate links, online ads and sponsorships can bring in revenue. But building an entire business with diverse sources of revenue in the ecommerce industry requires innovation. Ecommerce is a common business model for online retailers and companies to make money. As long as margins are managed and processes are scaled up, these businesses thrive and flourish.

Concluding Thoughts

Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon, is quoted as saying his online behemoth strives to be “an ecommerce destination where customers can find and discover anything.” At a larger scale, technology is the answer as margins will grow, when ecommerce prices come down, instead of shooting up. Companies that scale besides offering deep discounts in the long run are succeeding in the ecommerce industry. That is the secret sauce behind their growth and the recipe for their success!

The post Amazon Effect: How E-commerce Make Money? appeared first on EngineerBabu Blog.

These few questions seem to be on everyone’s mind lately. Owing to the tremendous growth eCommerce has witnessed in the past half-decade, it is evident that businesses will be looking to seek benefits of omni-channel retailing.
But what exactly is omni-channel retailing? Do I need to employ this in my business strategy?
There seems to be a lot of conundrum revolving around this topic. But worry no more because we’re here to answer all the questions surrounding omni-channel. Stick around till the end of this post, and I assure you that none of your questions will go unanswered.

History

Retail in its Nascence

Since Adam, commerce used to be single-channel, meaning the retailers owned a physical brick and mortar store through which sales occurred. This model was a tremendous success considering you didn’t require significant expense other than setting up your store.
Since times evolved, this channel became obsolete as it encountered many limitations.

The Digital Revolution

As the age of the digital revolution befell and smartphones & tablets came in picture – Customers demanded a more comfortable approach. Thus, retailers shifted their focus to a more diversified strategy to broaden their offerings.
Consequently, the multi-channel approach was born. Leveraging multi-channel consumers were able to shop from different channels as per their preference. Multi-channel approach provided the needed flexibility and convenience required for consumers to purchase goods and services.

This approach observed tremendous growth and proved hugely successful. But with time, people started noticing its limitations as well – Although this approach was beneficial having bought round-the-clock access to customers, but lacked in providing a seamless experience across different channels.
And, as more and more data got accumulated, it became relatively critical to introduce coherence amongst different platforms. Moreover, customer service was also a big concern since retailers communicated with shoppers in multiple channels and became perplexed with data synchronization in separate systems.

The Third Wave of Change – Origin of Omni-Channel Retailing

Customers now are more demanding. They don’t want to be limited by their geography and not have access to some commodity that might be available someplace else. Besides, they wish to seamlessly manage purchases across different channels and not struggle with order fulfillment and delay in delivery.
Hence, the arrival of – “Omni-Channel Retail”

Pertaining exclusively to eCommerce, omni-channel retailing is an integrated approach to commerce aiming at providing a unified shopping experience to consumers across all platforms.
Omni-channel retail requires centralized management of data sources to ensure a demographic view of that data. As a result, customers can wishfully use different channels in their shopping process, commencing their search at one and finishing-up the purchase at another.

The Difference between Multi-channel and Omni-channel Retailing

Many people believe omni-channel to be an extension of multi-channel retailing, though this isn’t exactly the case. Both omni-channel and multi-channel follow distinct business models.
Using multi-channel retailers implement as many channels as possible but there is no coherence amongst them, each channel is managed separately.
On the other hand, the omni-channel approach offers an integrated solution where there is centralized management of data amongst all channels, thus establishing a symbiotic ecosystem.

Why omni-channel?

According to a recent study by Harvard Business Review – To better analyze the multitude of omni-channel retailing, it was stated that:

• 7% shopped online exclusively
• 20% were store-only shoppers
• 73% used multiple channels

The above stats clearly indicate an already underlying fact that multiple channels help generate more sales. Harnessing omni-channel efficiently can boost your sales in no time. This is because shoppers that engage with retailers on multiple channels make purchases more often.
Thus, omni-channel is a lucrative strategy which needs to be leveraged right away if you wish to increase sales and retain customers. After all,

Progress is Impossible without Change

Must Read: The Top 7 eCommerce Trends for 2019

Do businesses really need to employ an omni-channel retail strategy?

