Today, it’s hard to imagine shopping without the help of ratings and reviews about the products and services. According to consumer research conducted by Deloitte and Touche LLP, the majority of shoppers (around 75%) use reviews to discover and evaluate products. From food and beverage and apparel, to health and beauty, reviews play an important role in the buying process for customers.
Shoppers today not only view ratings before they make a purchase, but also leave a review after they have purchased and used a product. Studies show that the number of reviews submitted increased nearly 11% year over year since 2019. With reviews, shoppers are not only converting faster, but are known to spend more money too. This lift in revenues per visitor has seen a steep rise in recent years. But, increasing sales and profits aren’t the only thing that reviews can improve for your business. Brand retailers have reported that reviews have an impact beyond the product pages online. Many times a good review directly converts into increased in-store sales too.
A vast majority of shoppers research products online before going to the store to purchase them. Consumers often turn to ratings and reviews when they are in the decision making phase of the final purchase. Reading a positive review from an existing customer gives them the confidence that the product they chose is working well for others too. Studies have also shown that reviews have the ability to influence consumers to buy a more expensive product than they had planned.
Don’t forget to check: Gain Greater Business Reach With Lokaly Buyer App
You may be surprised to find that it’s not only the positive reviews that influence purchases. Many shoppers say that negative reviews are just as important in their decision to buy. It helps them build a pros and cons list (mentally, subconsciously) and the final decision to buy a product is based on complete information. This increases their confidence in their purchase and your product.
Having reviews displayed on your site is a great first step to winning over your customers. It improves one of the most valuable assets a business can have in today’s retail landscape – trustworthiness.
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.
Developing an excellent product and a great sales strategy is only half the battle won for a business. Providing good customer support after you have sold a product is also important. Shopping is not merely a transaction – the entire experience counts. By providing excellent customer support you can offer your customers better experiences while shopping with your brand. Shoppers that ‘feel good’ while making a purchase, will definitely be back for more.
Customer support empowers customers through the entire purchasing process and post purchase experiences. It helps you better assist customers who are interested in purchasing your product by offering quick and accurate answers. Next, it is also useful during the purchasing process. You can provide customers with orders, errors while placing orders, or provide better package tracking details. Lastly, you can offer customers with support if they face any issues post purchase. You can make cancellations and returns easy to process or offer the ability to exchange faulty products.
A good product or service can only get you so far. If you add good customer support to the equation, the value of your offering as well as your brand instantly increases. It also has the potential to reduce negative reviews. This added value translates to increased revenue and customer retention.
With customer support, businesses can offer a lot more than sales transactions. You can give them a reason to love your products and your business!
Local departmental stores are the most popular businesses and dominate the market in a particular area. The main reason is their accessibility and simple approach, hassle free buying experiences, friendly behaviour and most importantly, emotional attachment of the customers. Especially those who are regular customers, it’s a matter of trust and loyalty too. But, this model of operation is highly contact based. Times have changed and there is a need to change this model of operation too. With the increasing emphasis on contactless operations for local businesses, how can local businesses maintain their existing customer base’s loyalty and trust?
The answer is – by offering them with easier and convenient means to contact them without actually visiting the store. Lokaly offers exactly this.
In a contactless safe distancing world, Lokaly helps take your local store online and helps keep your regular customers. You can instantly take your products online and accept online payments too.
Here’s what you get with Lokaly:
Completely White-label solution – create your very own store. Lokaly can be completely rebranded -with your specific branding requirements.
Customized & Branded Solution on App Store – Although you can simply download and use as – is, Lokaly can also be customized if need be. You can add your store specific features that caters to your customer base.
Your own Marketplace subscription model – It’s usually a notion that mobile applications are bound to be costly. This is where Lokaly differs from the expensive development options. You can simply pay as you go!
Customizable Features – If your business requires features that are not built in the product, we can customize it and include the features you wish.
Increase your revenue – Apart from your regular customers, a mobile store will enable you to increase your customer base and revenues!
Ensure your business continuity in the Lockdown or stay home period – sign up for a solution that can take your business online within a few clicks!
Attracting customers to your online store requires smart marketing techniques to engage and convert them to long-term buyers. Over the past 12 months, online sales have skyrocketed – mainly because, the whole world has been locked down and people are confined to their homes. The regular stores had been shut down too. The online marketplaces however thrived. So, if you already have an online store, here are some smart marketing tips to keep your existing customers and attract new ones to drive epic growth for your business. Ecommerce purchases have accounted for 16% of all the sales in the US last year. The eCommerce sales are predicted to keep growing even in the post COVID era.
Content personalization – If your store is online, it is very important to note that content is the main driver for your customers. So, content personalization is one trend to look out for. When you display products that are relevant to the customer buying at your store – they are urged to buy and you get increased sales.
Audience, Competition, and trends – create your marketing strategies with your audience in mind. It’s also essential to do complete competition analysis. Check the latest trends and create a comprehensive plan for your products.
Social media – social media is one of the most trending places today. People share what they purchased, how they found it, and what were their experiences while they used the product. Ensure that your products are talked about on social media!
Emails – emails are more powerful than we think. They can be used to target new customers, retarget the old ones, and also used as reminders for abandoned shopping carts. These are a powerful means of getting people to buy more.
So, if you have already taken your store online – there were a few smart ways to do more with your store to drive sales.
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.
