Celebrations are near, and it is one of the most euphoric times for both the customers and brand owners. The most popular pick is Dusshera and Diwali. And what do people love to do during the holiday season? Shopping! During the peak event season, online traffic reaches a record high. As the number of online orders grows, so does the need to ensure that first-time buyers, your regular customers, vendors, and all involved have a seamless experience. This blog post presents you with a microscopic view of the eCommerce market in India and a winning eCommerce business strategy for you to enter the marketplace with a bang.
India’s two largest eCommerce giants take the Diwali festival quite seriously. Running an online store means understanding that there are two possible paths to take, and then it is evident that potentially dangerous waters lay ahead amid fierce competition. With the year’s biggest sales approaching (Amazon’s ‘The Great Indian Festival’ and Flipkart’s ‘Big Billion Days’). Let’s first look at the numbers of the 2020 success and how you can reap benefits by partaking in this season.
Table of Contents
To understand how to form a successful eCommerce business strategy, let’s first understand consumer behavior
The most crucial thing in any eCommerce business is to understand consumer behavior. It will help you identify the needs of your target market and build a strategy that targets those needs.
During the festive season, consumer spending is usually twice as high as usual. You must have certain questions right about their spending behavior, such as:
- Â How do consumers begin their research?Â
- How has consumer spending changed?Â
- Which are the preferred payment options?Â
- Are they discount-oriented?Â
Take a look at the video below to get all the answers.
Unboxing the winning eCommerce business strategy for sellers
Planning and stocking up on your inventory
It is vital to plan and stock up on inventory for the festive seasons. This ensures that you are prepared ahead of time for a shopping spree. Also, analyzing previous sales performances and trends can aid in keeping track of your inventory. It provides an insight into the must-have/ bestselling products to be stocked in advance.
Success for online retailers depends on having the right inventory at the right time. The sellers should prepare in advance for the immediate surge in demand during the feasting season since sales are usually in large volumes. With the right stock of best-selling products on hand, you can fulfill and ship orders as fast as possible. Thus, your customers can enjoy seamless shopping with this enhancement in services.
With the help of Paxcom’s channel intelligence software, Kinator, you can easily plan your purchase and inventory levels based on past performance and seasonal trends. This gives you a good indication of what products to keep in stock throughout the year.Â
However, if you are still fretting about your inventory, Amazon and Flipkart have their fulfillment centers, and if you are an FBA seller. There is nothing to be worried about. You can send your SKUs ahead of time, and the fulfillment centers will process and store them for you.
Take a quick glance at your competitors’ performance
It is the time of the eCommerce business. Your product will attract many people towards it, but if your competitor’s product is better than yours, you want to know that to improve your product. So, by performing competitor analysis for the eCommerce festive season, you can gather some information about your competitors’ products and market share. You can use this data to run keyword research as well, as it is essential to use correct keywords that are gaining traction, and with competitor analysis, you can identify your missed points and optimize your listing to get an edge over them.
How to Modify your Listing to Attract Customers’?
To be prepared for the stampede of traffic, you need to make sure that all the traffic actually reaches your page and converts for you. You need to ensure that all your listings are filled with festive-related search terms, and the above competitor analysis you performed can now come in handy for you. Here are some of the steps advised to beautify your listing as a part of your eCommerce business strategy
- Update your images with holiday-themed ones. Make sure the primary images show off the festive vibes and that it is of utmost importance to add multiple packshots, lifestyle images of festive packaging.
- As a Brand Registry member, you can use the Brand Analytics tools to determine which keywords were searched during the shopping season last year for your product or a competitor’s product. This year, test some of the top-performing keywords and see how they do. Add festive keywords throughout your listing: “Diwali,” “last-minute gifts,” “Diwali celebrations.”
- Ensure that your product descriptions and highlights are filled with all the relevant information and integrated keywords. As the traction will be higher during the holiday season and you don’t want to miss your customers due to the lack of information.
Pro Tip: You should start optimizing your listing by the end of September with specific search terms to begin reaping the benefits.
How to Adjust your Advertising Campaign Budgets?