Since the dawn of the internet and all things related, every business is expected, and in fact, SHOULD, have an online presence. Entrepreneurs who got-on early on this bandwagon, and realized the importance of this extremely lucrative domain are still ruling the roost! (Amazon is a good example, I guess).
Several studies conducted over time have proven time, and again that multi-channel is the way to go. Owing to the fact that consumers nowadays want everything at their convenience, and having an online presence gives institutions that opportunity.
However, the demand now is not just having multiple channels to shop through – Consumers, now, are also looking for seamless integration across the numerous platforms they utilize throughout the day. Hence, it is extremely critical, especially now more than ever, to adopt the omni-channel approach if you want to expand your business.
Businesses who have already adopted this omnichannel approach are flying high. Let’s take a few use-cases to understand better:

• Disney

Disney has gotten the omni-channel experience right to the minutest of details. Disney’s trip planning website works flawlessly across all mediums like mobile, tablet, desktop, etc. Also, it seamlessly integrates across all your devices providing synchronization with the bat of an eye.

• Starbucks

Starbucks is also leading the herd when it comes to providing one of the finest omni-channel experiences. Standing in line to get your morning cup of Joe and realizing you don’t have enough balance in your account, is the side of the town where nobody ever wants to get to.

Starbucks has now made it possible to check and reload your card via phone, website, in-store, or on the app. Any change to the card or your profile gets updated across all channels, in real-time.

• Zomato

With omni-channel, it’s all about making the customer’s life easy. It becomes especially frustrating when there isn’t seamless integration amongst platforms of the same application. For instance, imagine yourself ordering food from your favorite restaurant to discover half-hour later that the restaurant hasn’t even received your order yet.

A situation like this nullifies the whole point of adopting this medium in the first place.

Zomato (an Indian food ordering service) seeks to eradicate this frustration with its flawless user experience. You can easily track your delivery guys’ movement in real-time across multiple platforms. Plus with its easy-to-navigate tools that provide on-the-go ordering access, Zomato does a wonderful job at that too.

Since you now understand why it is crucial to implement the omni-channel retail strategy in this day and age, let us now understand as to how exactly can you do it.

How to develop an omni-channel retail strategy

Get a comprehensive understanding of your customers’ persona

The first step that goes into establishing a seamless omni-channel retail strategy is in clearly chalking up your target customer’s persona. This includes understanding which devices, platforms or medium your customers utilize regularly.

Sieve through your Google Analytics report and develop a clear elucidation of your customers’ demographics, geography, and concentration.

Secondly, try and analyze how customers are discovering your business. Once you gather and analyze all this data, you can proceed with implementing strategies accordingly.

Analyzing this data will help you gain a broad understanding of the most important touchpoints for your business.

Providing Seamless User Experience by bridging Online & Offline Shopping experience

Now that you’ve nailed down specific platforms to streamline or improve, it’s time to build off of that understanding for an omni-channel buying experience.

You need to bridge the gap between the online and offline shopping experience because customers now, don’t like wasting time visiting your store if they aren’t sure whether their desired product will be on the shelf.

To address this, you can integrate your eCommerce platform with Google. Applying this will assist the user to directly go from keyword search to product location to buying it and picking it up in-store.

Concluding View

It is no secret that technology is rapidly evolving. We have come so far from the phase when you needed a desktop to access the internet. The inception of the first iPhone was a total shift in paradigm where your handheld device was able to seamlessly access the then growing realm of the internet.
No one has been able to make it big, all by himself! Teamwork goes a long way in ensuring the overall success of any organization.  Especially, in case of omni-channel retailing, you need to strictly ensure that all the cogwheels of your supply chain are working coherently.
EngineerBabu specializes in designing some of the best seamlessly-integrated eCommerce solutions out there, and we are more than willing to share our substantial domain expertise for the benefit of your organization. You can also contact us for a free consultation.
Feel free to drop your comments in the section below, in case you have any doubts.

Handpicked Content for You:

• How to Start a FinTech Company – 7 Things You Should Know
• Largest eCommerce Companies in the World
• Top 5 Use-Cases of AI in eCommerce
• How to Start an eCommerce Business

The post What is Omnichannel Retailing? appeared first on EngineerBabu Blog.

In this article, I would try and shed some light on the practical and significant use-cases of AI in eCommerce and how your eCommerce business can leverage it at this moment in time!
There seems to be a lot of conundrum on the subject of AI in eCommerce, so let’s put an end to this discussion, once and for all, shall we?

