Sorted by Topic: Customer Experience Management
5 Challenges of Endless Aisle for Retailers
(This post was last published on May 4th, 2016. It’s been updated for accuracy and completeness.)
Retailers are missing out on nearly $1 trillion in in-store sales because they don’t have on hand what their customers want to buy. When customers can’t find what they want on your shelves, they’re quick to shop online or with one of your competitors.
There’s a lot of reasons why your shelves might be empty like miscalculating labor costs, customer satisfaction, and poor communication between vendors and retailers. To combat this problem, retailers of all sizes are turning to technology to ensure their shelves stay stocked, or appear to have an endless aisle of products consumers are looking for.
Implementing this retail strategy isn’t easy though. This article discusses some of the common challenges of deploying an endless aisle program.
(more…)2019 Holiday Shopping Predictions
The holiday season is almost here. Retailers have only a few weeks left to finish their to-do lists to prep their stores, online sites, and marketing campaigns. Deloitte predicts overall holiday retail sales to increase between 4.5% and 5% this year, passing $1.1 trillion in sales from November to January. They expect eCommerce sales alone to increase 14% to 18%.
See more holiday shopping predictions for this holiday season below.
(more…)How to Run Smooth Online Flash Sales
Online flash sales are a popular strategy to drive revenue. Successful sales can increase a merchant’s sales from 50/day to over 10,000 in a single 24-hour period. This is great for your revenue, but can undoubtedly put major stress on your operations during and after the sale.
When not handled properly, flash sales can quickly turn into disasters for merchants. Your website can crash or stall. Orders can take forever to process. Inventory can oversell. Once disaster hits, it’s hard to see why you wanted to run a flash sale in the first place. When poorly executed, sales can lead to upset customers, lost sales, and erode your brand image.
While the risks of failed online flash sales are real, they can be avoided!
See how theBalm Cosmetics upgraded their technology stack and worked out important backend processes so they can run smooth flash sales multiple times a year.
(more…)Omnichannel vs Harmonic Retail
Whether you call it multichannel, omnichannel, unified commerce, or converged commerce, retail experts have been trying to coin the approach merchants should take to best serve the fluid customer journey between physical and online stores. Over the past decade or more, omnichannel has been the buzzword slapped on virtually all advice, case studies, reports, and more.
However, with the rise of online shopping, especially mobile and social, the omnichannel strategy has proven to worn out its welcome. Consumers don’t shop by “channel” so retailers shouldn’t approach it that way.
Instead, retail experts are calling for a new approach, harmonic retail, that better describes how to create remarkable experiences for consumers as they interact with your brand across digital and physical touchpoints. In the end, it’s all about understanding your customers and providing the best shopping experience possible.
(more…)Learning from B2C: Making B2B eCommerce More Accessible for Self-Service
(This is a guest post from our friends over at Zoey Commerce,a powerful eCommerce solution for B2B and wholesale businesses.)
Traditionally, B2B eCommerce has been a more manual process than its B2C counterparts. There’s a variety of reasons for this, from more complex product offerings to lagging technology solutions for B2B business. Fortunately, the latter issue has been quickly getting resolved, with off-the-shelf B2B eCommerce solutions providing much more robust capabilities than they did even just a couple of years ago.
For B2B and wholesale sellers, this means the opportunity to take much more time-intensive sales and streamline them, simply by offering their buyers stronger self-service tools. Some of these ideas come from the B2C eCommerce space, and will look familiar to all of us as B2C shoppers when we take off our work hats.
Here’s some ways that B2B businesses can leverage modern eCommerce technology to put more power in the hands of their buyers.