Digital Interactive Services

How to start a profitable digital store in challenging times?

Online selling is a highly competitive space, with businesses striving to reduce procurement costs, deliver flawless fulfilment, enhance processes, and ultimately, improve sales.

Digital stores are strategic assets for businesses, considering the latest shifts in the e-commerce space:

• About 66% of shoppers chose a retailer based on convenience, while only 47% chose a retailer based on price/value.
• By September 2022, 50% of all online shopping will be done over smartphones - no e-retailer should miss this opportunity
• Retailers that have deployed advanced on-site personalisation saw 25% rise in revenue.

As the number of e-commerce stores increase and reach saturation levels, only those that leverage technology early on will survive and thrive.*

How to start an online store?

For a successful e-commerce store, you need to go beyond having a minimum viable product (MVP) with a holistic plan:

SWOT analysis:

Don’t skip on the essentials. Research Strengths (S), Weaknesses (W), Opportunities (O), and Threats (T) for your business idea.

Target market gaps:

Find unexploited niche gaps with targeted research using social media and Google Trends.

Customer persona analysis:

Collect demographic and psychographic data to build an audience persona.

Business model:

Select the right model - B2B/B2C e-commerce, selling at online marketplaces, drop shipping, or direct-to-customer (DTC) - to suit your products.

Domain name and website design:

Have a unique, sticky domain name and a website that’s attractive and easy to navigate on all devices.

Products and services:

Add clear descriptions, images, categories, and specifications.

Logistics and supply chain setup:

Select the right mix of e-commerce shipping solutions as customers will avoid an e-commerce store if the delivery experience is unsatisfactory.

Launch and marketing:

Have a pre- and post-launch strategies as well as a long-term strategy in place (SEO, paid marketing, and platform marketing).

Launching a successful digital store is just the first step. It takes a lot more to turn it into a profitable business.

For instance, last-mile delivery is demanding like never before. Nearly 80% of American consumers said they would not accept COVID-19–related service disruptions from brands and retailers. Mobile shopping sales will see further growth with social shopping and younger audiences driving online spending.

Challenges in creating digital stores

It is important to invest in the right direction and with a long-term perspective. Some of the challenges e-commerce stores face include:

Unprecedented customer expectations:

Stellar customer experience is the most coveted goal in e-commerce, but it’s harder to achieve with evolving expectations and heightened competition.

Data efficiency:

eCommerce tends to become a separate function of the business only to capture and collect data. This makes the digital store redundant in its core function. To avoid the same, organisations need to invest in e-commerce solutions to find smarter ways to capture and measure data and make the digital store a more integral part of the business.   

Outdated business processes:

They result in frustrated customers, limited digital campaign ROI, and delayed deliveries.

Agility:

The lack of new technology integration keeps retailers from immediate digital fulfilment and better market penetration.

Managing product complexities:

This includes product selection, demand prediction, vendor contracts, and price negotiations.

The balancing act:

Running the digital store, backend operations, and customer service simultaneously requires a full-fledged staff.

Leveraging technology for a successful eCommerce business

Voice commerce:

Alexa and Google Assistant can do everything, including buying products online. Optimise your e-store for voice search.

Omnichannel shopping:

Analytics and tracking tools provide demand insights and enable a seamless experience across channels and devices.

AI and AR for enhanced e-commerce:

AI can help analyse past buying trends and recommend high-probability products. AR revolutionises product trials.

New payment options:

Make your e-commerce store compatible with digital wallets and cryptocurrencies.

Dynamic pricing:

Use perceived value, competition prices, and market demand to stay competitive in real time and attract more customers.

Mobile commerce:

By the end of 2021, almost 73% of purchases will happen over mobile phones. Make your e-store mobile friendly.

How Infosys BPM can help?

In e-commerce services, nothing matters more than proven experience. Our digital commerce capabilities have supported 500+ e-tailers in 30+ languages with results like:

• 25% lesser product returns
• 35% reduced order cycle times
• 40% lesser total cost of operations

With our approach, your business can deliver hyper productivity and strengthen their e-commerce capabilities, including:

• Online store setup and management
• Customer support setup
• Fulfilment operations setup
• Promotions and loyalty programs management
• Brand and data compliances and audits
• Fraud and returns management analytics

*For organizations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organizational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organizations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organizations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.

Explore our range of BPM eCommerce services.