5 Use-Cases of AI in eCommerce

1. Better Search Results

It has been observed that customers end up abandoning their purchase because often the product results displayed turns out irrelevant.
Through AI organizations are trying to display customer-centric search results that are relevant to their desired ask.  eCommerce websites are increasingly leveraging NLP (or Natural Language Processing) and Image Recognition to better comprehend user language and produce better product results.
Yandex, a popular search engine, successfully implemented some advanced applications of NLP and Deep Learning to optimize future searches with the help of the data of previous searches. This turned out to be a massive success as they were able to increase their click-through rates by almost ten percent.
Clarifai is trying to improve ecommerce by building smarter applications which can see the world as people would. In their words, “Artificial Intelligence with a Vision.” These applications enable the developers to build more intelligent apps and at the same time empower business by providing a customer-centric experience.

Pinterest is partnering with ecommerce stores for its new offering Pinterest Lens to find matching items in the store directly from their image on Pinterest. This is great from the standpoint where people generally abandon their search because they aren’t able to find the relevant product.
Developments such as these are not just helping businesses generate better revenues, but are also reducing customers’ journey.

Recommended Read: 5 Tips to Ensure Impeccable Security for Your eCommerce Business

2. Shopping Experience Level 1001!

How do you enhance the user’s shopping experience?
Make it as real as possible!
If you want to understand just how much Google knows about you, go check out your Google Maps Timeline!
The devices that you use collect and store a ton of information about you. This data is extremely valuable as the right type of information can enrich and improve your shopping experience.
Deep Learning and Machine Learning technologies are able to utilize the smallest piece of data. For instance, even the hover that you made over a product is analyzed and evaluated to understand the likelihood of you buying that product.
In practice, this personalization helps deliver images of related products, enticing offers related to the product, alerts related to that product, and dynamic content that alters according to demand and supply.
AI engines such as Boomtrain acts as a bolt-on with your existing customer channels and helps businesses analyze how customers are interacting online. It also provides a unified view across all devices, monitoring and analyzing performances across different platforms.
Companies like Criteo, are assisting Internet retailers to serve personalized online display advertisements to consumers who have previously visited the advertiser’s website. Through cross-device advertising, they are able to engage shoppers wherever they are online with premium-placed ads across desktop, mobile and social.

AI is assisting in generating deep and relevant insights of data by analyzing and scanning through terabytes of data to efficiently predict human behavior. This scale of intelligence helps deliver a personalized shopping experience for the end user.

3. Curbing Fake Reviews

These stats are absolutely insane!
Customer reviews are an integral part of the sales cycle. 87% of customers trust what they read without the blink of an eyelid. The last couple of years have seen a surge in talks around this subject and has consequently impacted the way customer perceive information they encounter online, even if it is ostensibly written by a credible source.
Artificial Intelligence is increasingly being deployed to analyze user reviews.
For instance, Yelp has deployed a sentiment analysis technique to classify their review ratings. Through this technique, they organize the information into different data sets like business_id (ID of the business being reviewed), date (Day the review was posted), review_id (ID for the published review), stars (1–5 rating for the business), text (Review text), etc,.
On similar lines, Facebook has come up with their AI solution “fastText” for text classification and create supervised as well as unsupervised learning algorithms to obtain vector representation for words.

4.  Sales Forecasting

Earlier only God or Charles Xavier could have read your mind – but now – AI can too!
Try and fathom an alternate reality where all your marketing efforts and expenditures are targeted only where the customer is likely to make a purchase. Your conversion rate will be at an all-time high, and you won’t waste your capital on customers who won’t buy.
Being able to foretell how much of a given product will sell by a specific date will enable shop owners to stack up on inventory more efficiently, and simultaneously eliminate large sums of undesired cost.
It is especially valuable for industries dealing with perishable products, which include not only groceries but also tickets of concert and transportation – anything that costs money when unsold.

Sounds too good to be true, right?

AI solutions can gather historical data about past purchases and help your sales team better derive conclusions and make decisions. Besides, you won’t even need to sell your arms and legs to afford this either as these solutions are easily deployable, even by organizations with smaller budgets. Employing AI, businesses were able to derive relevant conclusions like –

• Suggesting products that should be promoted on a particular date
• Identify popular products that are making good sales
• Predicting what customers are likely to purchase in advance
• Determining the highest price a customer will pay for your product
• Targeted promotions
• Reduce fraud
• Improve supply chain management
• Enhance business intelligence
• Make the most money on your sales

5. Chatbots to the Rescue

It might be so hard for you to feel special amongst an ocean of 7 Billion, right?
Well, eCommerce websites are adopting chatbots to make you feel special.
Companies are increasingly deploying chatbots to improve customer service & satisfaction. Go ahead and browse any ecommerce site, a little chatbox will pop-up asking you what you want to make a purchase of. Once you enter your requirements, you get filtered results specific to your taste.
Let us list some benefits of deploying chatbots:

