As technology advances, customer demands for the latest tech increase too. For businesses, keeping up with the latest tech trends ensures that you can give your customers what they want. It also help retain a competitive edge and embrace the fast-paced changes to stay relevant in the industry. If your business does not keep up with the changing technology, you face the risk of being left behind.
Here are a few ways in which you can keep your business up to date with the latest technology:
It is essential to offer you’re your customers with products and services built with the latest technology. Innovating and improving products and services with the latest technology prepares your business for the future. Web technology, Mobile applications and new features such as AI, VR and AR can dramatically add value to customer experiences.
Don’t forget to check: How To Bulletproof Your Digital Business With Technology
Technology update is not a one-time thing. It keeps evolving. New trends are constantly around the corner. Having all this information gives you an insight into what you should include in your business growth strategies. Following latest trends will ensure that you are ready for what the future may bring in terms of technology.
With competition getting fiercer, it is getting more and more important to understand what technology are others in a similar business using. This will ensure that you and offering similar or better services to your customers with advanced technology solutions. Checking out the competitors will help you strategize better about your tech strategy.
Keeping your business updated with the latest technology is beneficial in many ways. It enables businesses to offer better services to their customers and stay relevant in a fiercely competitive business world. Latest technology will ensure that your business is future ready.
As smartphones become more accessible and high-speed internet is no longer a premium infrastructure in many countries, users are now directly connected to the internet. This easy access to the internet has given a boost to mobile shopping. Many brands are hence embracing mobile commerce on top of the eCommerce platforms. Shopping apps with easy to browse catalogs are becoming more and more popular.
The emergence of mobile commerce changes how brick and mortar businesses operate. It’s important to note that mobile commerce growth is steadily increasing hitting an estimated $284 billion or 45% of eCommerce at the end of 2021. The mobile payments market is also catching on. This means that the likelihood of people making mobile purchases on their smartphones is also huge.
The sheer number of mobile users is reason enough to motivate businesses to embrace eCommerce and introducing mobile shopping as a part of their sales strategy.
Use experience is one of the main reasons for increased conversions. Various technologies can be used like AR that makes shopping experiences more immersive and interesting.
With the aid of a chatbot and messenger app, business owners can support their customers even outside business hours. Customer support bots have grown in intelligence and intuitiveness making these bots more efficient in dealing with common queries.
Customers have a number of payment methods when it comes to M-commerce. Whether it is a conventional credit card or PayPal, it can be integrated into the mobile store.
You can also read : Mobile App with Online Ordering for Your Local Business
With the entire world owning some or the other kind of mobile devices, businesses cannot afford to not have a mobile strategy. Mobile shopping is definitely becoming popular by the day and most businesses are reaping the benefits from going mobile!
When the whole world literally came to a halt in 2020, but rather than causing any destruction in the retail world – it provided a boost to this industry in the online world. The entire volume of retail growth reallocated to the E-Commerce channels, which enjoyed an 18% bump in total growth. This growth cannot be accredited solely to the pandemic. The world has seen steady progress towards the online for well over a decade. In the aftermath of a year filled with social distancing and quarantines, the retail industry looks to emerge as a changed entity. Let’s look at what the future holds for the E-Commerce industry:
Voice commerce uses voice assistants such as Alexa or Siri to give shoppers a hands-free shopping experience. In a world of contactless and social distancing, voice shopping will be a great addition to E-Commerce.
Voice commerce has enjoyed success in the E-Commerce industry. However, COVID-19 has disproportionately affected the older demographics, as they are required to adhere to strict quarantine measures. But they still need groceries and essential items. This will encourage the use of E-Commerce solutions and hence the use of voice commerce.
E-Commerce has undoubtedly been a life raft for many who were stuck at home. It’s probably been the only surviving tool. Although it is very convenient and quick, – at its core it is a very impersonal experience. E-Commerce and voice commerce will find its applications for enhancing online shopping experiences.
E-Commerce has become a significant retail channel. Technology does not stay static for long. Modern devices with advanced capabilities will enable a lot more AR functions. AR is one of the technologies that will be a game-changer for the E-Commerce industry in 2022.
Predictions cannot be 100% accurate, but it’s true that 2022 with set the stage for new and advanced features that will take E-Commerce experiences to the next level.