Not to spoil your fun with talking about budgets and calculations, but this step is one of the vital steps, since “Big Billion Days” and “Great Indian Festivals” account for the large increase in traffic. PPC advertising becomes more competitive as customer traffic rises, which means it’s time to get aggressive with your keyword bidding as well.
Optimize your budgets for the Great Indian Festival using the new budget rule of Amazon Marketing Services. You can set the campaign budget prior to the D-day, or you can use performance-based rules to increase sponsored product ads campaign budgets when your campaigns meet certain performance thresholds, including advertising cost per sale (ACOS), click-through rate (CTR), and conversion rate (CR).
For Flipkart Big Billion Days, you can try creating campaigns with a daily budget option for better performance control, or a total budget option with a start and end date. Extend the end date beyond the event or use “Equally divide budget for all days.” When your daily spend average is reached, the campaign ends.
To sum up, with the increase in holiday traffic, your daily budget may disappear faster than usual because you’ll get more clicks. Ensure that your advertising account has a sufficient balance before the start of the event. 80% of brands are looking to increase their marketing budgets (MMA group) this festive season, so raising your daily budget may be necessary if your ads are running profitably currently. If you find your daily budget is being eaten up before the end of the day, increase it incrementally until you find that your ads can now run effectively.
Get to grips with your keyword bidding
We all know how the saying goes: go big or go home. During this festive season, as more and more sellers start to advertise products on Amazon, unlike you think, the bids you currently have will not suffice. A lot of competitors have probably upped their bids as well. Depending on your products, bid competitively, specifically on highly relevant, top-performing, non-negotiable keywords, to win as many impressions as possible.
What is the Importance of Executing Advertising Campaigns?
It is vital to be visible to your customers during the festive season and cut out all the noise; Amazon Sponsored Ads and Flipkart Search Ads can be of big help. Customize your banner ads with a catchy tagline such as “product-related + holiday-related” to garner customers’ attention. Test all kinds of ads, and it is not the time to hide behind only one type of ad. It is also advised to add all relevant brand, generic, and competition keywords to multiple campaigns to broaden the traffic base.
Although display and video ads are recently gaining a lot of attention, when a customer is looking for products and lands upon a video, that will certainly gauge the customer’s attention, especially if it puts you into their consideration stage. During the peak, festive ads drive conversions with display ads. You can retarget the ads to the customers who viewed your products and with search ads through native placements. This will give you a massive leg-up on the competitors who are not running these eCommerce sponsored ads.
Remember to constantly check all your keywords and advertisements’ performance, since this field is highly competitive. You’ve heard the saying, “You snooze, you lose!”.
Get creative with the deals!
Both the Amazon and Flipkart platforms may have different terminologies for the deals they offer. But one thing that doesn’t change is consumers’ love for bargain deals. You don’t believe us? MMA Group conducted a recent survey that found that 39% of consumers are waiting for festive discounts and offers to make their purchases. Also, not to be a negative nelly, but the same research suggests that almost 50% of Indian shoppers tend to be brand switchers. So, now you know the importance of creating coupons, deals of the day, discounts, and whatnot.Â
Suppose you are creating coupons or discount deals. Ensure that you create them a couple of weeks before the big holiday event arises.
Be ready for the Inevitable Product Returns
Product returns are inevitable; they are just a part of the business. While many sellers expect that October will be the busiest year ever in terms of sales, they tend to forget that returned items can also become the cause of sleepless nights. In summary, it’s also a significant step of your eCommerce business strategy to be aware of and check your return policy to ensure smooth sailing.
Being Prepared is Half the Victory
As the title suggests, if you’re proactive with your pre-preparation, you will be well on your path towards a higher conversion rate, visibility, and discoverability. And remember, data is your best friend. Stay informed about the performance of you and your competitors. Our eCommerce experts can assist you at every stage of the eCommerce process, from out-of-stock data custom alerts, content planning, allocating budgets, and running advertising campaigns.
We hope that the above-mentioned step-by-step eCommerce business strategy will be helpful for you. If you still feel stuck, you can reach out to us at info@paxcom.net.Â