• Chatbots have increased customer conversion tremendously by reducing the labor for lazy buyers.
• We have come so far from the time when chatbots offered just customary replies. Now they have become intelligent beings who understand and tackle a range of issues which they were earlier incapable of.
• It is vital to provide real-time support to online shoppers as a recent study found that almost 83% of online shoppers need assistance while shopping and chatbots make it possible to provide real-time support.
• Chatbots also provide a more personalized experience for consumers. Compared with social media, chatbots can make conversations more interactive and engaging. They increase the sales figures by up to 40%.
• Deploying chatbots helps to collect feedback more efficiently. Additionally, it can make it easier to track purchasing patterns and consumer behavior.
• Chatbots can provide efficiency, that too at an affordable price. Live support can be quite costly with limited work hours. Chatbots automate the process and can operate 24/7.
• Chatbots are gaining ground. Apart from potentially changing the industry, implementing a chatbot can be a good marketing campaign. Any company who wants to stay ahead in the race needs to follow this trend.

Wrapping Up

Coming up with innovations isn’t rocket science anymore. AI has become the single biggest driver of massive technological advancements in every tangible domain – and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
The question we need to ask ourselves is – Are we ready to keep pace and adapt with this onslaught of changes that are happening so rapidly?
If No, there you have it. You need to adapt and change pace as quickly as possible. Coz if you don’t, you will be replaced.

EngineerBabu excels in providing some of the best eCommerce solutions out there. Our AI-enabled offerings help derive deeper insights into the customer journey and in turn assist businesses in taking calculated decisions on how to advance.

Our eCommerce customers have garnered numerous accolades over time. Our dear Australian customer Frankgreen grabbed the Best Design Award for not one, two, but three consecutive years. Ondoor, a grocery retailer earned 100,000 downloads in record time as well!

Call us for a free consultation, we’ll be glad to help you out! Also check out our portfolio, right here. 

Handpicked Content for You

• How to Start an eCommerce Business
• Largest eCommerce Companies in the World
• Top 7 eCommerce Trends for 2019
• 5 Ways to Ensure Impeccable Security for your eCommerce Business

The post Top 5 Use-Cases of AI in eCommerce appeared first on EngineerBabu Blog.

Firstly, let us understand some of the most distinguished and common threats that hamper merchants from doing business effectively –

• Online Security
  There is a wide range of ecommerce security threats out there that hamper trade over the internet. The primary motive behind all these security threats is to exploit the victim in terms of money. These include credit card frauds, malware, phishing attacks, hacking, spams, etc.
• System Reliability
  System reliability comprises three major types of issues
  • The Internet service provider (ISP) server could crash
  • The online payment system could show errors
  • The ecommerce plugin could have bugs
• Privacy Issues
  We can’t even quantify how many product catalogs, user IDs, personal information, and financial information like credit card details a typical eCommerce site stores. That’s what makes eCommerce sites of almost any magnitude, so attractive and appealing to hackers and fraudsters to exploit. A customers’ personal data could be compromised and used for spamming, identity theft and unsolicited marketing. Therefore, privacy issues are one of the most pressing problems for e-commerce businesses.
• Payment Frauds
  No matter how good your online security measures are, sometimes it is tough to avoid payment frauds. Notorious elements could get access to details of your credit cards by impersonating as financial institutions.
• Intellectual Property Issues
  Others could copy your product descriptions, product images, copyright logos, even music, and even videos and use it for their purposes. Intellectual property violations are pretty eminent as they could easily be made.

Recommended Read: How to Start an eCommerce Business?

Having learned about the major threats, now let’s dig into how you can prevent your site or your business from these imminent anomalies that hover around this realm,

1. Get SSL Certified

Ideally, every site needs to have SSL by default. Generally, SSL certificates are used to protect data transfer, credit card transactions,  and login information. In a recent development, SSL certifications are also being deployed on social media sites to enable secure browsing.

What are SSL certificates?
SSL Certificates are records of data which digitally bind a cryptographic key to an organization’s details. When deployed on a server, SSL activates the padlock and HTTPS protocol and activates secure connections from a web server to a browser.
SSL Certificates bind together:

• A domain name, server name or hostname.
• An organizational identity (i.e., company name) and location.