One of the biggest decisions you will make for your business is the choice of the eCommerce platform that is scalable and will ensure long term growth. The platform should also help customers that are engaging with your brand to reduce friction while they’re getting the product they need. Ensuring employees have what they need to implement campaign strategies and at the same time be ready to use without add on cost for maintenance and installation.
Whether you are a brick and mortar store with a strong local presence or are looking for an enterprise eCommerce solution, building one from scratch is out of the question! The time frame and the cost is simply too high for such an endeavour.
The good news is that there are a number of ready to use eCommerce solutions such as Lokaly that enable you to go online instantly. These solutions are highly customisable too. Being white labelled, you need not worry about how it will ‘look’ for your brand.
Lokaly is ready to use, white labelled eCommerce solution. It enables local stores to quickly go online by quickly upload the products and begin selling.
Lokaly can be completely customised to suit your business requirements. It’s the easiest and fastest way to reach your customers where they are – online. It not only helps you keep up with the latest in the online world, but also helps keep in compliance with the latest no contact delivery policies for the covid 19 rules. With customisations, you can make the app look, feel and serve your customers as your business requirements.
Increasing sales is one of the primary goals for all businesses. Whether you are a local departmental store or a huge e-commerce giant, businesses are always on the lookout for different channels to increase their online sales. There are many techniques you can use to get more and more people to order from your store. The very first move would be to take your store online – if it’s not yet. Either a mobile commerce store or a web store would be the right place to begin.
If you are planning to go mobile, there are plenty of ready options. Gone are the days when you spend months on end in developing an eCommerce or a mobile commerce platform. With platforms like Lokaly, you can simply create a store and upload products instantly! Well, going online is one way to increase online sales – here are a few pointers to drive more sales via your online store:
Create a beautiful storefront – This is one of the basic things you need to take care of. The first look of the store should be appealing and attractive. A user’s decision to enter your store (like in the real world) largely depends on the impression you are able to create within the first 3 seconds. So, the first look counts – make the most if it.
Product images – After a customer has stepped into your store, make sure you have something amazing to offer them. The product images are the only reference they have to what you are trying to sell. So, invest in high-quality product images.
Campaigns and the messaging around it – Create marketing campaigns and ensure that you create them with consistent messaging. It helps customers understand what you do and what your brand stands for.
Social signals – Do not underestimate the power of social media – whether your business is small or big. Include features to instantly share your products on social media.
The right effort in the right direction will enable you to get the most out of your online store and drive sales and enable a faster growth rate for your business.
Using the latest technology in e-commerce significantly boosts a company’s chances to become a market leader. The latest technology can offer innovative solutions for enticing customers online. One such technology is Flutter, which takes cross-platform app development to a new level. Some of the main benefits of selecting flutter for e-commerce mobile application development are:
Faster time to market: In today’s competitive business landscape, speed matters above all. The use of cross-platform app development allows reducing the time to market. The product can be released sooner and the app will be available on two devices – Android and iOS while performing like a native app – stable and reliable.
Easy maintenance: It’s known that the release of the application is just the beginning. Maintenance of the application is a large part of the process. It’s time consuming and it costs you too. Flutter’s apps solve these problems as well. In Flutter, adding new features and fixing bugs is easy. There are plugins and widgets available to accommodate any new features you want to.
Cost efficiency: This is one of the most important advantages of Flutter. Because it is cross-platform, two separate teams need not be hired to develop the e-commerce app. So, it saves costs. Developing an app on flutter requires less financial, human and material costs than developing a native application.
Customizable advanced UI: With the focus on the end user, many companies focus on immersive user experiences. Flutter has a wide range of tools and widgets to help design flexible and advanced UI features.
Easy integration with the existing apps: Many companies are apprehensive about creating new apps and discard the old ones. Flutter is flexible and enables you to embed code even in the native mode. Flutter has many more benefits. The transition to cross-platform development is gradual, but a less painful process for businesses.
Flutter is stable, reliable and definitely an option for businesses who wish to move to mobile e-commerce – soon!
Lokaly is an e-commerce app and built using Flutter technology.
