Sales Strategies for a Successful E-Commerce Business

How to increase sales on ecommerce portals and beat competition?

From legacy brands to a newly created label looking for a perfect recipe to cook the best sales strategy to emerge as the winner on the virtual space. Rightfully so, ecommerce has emerged from being a single digit revenue contributor to one of the major revenue consolidators for the companies. Also, the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of ecommerce segment is projected to be 5x compared to the other trade channels. Therefore, it is inevitable that the companies focus on this segment never like before and try and acquire more and more customers while maintaining the existing base without any dilution to the near competition.

During Covid, E-commerce business grew exponentially. As the world was shut the only way people could buy was online. The online market picked up and had growth that

Below are the basic strategies which companies should adopt in order to sell the optimum numbers at any given point. These can also be called the golden rules of ecommerce.

1)????Jo Dikhta Hai, Wo Bikta Hai: Unlike in a traditional retailing where customer goes and sees the product on a visual merchandising segment or a physical storefront ecommerce is a virtual selling. Further, there won’t be any push from the retailers, shopkeepers or incentive hungry sales force of the showroom. Listing is the only way to communicate with the customers, create brand awareness and educate them about the products. The sales of the product will be directly proportional to the listing quality provided other hygiene points are satisfactory. The listings have to be detail oriented, transparent and more and more educative about the product features and utilities. Also, there are advanced tools like A+ content, Enhanced Brand contents, Brand store etc which are available and the same shall be made full use of. Needless to say, search keywords, attributes of characteristics, minimum 5 images, bullet points, apt title, description should be a part of any listings that are present on ecommerce platforms.

2)????Price It Right: Ecommerce selling unlike traditional retailing is just like a stock market where the product which is priced accurately will sell without any doubt, under-priced will always hit upper circuits in volume sales and products which products will in traditional retailing, there is a function of stocks availability in a particular location, distribution challenges, manual push towards some brands from the shopkeepers and other stakeholders. Since the products are available on a virtual platform for the entire country, those challenges are majorly overcome. Pricing it right means not deep discounting or selling at loss. Basically, with regards to the brand positioning, product quality, customer segmentation the product should be within a comparable range with respect to the immediate competitor products pricing. Also, the aged and older products should be liquidated in a timely manner with a premium discounting. Also, there should not be any significant difference in the price of the products between the platforms when the product is live on different ecommerce platforms which might result in a bad customer experience.

3)????Creating Product Bundles: In ecommerce, fulfilment cost plays a huge role in deciding the pricing dynamics and resulting into the P&L decider. Since there are some costs like shipping that are fixed and doesn’t increase up to a certain level, this creates a vacuum for creating product bundles which are frequently used together or have some additional utility when sold together. For example, shampoo and conditioner can be sold as a bundle, small and medium suitcase can be sold together. This results in a significant cost reduction and thereby, an opportunity to pass on the pricing goodness to the customers which arising out of cost reduction. It will be win-win situation for the seller, portal and the customer.

4)????Advertising the Products: Advertising plays a key role in ecommerce which involves boosting the visibility of the products inorganically by creating paid campaigns, video ads, Product Level Advertisements (PLAs), Product Contextual Advertisements (PCAs) and many more. High amount of advertisement spends during the product introduction stage to moderate to stable advertising spends during mature stage of sales cycle of a product is a must and should. Further, the advertisement spends should be monitored regularly to derive the optimum results out of the spends that are happening. Also, visibility boosters like deals (Lightening Deals, Super coin offers, Deal of the Day), coupons etc should also be extensively used to optimise the ad spends and get the best out of the campaigns.

5)????Customer Feedbacks and Repeat Orders: The sellers should always have an open ear to the customer voices which might come in the form of Q&As, Reviews, Ratings etc. Getting the first order is great but winning the loyalty is what matters the most during the long term. Sustainability sales strategy is something which acquires new customers with the innovative initiatives but converts the existing customers to the brand loyal customers and gets the repeat orders. Customers are the real brand ambassadors of the products on the ground and winning them will only be possible through healthy two-sided conversation.

6)????Be where your customers are: In traditional retailing there is a challenge of making the products available in every corner of the places where the demand has already come or demand may come. With ecommerce evolution, the challenge has tined down but not completely eradicated. Customers in today’s era need quicker deliveries which can go as down as 12 hours delivery. This is possible only through stocking up in the fulfilment centres of all 4 zones of India and then further replicating the stocks in all top metro cities once the demand skewedness is known. This will help increase convenience to the customers and increase the chance of sales.

If the companies follow the above six golden rules, there is no doubt that they are going to win the customers and have a stable sales experience. However, for a traditional company or a company who is creating its first footprints into the market or any other company for that matter this might become extremely tedious and operations and investment heavy. Each of the aspects today are run as separate businesses and there are players in the market who execute these individual aspects. But, BuyMore, through its technological advent and operational capabilities, is able to blend everything into a single jar and grind and deliver the success to the brands as a one stop destination for all the aspects. Over 400 Clients of BuyMore are provided with end-to-end ecommerce management and service including listing, warehousing, payments reconciliations, business development, account management and many more.

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