The primary reason why the utilization of SSL is increasing is that they keep sensitive information sent across the Internet encrypted so that only the intended recipient can access it. This is critical because the information one sends over the Internet is conceded from computer to the other to get to its destination. If any computer in the network is compromised, the server would be able to see your username, passwords and even sensitive information like credit card numbers if it is not encrypted with an SSL certificate.
When an SSL certificate is used, the information becomes unreadable to everyone except for the server you are transferring the information to. This approach safeguards it from potential threats and notorious elements.

How does it work?

1. A user attempts to connect to a website (i.e., a web server) via a web browser. This connection needs to be secured with SSL.
2. The web browser requests the identity of the web server.
3. The web server sends a copy of its SSL certificate.
4. The browser verifies the received SSL certificate. If verified it sends a message to the web server.
5. The web server acknowledges by sending over an acknowledgment.
6. The session is started, and encrypted data is shared

2. Become PCI compliant

In a study, it was found that nearly 90% of security breaches impact small businesses.
PCI Compliance stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). The PCI DSS is a security standard for organizations that handle branded credit cards from the major card schemes.
The standard came into practice in 2006 and has gained wide popularity worldwide to prevent credit card frauds and to increase controls around cardholder data.
PCI compliance applies to corporations of any size that accepts card payment. So, is your ecommerce PCI compliant?
There are plenty of reasons to become PCI compliant as this could increasingly secure your online transactions considerably.
Small businesses often feel plagued in their capabilities to adjust their processes accordingly to become PCI compliant. Hence, if you want your business to become PCI compliant you need to remember, PCI compliance is attained through a collaborative effort amongst teams, including working with payment processors that ensure PCI compliance, accepting EMV chip cards and even securing your business’s IT infrastructure, networks, and payment processes.
PCI compliance can be intimidating and complicated for e-commerce business owners to decipher and implement, but they’re a set of precautions designed to minimize your risk and protect your customers.
Getting PCI compliant can be a daunting task, especially for small business owners. Thus your PCI compliance checklist should include the following:

• Use a firewall for payment card data and public network, and keep the firewall updated.
• Do not store the cardholder’s data. If your business needs to store cardholders’ data, make sure you use strong encryption. Several platforms provide extensions to shift the storage of cardholder data. For instance, you can deploy Magento’s extension BrainTree to switch the storage of the cardholder data.
• Use encryption to safeguard all transmissions of cardholder data over any public network.
• You need to ensure that your card processing systems have a vendor-supplied security patch installed.
• Limit access to cardholder data to as few people as possible.
• Regularly test your security systems and network environment.
• Establish an effective and efficient security policy and make sure that all personnel are aware of it.

3. Choose the correct eCommerce Platform

It is an extremely critical business process to employ an efficient ecommerce platform for your business. It is vital, especially for small business, to be extremely vigilant while selecting the correct ecommerce platform for your business.
With sleuths of ecommerce platforms being available at throwaway prices, selecting the appropriate platform becomes a daunting task, considering that switching isn’t an appropriate option. Hence, a tonne of planning must go into ensuring that you have selected the best platform.
Our recommendations:

• We recommend you to employ a platform which is based on Object-Oriented Programming and includes built-in security protocols.
• In case, if you opt for WordPress as your platform, select a good WordPress security plugin that will help add an extra layer of protection to your website.
• Also, set up a bot mitigation solution as it isn’t provided by default.

Have a look at the table below, and you’ll get a brief idea on which platform could be leveraged for your business.
For an in-depth understanding of the best and most suitable ecommerce platforms for your business, do read our detailed article on, “Best eCommerce Platforms in 2019.”

4. Do I really need security auditing?

YES, YOU DO!
I can’t press on this enough to make people understand the importance of security auditing. Even if you are a small business with relatively lesser transactions and money flowing through your website,
YOU DO NEED SECURITY AUDITING.
Frequent security checkups and audits are highly recommended for sustaining and reinforcing your ecommerce website’s safety. Audits not just help in weeding out potential threats that may have found their way onto your portal, but also eliminates data of past transactions.
Just like casinos; online portals which have round-the-clock cash flow are marred with new security contingencies every other day. Security audits thus become quite necessary to ensure their client’s information is safeguarded efficiently and effectively.
An ecommerce business is granted a certificate and a mark after its security audit. Even consumers can differentiate these security audited websites through the individual marks they embody.
There are 4 significant factors on which the security audit of business is evaluated, namely:

• Data security
• Performance
• Engagement
• Navigation
• Product
• Payment
• Fulfillment
• Service

5. Is your Customer even Human?

Do you know that bots represent 50% of all the website traffic?
Do you also know that 30% of this 50% are bad bots?