The restaurant business is hyper-local and the lockdown made them close shop and depend on take away orders for sustaining. Not many restaurants were prepared for an online model of operation. But, with the pandemic and the lockdown that followed, it became imperative for restaurants to take the leap and go online quickly. This is exactly where Lokaly can help:
Instant setup
Lokaly helps quickly set up an online restaurant that can instantly enable you to reach out to your customers. Take-away and food delivery options help keep these restaurants afloat even in times of crisis. Restaurants can create an online food ordering system and share their latest menu items with customers.
Discounts and offers
One way to ensure customer loyalty is to offer special offers and discounts on various items on the menu. The Lokaly app enables you to quickly set up discounts and offers. You can update combos, bestsellers, enable users to find various cuisines, and get a restaurant list by selecting cuisines.
Attract new customers & keep the old
Discounts and offers not only attract new customers but also help retain the existing ones. Further, they offer a great means to give value to customer’s money. Discounts not only add to the overall customer experience but also help boost sales and improve your engagements with customers.
Lokaly offers restaurants the one ingredient that could enable you to not only go from a brick and mortar model to an online model with great features to support better customer experiences and drive more sales – even in times of crisis. Customers tend to trust their regular restaurants and seeing your mobile application that offers all their favourite menu items for online order placement will definitely create a positive impact and drive more sales.
Get your restaurant online instantly with Lokaly!
Dashboards are essential admin tools that help you keep on top of everything that’s going on with your online store. They display all the data in a visual format that makes it easy to get a glimpse of everything that matters for your store.
Lokaly has an extensive dashboard with information on your orders, payments, overdue, customers, modes of payments and lots more.
Here are a few things you can check out instantly on the Lokaly dashboard:
Lokaly Statistics – This gives you the numbers that indicate the number of stores you have in this marketplace, the total items, and the earnings. At a glimpse information of all these give you as owners a good understanding of where you stand as far as your store is concerned.
Order statistics – The order statistics offers useful information about the total number of orders that are pending, those that are currently running, those that are completed, and even those that are cancelled.
Payment modes – payment modes tells you which customers have paid by which methods. The methods available are:
Order count by the hour – This section offers you with the information such as the order count, amount and items count.
Credit account – A credit account can keep track of the store credits that have been offers and to whom and also tells you which payments are overdue.
Last orders – These statistics tells you the last few orders that were placed with your store.
With a dashboard, you can monitor and measure your business performance by tracking data points and gives you valuable insights into everything that you need to know. This gives you data to base your future business strategies on.
“Restaurants are Looking Beyond…”, says an article by The Economic Times. Restaurants are now adopting platforms that charge lesser commission fees compared to dominant food aggregators. Asking for high commission and masking consumers’ data, restaurants are moving to marketplace-based platforms. These changes (aka savings from hefty commission %) will be rewarded to consumers as discounts on their online orders. This is going to enable a more modest and effective model – Direct to Consumer (D2C).
When businesses opting for ready-made solutions, where they can save cost, get access to their consumers’ data and manage online business easily. Lokaly is a ready-made and transparent solution for small to large businesses. Lokaly has partnered with 30+ restaurants based in Ahmedabad. Also, Lokaly has developed solutions for some famous brands in the USA. Lokaly provides free trial and support to sellers to know the platform better.
When you are a local business, you have a regionally marked territory and seldom get customers beyond a certain point. Every store has one-time customers and then there are regulars – who order weekly or monthly. It’s a great business model and a very certain business strategy. But, with all that, there are still limitations on how you can retain customers as well as gain new ones. Local stores are rarely a monopoly – there is always competition in the vicinity. So, how do you ensure that your customers get the ‘delight’, the ‘ease’, and the ‘convenience’ that a local store can or must offer?
Well, Lokaly has the answer to this plea. Lokaly is an E-Commerce application for local departmental stores and businesses. Stores can easily create their account, and avail all the features – just like a mobile app would.
Each sale is now on a digital platform. The seller can then introduce a khata system where loyal customers receive store credit. You can also check analytics to understand how your business is going. The app also has integrated features for payment reminders and ready for pickup notifications.
Once the decision is made – to move from bricks to clicks, it’s just about choosing the right platform for setting up your online or mobile store!
