Not long back, to many organizations, digital commerce meant having static storefronts and shopping carts.But today, digital commerce is all about building an integrated personalized experience using emerging digital technologies to acquire customers and retain them using contextual marketing. Holding on to legacy systems may keep you away from the important business drivers and differentiating capabilities of digital commerce. This is why it is essential for businesses to adjust and optimize their business to adapt to digital commerce. However, if you are among those businesses who wish to embrace digital commerce, then you need to consider adapting to the digital commerce strategies mentioned in the blog to develop a multi-channel platform. The platform should enable you to carry out enterprise-level marketing, seamless remote collaboration and great customer experience that ensures increased ROI.
Some of the crucial digital commerce strategies for complete digital transformation and maximized profits
1. Select a digital commerce platform
Choosing the right digital commerce platform that meets your business requirements is a big decision that will have a long-term impact on your future growth. Shopify, SAP Hybris, Salesforce commerce cloud, Sitecore experience commerce, BigCommerce and Magento commerce are among the many popular platforms that can enable you to create a consistent shopping experience across all touchpoints. Here’s a list of functionalities to look for when you plan to choose a digital commerce platform –
- Provide the ability to personalize sales and services to your preferences such as payment options, marketing features, mobile application, add-ons, and more.
- Offer operational advantages and business tools consisting of product and inventory management, advertising, pricing, search capabilities, etc.
- Increase agility and the capability to deliver a consistent digital experience for customers across all channels.
- Allow omnichannel B2B marketing and provide analytical-driven customer engagement at all touchpoints by tracking consumer interactions.
If you are on a legacy platform such as ATG, WebSphere, Intershop or homegrown, it is advised to consider moving to the latest digital commerce platform to deliver a better digital experience to your customers.
2. Integrate your commerce platform with other systems
By deciding to integrate your e-commerce platform with your ERP, CRM and PIM systems you can ensure that your business processes run efficiently while providing you end-to-end visibility. Digital commerce integration will allow information to flow smoothly between departments and help to improve organizational communication. Let’s check out the benefits of these integrations.
Integrating your e-Commerce distribution channels with your enterprise resource management (ERP) system helps to work more effectively as a company in several primary ways. For instance, your key data types such as order, inventory, item, customer and shipping/tracking details are easily accessed between your systems.
Similarly, when you integrate your e-Commerce platform with a product information management (PIM) system, you are bridging the product information across systems to provide an advanced user experience. This results in building exciting shopping experiences with ease by combining multi-device front-end shopping with rich and centrally managed product data.
In addition, when you integrate with the customer relationship management (CRM) system it helps you organize customer information and keep track of sales opportunities. Also, CRM systems help to improve collaboration between employees.
3. Move to cloud
Changing customer-centric experience, employee empowerment, omnichannel adaptation – all of these demand businesses like yours to move to cloud computing. Moreover, once you move to the cloud, you will gain numerous advantages such as flexibility, agility, lower costs, better performance and scalability, improved server usage and stronger security. Also, as cloud solutions result in lower set-up and maintenance costs, digital businesses have the greatest benefit to move forward with cloud technology
When you adopt cloud, you are eliminating several traditional causes of cyber-penetrations such as manually configured or misconfigured environments, stale infrastructure and log response times to recover from a compromised environment.
Digital commerce plays a crucial role in delivering a smooth shopping experience; therefore, faster time-to-market is critical for maintaining a competitive edge. When you operate through cloud services, you get the ability to act faster in delivering customer values, flexibility to adapt to changes as well as harness analytics for better insights.
4. Embrace mobile commerce
If your focus as a retailer is on allowing sales only on smartphone or tablet, it is time you reconsider this approach, as the focus is no longer on smartphones, but rather digital. The power and visibility offered by digital assets ensures businesses to achieve higher revenues. According to Forester, 58% of retail sales will be influenced by digital by 2023.
There is great value in recognizing the importance of listing products anywhere customers spend much of their time. And that is contextual commerce – a strategic approach to omnichannel capabilities. Omnichannel is about being where the consumers are and making it easier for them to buy their desired products.
The future with digital mobility may also include augmented reality applications for retailers to showcase their products with ease and also using chatbots and messenger applications to easily interact with customers. Besides, there are endless opportunities to leverage the power of artificial intelligence using a mobility approach.
5. Implement digital commerce analytics
We have already stepped into an era where data has become the need of the hour. By leveraging data analytics, you can perform data mining, text mining, predictive analytics and others to drive information to help you make better business decisions.
This involves making use of customer information that’s most relevant to your business and utilizing it to make informed decisions. By adopting data analytics, you are to leverage a proactive approach that will help you to transform your business operations as it provides you insights in real-time.
Moreover, using data analytics, you can also enhance your existing product lines, develop the kind of products that your customer base demands, improve customer retention, and gain an edge over your competition. Also, you can gain the ability to quickly respond to the changing market needs while staying on top of critical customer shifts and various metrics that may impact your business.
6. Focus on UI/UX best practices
User experience (UX) and user interface (UI) – needless to say, are the decisive factor for the success of your brand. Your user interface should be designed in such a way that it conveys your message clearly and allow your consumers to see what you want them to see. For example, if the e-commerce store contains items that need to be promoted maximum, then the natural flow of navigation should not get disturbed. Your buyers should not see it as a hindering factor, but they should have the liberty of ignoring it if it does not interest them. Also, the use of headings, containers, or scroll bars has to be there in a balanced manner to offer a consistent user experience throughout the online store.
Final thoughts
Digital commerce solutions can provide your users with a rich digital experience by combining digital content and commerce. Carefully considered digital commerce strategies can maximize your competitive potential by delivering superior shopping experiences. If you are planning to get started with your digital commerce journey, leverage our digital commerce consulting services. We have the right expertise and experience to help you adapt to your digital commerce space without any hassle.