These bad boys are the single-handedly the most significant contributors to eCommerce website frauds.
Everyone wants more traffic for their ecommerce site. However, it is necessary to ensure that all this traffic is legitimate and comes from a verified buyer. What you might suppose as legitimate traffic on your website could actually be malicious bots deployed by hackers and even your competitors to scrape your product prices and even steal your entire customer data, vendor data and product catalogs, that too within a matter of a few seconds.
For protecting your business against the threats of bad bots creeping into your website, you can employ a series of effective steps,
STEP 1: Detecting and Analyzing legitimate bot traffic is the first step. Bot detection platforms should be able to make out human traffic from non-human traffic. Non-human traffic patterns could be detected by employing logical puzzles and security questions on pages that involve cash flow.
STEP 2: Once you are finished implementing STEP 1, and bot traffic have been identified, the next step involves classifying the type of traffic. Bot traffic could either be from a known source – like that of search engine bots which should be allowed to pass through, and the other could be from a source malicious source, whose intent may not be clear – this shouldn’t be allowed to pass through.
STEP 3: The third and final step involves controlling the malicious bot traffic, which would depend on the intent of the bot. For example,

• If the bot is eyeing for vulnerabilities or trying to commit frauds like shopping cart stuffing, the software should deny access and return a false 404 “page not found” to the bot.
• For a DoS attack (denial of service), your bot mitigation and management solution should simply divert the traffic.

Fortunately, there are also some pretty effective bot detection platforms that you could leverage at a reasonable price for your eCommerce site, namely,

• Infisecure
  InfiSecure offers real-time and user behavior based bot detection technology to identify bad bots. Their tools block web scraping bots in real time before they access your ecommerce website, thus preventing customers from fraudulent orders, data theft, price scraping, and variation tracking.
• ShieldSquare
  ShieldSquare utilizes a non-intrusive API-based approach to analyses and detects malicious activity on your ecommerce site, thus blocking bots in real-time without impacting the real users already browsing through your product catalog.
• Data DomeBeing employed by some of the significant fortune 500 companies, Data Dome employs an AI-empowered bot management solution to counter frauds like user data theft, price scraping, etc.
• Global Dots
  Global Dots is an extraordinarily efficient and effective platform to ensure security from bad bots. They use Behavioral Fingerprinting to analyze dynamic profiles of real customers to identify click frauds, content and price scraping.

Concluding View

Many pillars go into holding-up the dome of eCommerce security.
Data privacy being a major concern for every internet-based enterprise right now, it is extremely important, now more than ever to safeguard customer’s data to maintain the dwindling trust with eCommerce-based companies. With the revelation of Cambridge Analytica Scandal consumers have become unsure of commerce over the internet.  
Whether you are just starting out, or have a small business in a place or a major enterprise – Doesn’t matter. These measures need to function like clockwork to ensure impeccable security for your website. One would also need to keep yourself and your team updated with the latest advancements in Cybersecurity.
Stringent security measures must be put in place to protect your company from threats, or risk jeopardizing revenue and customer trust.
After all, It is a tricky domain to be in, but,

The fruits of your labor will bear the fruits of your success.

Handpicked Content for You:

• How to Start an eCommerce Business
• How to Start a FinTech Company
• How to Enhance Your Payments Usability – Instantly!
• How Can AI Help Small Business?
• Largest eCommerce Companies in the World

The post 5 Security Tips for your eCommerce Website appeared first on EngineerBabu Blog.

This is a simple business model that’s extremely easy to over think. There are many moving parts that can feel tricky, and even confusing at times. Therefore one must remember,

“Everything is Simple, till you make it complicated.”

Here’s the basic game plan to start an eCommerce Business

1. Select a product to sell
   1. Find a product to sell
   2. Evaluate your product
   3. Conduct market research
   4. Obtain your product
   5. Prepare a business plan
   6. Sell some samples
2. Set up your business
   1. Find a name and create an engaging logo
   2. Structure your website for SEO
   3. Build your store
   4. Select a sales channel
3. Identify KPIs for your business
4. Acquiring Customers
5. Market extensively
6. Collect feedback

STEP 1: Selecting a Product

In this section, we will highlight some key strategies one can apply to get going with your product.
1. Selecting a product to sell
The first step in building an ecommerce business is to know what products you want to sell, and this is generally the place where most entrepreneurs get themselves stuck in.  If you don’t understand what you’re doing, it’s easy to get lost in the Gulf of Product Research.
With so many businesses and sellers looking to one-up the other – It is essential to target a niche market segment, in case your product is mainstream – remember to keep your quality high, and pricing as competitive as possible.
2. Evaluating your product
Once you get a product idea in mind, how do you stipulate it will sell?
Here market research comes to action.

