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Digital Marketing: Key for an e-Commerce Startup

Category: Ecommerce

Digital Marketing: Key for an e-Commerce Startup
Mohab Ecommerce 0

Digital Marketing: Key for an e-Commerce Startup

You have a great idea; you have registered your name and your business; you have complied with the tax regulations, you have chosen a brand name, you have signed up for your domain, you are developed your website, you have selected a shopping cart plugin for your site or developed your own shopping cart, you have selected your payment gateway you have stocked your inventory.

Now you are all set! Your maiden e-commerce venture is about to begin! But, how do you get the word out that you are a new e-commerce venture and how do you attract customers to buy from your website, whether it is a marketplace or a single store. The answer lies in Marketing. Considering all forms of marketing available nowadays, the most effective form is to market through the digital form, especially social media.

The following factors are the reasons why you should concentrate on digital marketing:

  1. Variety of Content:

    As a business, you would have multiple forms of content that you can leverage to educate the consumer about differentiating factors of your e-commerce platform, be it blogs, infographics, images, etc…. From a content creation standpoint, focus on the USP of your platform and the experience that your platform provides.

  2. Pervasiveness of Search Engines:

    Most consumers search online looking for products to buy. Hence it is an imperative for your e-commerce platform to be SEO friendly. You should have optimized all the pages of your site/platform to be picked up by Google/Bing/Yahoo. Well, the most popular search engine is Google, therefore optimization of product pages on your site is a necessity. Most importantly, ensure your site has a search bar for any consumer to search for a specific product they are looking for. Search engine crawlers tend to rank sites higher with a product search option. This also enables your site’s product page to be featured for product searches done on the search engine.

  3. Analytics and Targeting:

    The role of analytics in the digital marketing space has grown over the years and it proves to be a great barometer of consumer assessment. You can often target a consumer who spends more time on your site by pushing out relevant ads of the product pages he has browsed, through remarketing (either google remarketing or facebook remarketing).

  4. Growth of Social Media:

    It is a no brainer that social media platforms such as facebook or twitter have grown to become hubs for consumer conversations. It adds value to have a strong social media presence and market yourself effectively on social media to create awareness about your new e-commerce venture.

  5. Social Listening:

    Using advanced social media listening tools to gain insights about your consumer, as in picking up clues from his conversations, actions, etc… Social listening tools enable you to keep a tab on your competitor and their navigation of the digital space. It is a must for analysing consumer behaviour and analysing competition.

  6. Video Marketing:

    Videos in the digital world are known to capture the consumer’s attention in a very short span of time. Video content can be used for paid/non-paid digital advertising leading the consumer to go to the site and browse through or purchase. It pays to invest in video marketing, as the ROI over a period is going to be highly profitable for you.

As you can gauge by now, digital marketing is an intrinsic lever to grow your e-commerce business. What are you waiting for? Start now! Subscribe to our blog to gain more insights on e-commerce. You can also sign up for a demo of our Payments Solution to understand the value that we can bring to your e-commerce venture.

7 years ago
How a Payment Gateway Works
Mohab Ecommerce 0

If you have ever wondered how a payment gateway functions on the backend. Well, look no further! We have a lowdown on how a payment gateway facilitates the transfer of information between a payment portal (such as a website, mobile phone) and the Front End Processor or acquiring bank. Here is a step by step guide detailing how Payment Gateways work:

How a Payment Gateway Works

To understand the value of PayTabs as a comprehensive Payment processor, sign up for a free demo here. If you have some questions or insights, feel free to comment below.

7 years ago
Starting Your E-Commerce Business: Key Points
Mohab Ecommerce 0

Starting Your E-Commerce Business: Key Points

Worldwide e-commerce sales is projected to grow to $4.5 trillion* by 2021. That’s almost double the current value. While at the face of it, the value seems mind boggling but it doesn’t come as a surprise because globally, e-commerce has been witnessing staggering growth, propelled by the sprouting of various e-commerce startups across the world.

Considering the growth of the industry, it is a lucrative proposition to start an e-commerce enterprise. Hence, if you have an idea and are willing to navigate through the challenges of building and running your own e-commerce enterprise, here are the key points you need to keep in mind:

  • Name & Registration: Choose a name for your business that separates you from the competition. Do a corporate name search to ensure that the name you have chosen is not in use. You would need to register the name and select a business structure for your startup, it can be a sole proprietorship/partnership/LLC/Corporation.
  • Domain name & Website: Ideally, your business name should be the domain of your e-commerce site. If the domain is not available, chose a domain name, that’s easy to spell and pronounce.
  • Banking Regulations & Identification number: Make sure you have your company’s identification number, as per the respective country’s law and ensure that you open up your company’s bank account. These are generally for tax & corporate records purposes.
  • Business Licenses and Permits: Check the operating licenses that you require to run an e-commerce business in your country and ensure you have all the licenses in place before starting business operations.
  • Find the right vendor: If you are going to running a marketplace, then you wouldn’t need a vendor for products that you would sell. But if it’s a standalone e-commerce platform, you would need a long term commitment from a vendor for supplies/raw materials or products.
  • Inventory: Make sure you have stocked your inventory. It would help tremendously, when your orders come through. You should be able to provision for x number of order and ship on time.
  • Logistics and Delivery: It is imperative for any e-commerce to have the logistics and delivery sorted. It is not only delivery for your customer orders but the delivery of your supplies that need to be streamlined as well.
  • Technology & Software: Having the right shopping cart plugin or building your own shopping cart is a must for any e-commerce site, the experience of your customer while shopping on your site, depends on your cart. Additionally, you need to ensure that you gradually invest in productivity software such as email marketing, CRM, etc…
  • Marketing: To start off with, use all digital marketing mediums, especially social media to spread the word about your business and drive sales. Prepare blog posts and social media properties well in advance.
  • Compliance: Your business will grow at the speed of light, but you must be mindful of the fact that you follow the regulations as per compliance, i.e. reporting annual results or quarterly results to regulators. Even the annual fees for your business permits and licenses. Do not ignore any aspect of being a compliant and legal e-commerce site.

Last but not the least, for transactions to occur on your e-commerce site, you would need a payment gateway to be integrated with your website. Sign up for a free demo to unlock the value that we can provide for your e-commerce venture, as a comprehensive payments solution provider.

*Data Source: Statista

7 years ago
Physical Store vs Online Store
Mohab Ecommerce 0

 

Physical Store vs Online Store

One fine morning, you wake up and you stumble upon a business idea that you instantaneously believe in and you think it will work great in the marketplace. You start working on your business plan and then you stop at a critical juncture, you start evaluating the feasibility and costs of starting a physical store vis a vis an online store.

Let’s look at the scenarios and help you take a wise decision.

When you decide to open a physical store, there are costs that need to be borne in terms of infrastructure, furniture, labor, etc.…. Furthermore, you must invest in the security of the store, the maintenance of the store, etc.… The costs involved in setting up and operating a physical store to sell your products are very high to begin with, not to mention you would have to indulge in some outdoor marketing to attract customers to your store. If you think you don’t need to do marketing, then your store better be in a good location to cash in on the automatic visibility. But, a good location comes at a cost.

Sometimes, the rent of the store will be abysmally high, due to locational advantages. Oh, last but not the least, there are regulatory clearances from the civic body & government that needs to be sought, before you start operating a physical store. In many countries, receiving regulatory clearances is not easy as sometimes, the process is cumbersome and tedious.

Therefore, purely from a short to medium term, it certainly doesn’t make sense to open a Physical Store, because it will take a while before you realize your return on investment. Hence, what’s the other option? Online, right!

It is 2017, the peak of the e-commerce revolution, the possibilities are immense. You don’t need to worry about location, physical security and outdoor marketing, to start shop. Sure, these elements exist in the online space as well but it is easier to deal with. To start up in the online space, you don’t particularly need any regulatory clearances. You would just need a few computers and a good internet connection.

However, you must ensure that you have adequate stock to service your orders. It is imperative to have a good supply chain and logistics system in place, because if the first 100 costumers, like your products, chances are that your orders will increase in a very short span of time, aided by digital marketing.

Having said that, the most important factor is the experience you provide to customers, when they land on your online store. The UX/UI (User Experience/User Interface) of your website needs to be top notch. Right from the homepage to the payment gateway, the amount of time that a customer will spend on your online, he should be blown away by the experience. The UX/UI will be your single most important driving factor for your online store, initially.

Contact us and we will be able to guide you on setting up a viable online business, apart from providing a seamless payment experience for your online store. Sign up for a free demo to understand the value of our payments solutions.

7 years ago
We can Ride on Your Cart!
Mohab Ecommerce 0

We can Ride on Your Cart!

When a customer shops on your website, little he is aware of the fact that you have shopped elsewhere to integrate your website with a shopping cart platform. Shopping cart platforms lie at the very heart of e-commerce and no merchant looking to venture online, can do without a shopping cart platform. What a door and furniture is to a offline store, a shopping cart is to an online store.

Quite simply put, the technology that runs in the back-end when you buy any product on any e-commerce site and add it to the cart for checking out. That virtual process is executed by a shopping cart platform. Once the customer arrives at the checkout page and agrees to pay, that’s where the payment gateways come to the picture. It is important to draw the distinction between shopping carts and payment gateways because merchants might be ambiguous to an extent.

In a world that has been shrunk with the onslaught of global e-commerce sites and multiple variants of shopping carts, it is imperative to have a payment gateway that caters to all types of shopping carts, be it Magento, Open Cart, Cs Cart, Woo Commerce, Shopify, Prestashop or WHMCS.

We have ready made extensions/plugins for you to integrate directly onto the platform of your choice. Now it is easy to integrate the shopping cart of your choice and start accepting payments with PayTabs.

Click here to learn more about shopping cart plugin integration onto your website, using PayTabs as a payment gateway. Moreover, you can contact us for any technical questions regarding shopping cart integration.

7 years ago