• Brainstorm and research about the different types of products you can sell.
• Take into account every possible anomaly.
• Validate your product idea by asking people to purchase before you start on making or importing them.

Pre-sales is a powerful strategy that could help ensure there’s a real demand for your product. Pre-sales helps reduce assumptions and gets you moving forward quickly with your business.
3. Find the Right Vendors
Once you’ve decided on a product, you will need to source that product from a distinguished supplier. It can take quite some digging to find them, but there are ways to ensure you dodge the scams and increase your odds at finding an awesome supplier.
You’ll have a lot of competition selling products online, so it is in your best interest to obtain the best quality and best prices for the products you wish to sell, or materials you use to create your products. Look around with patience until you find a vendor you want to do business with long-term.
The DON’Ts

• Don’t proceed to buy in bulk from a factory until you have their samples in your hands which you absolutely LOVE.
• Don’t let any supplier tell you that they can’t ship small sample orders; they are just trying to squeeze you.
• Don’t purchase with any other method but Trade Assurance or PayPal for the first few months with your supplier. This eradicates a ton of risk.
• Don’t buy from someone that won’t accept PayPal or Trade Assurance. What it really indicates is that they were closed down due to complaints.
• Never buy counterfeit products. Not that there isn’t money to be made, it’s just a bad business to be in and ILLEGAL.
• Never buy a lot of inventory in the beginning.

STEP 2: Set up your business

Besides from finding an actual product to sell online, another challenging decision is determining your business or brand name and choosing an appropriate and available domain name.
1. Find a name and create an engaging logo
The right name can prove to be a brand’s valuable asset, driving differentiation and speeding acceptance. On the other hand, the wrong name can cost millions in workarounds and lost income over the lifecycle of the brand.
Thus, it is immensely important to find the right name when setting up your online store and help your business stand out from the crowd. Here are a few pointers on how to find that killer name.

• Keep it short & simple
• Be different
• Put on your creative thinking hats
• Be original
• Never lose the essence

2. Structure your website for SEO
To make sales, it is vital for any online venture to rank well on search engines. Therefore you need to understand the basics of search engine optimization so that you can adequately structure your site and pages for Google and other search engines.
Here are a few pointers that can help you rank well on popular search engines like Google:

• Carry out extensive keyword research
  • You can use keywords research tools like Ubersuggest, SEMrush, Moz etc to understand which keywords are trending.
  • Choose the right keyword for your store
• Ensure your site structure is simple, but easy to scale.
• Try keeping every page of your site as few clicks from the homepage as possible.
• Leverage On-page SEO for the product category and product pages
• Take advantage of LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)

3. Build your store
After having a better understanding of search engines, it is now time to build your store. The two most crucial aspect of delivering the best user experience is – Captivating product descriptions and Beautiful product photography
Recommended Read: 5 Things to Keep in Mind for Building an eCommerce Website
4. Select a sales channel
It is a smart approach to leverage already build sales channel instead of creating new ones. Therefore one of the best ways to target new customers is to choose sales channels where they already shop. The right combination of sales channels will depend on your products and your target customers.

STEP 3: Identify KPIs for your business

Key performance indicators or (KPIs) are like landmarks on the road to online retail success. Examining them will help eCommerce entrepreneurs identify progress toward sales, marketing, and customer service goals.
KPIs should be selected and monitored depending on your unique business goals. Specific KPIs support some goals while they’re irrelevant for others. With the idea that KPIs should be different based on the goal being measured, it’s likely to consider some performance indicators for eCommerce.

For instance, these could be some of the key KPIs for different sectors:
For Marketing

• Site traffic: Site traffic is the total number of visits to your eCommerce website. More site traffic means more users are visiting your store.
• New visitors vs returning visitors – New visitors are the first-time visitors to your site. Returning visitors, on the other hand, are those who have been to your site before.
• Total Time on site: This KPI tells you how much time visitors are spending on your site. Ideally, more time spent signifies they’ve had deeper engagements with your brand. Generally, you’ll want to see more time spent on blog content and landing pages and lesser time spent through the checkout process.
• Bounce rate: The bounce rate denotes how many users exit your site after viewing only one page. If the bounce rate is higher, you’ll want to investigate why visitors are leaving your site instead of sticking around.

For Sales:

• Sales: Ecommerce retailers can examine the total sales by hour, day, week, month, quarter, or year.
• Average order size: Sometimes referred to as the average market basket, the average order size tells you how much a customer is typically going to spend on a single order.
• Gross profit:  This KPI is determined by deducting the total cost of goods sold from total sales.
• Average margin: Average profit margin or average margin is a percentage that represents your profit margin over a specified duration.
• Number of transactions: These are the total number of transactions. Use this KPI in union with average order size, or the total number of site visitors to get more profound insights.

For Customer Service:

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score: The CSAT score is measured by customer response to a ubiquitous survey question: “How satisfied are you with your experience?” This is usually answered using a numbered scale.
• Net promoter score (NPS): The NPS KPI provides insight into your customer relationships and brand loyalty by describing how likely customers are to recommend your brand to someone in their connections.
• Hit rate: Calculate your hit rate by accounting the total number of sales of a single product and dividing it by the total number of customers who have contacted the customer service team for the said product.
• Customer service email count: Are the number of emails your customer support team receives on a daily basis.

For project management:

• Hours worked: The total hours worked tells the total time a team has put in a project. Project managers should also measure the inconsistency in estimated vs actual hours worked to calculate better and resource future plans.
• Budget: Budget depicts how much money has been allocated for a specific project. Project managers and ecommerce business owners would want to ensure that the allocated budget is realistic; if you are repeatedly over budget, some adjustments to your project planning needs to be done.
• Return on Investment (ROI): This KPI tells us, how much your efforts have earned for your business. The higher the number, the better.
• Cost variance: Just as it is helpful to compare real vs predicted timing and hours, you should examine the total cost against the expected cost. This will help you comprehend where you need to reel it in and where you may want to invest more.

STEP 4: Acquiring Customers

Acquiring customers, in the beginning, requires focus and time. With hundreds of channels and means to promote your business, it can become difficult to find the ones that make better sense for your business.
One needs to identify some key marketing tactics that you are planning to leverage and implement them for the first few months. Identify some KPIs to analyze whether the tactics that you narrowed down are working or not. If not then you should tweak your marketing strategy.
It’s easy to fall prey to endlessly altering your store in pursuit of perfection, instead of spending that attention into the most significant activity – Getting people to the store.
Try this challenge: If your store had already launched, focus your next 30 days exclusively on getting targeted traffic that’s likely to make a purchase.

STEP 5: UP Your Marketing Efforts

Once you are in the business for a quarter or two – It is time to shift your focus to a broader marketing initiative.  It is likely that by thi time you have a few sales under your belt. It’s time to get serious and focused. Try implementing the below strategies to drive hoards of customers to your door –

• E-mail marketing
  • Run email campaigns
  • Send promotional and transactional emails
• Content Marketing
  • Create engaging blog posts
  • Post relevant and crisp content
  • Leverage significant players of the industry
• Social Media Marketing
  • Utilize Instagram to drive traffic
  • Try your hands at Pinterest
  • Create short YouTube videos.

STEP 6: Gather feedback

To stay relevant in ecommerce, it is crucial to learn from your mistakes.

I have observed that almost everyone in the ecommerce domain never follows up on their customers’ feedback. Collecting feedback shouldn’t be your only goal; instead one needs to follow up diligently on the customers’ shopping experience and implement strategies to improve the same.
Several major ecommerce players swear by this strategy.

Wrapping Up

Building your own eCommerce business or for that matter, any business whatsoever is as appealing as it is challenging. At a rapid pace, you need to learn a tonne about choosing a product, assessing its viability, figuring out how to get it sourced or produced, building the online store, marketing and selling to new customers. The process doesn’t even end here, you need to constantly improvise and improve your offerings or someone will get ahead of you.
The process can feel quite tedious as if you’re solving a head-scratcher of a puzzle, but it’s rewarding at the same time. We wish following this resource roundup helps provide you with a clearer road-map.

We hope you found this post valuable. Let us know in the comments below what you would like to learn next about.

Handpicked Content for You

• Top eCommerce Development Companies – 2019
• 5 Things to Keep in Mind for Building an eCommerce Website
• Largest eCommerce Companies in the World
• Best eCommerce Platform for Small Business – 2019
• How Can AI Help Small Businesses?

The post How to Start an eCommerce Business appeared first on EngineerBabu Blog.