By Saahil Goel
Over the past two years, we have seen entire industries rise and fall, thanks to the global pandemic that has upended the world as we knew it before. While nearly every sector underwent large-scale disruptions, some managed to evolve quickly and are thriving today. E-commerce is one of them. With the global crisis accelerating digitisation, internet proliferation has skyrocketed, with India having over 825 million internet users by Q4 of 2021. And a majority of them now prefer to do all their shopping online – be it apparel, electronics, or everyday items such as food and groceries.
So, it’s safe to say that e-commerce is booming and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. This is a sign of progress for the industry, particularly SMEs that are witnessing stellar growth. However, despite this, SMEs, an integral part of the country’s GDP and economic growth, face certain challenges when it comes to seamlessness in e-commerce. What are they, and how do we solve them? Let’s take a look.
Visibility
Amid the numerous brands and cut-throat competition that exists in the market today, SMEs often find it a major challenge to ensure visibility. How can they gain quality traffic and drive sales if customers cannot find their website? For any company that exists today in the digital world, visibility is an integral aspect that can make or break a business. So, ensuring brand visibility is crucial, and one of the best ways to do this is to invest substantially in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to bring the business to the top when customers search for a product or service that the company offers or even anything related to it.
Conducting keyword research and implementing the same will allow SMEs to drive quality traffic to their website and boost order conversion. SMEs can also consider tying up with platforms in the e-commerce aggregator space, i.e., a third-party platform, to help increase brand visibility.
Order fulfillment
SMEs often have limited resources in terms of capital, manpower, etc., making it challenging for them to manage every activity within the organization. With an influx in e-commerce orders in recent times, coupled with the pandemic-induced mayhem and supply chain disruptions, SMEs have been finding it burdensome to manage every aspect, especially order fulfillment, seamlessly and efficiently.
However, this isn’t an unsolvable issue. Today, there are third-party logistics and fulfillment platforms leveraging cutting-edge technology to ensure efficient, cost-optimised, hassle-free last-mile delivery and order fulfillment. Logistics and fulfillment platforms also have a wide network of expert delivery partners and PAN India reach, making shipping frictionless. Outsourcing order fulfillment to a third-party platform will allow SMEs to direct their focus towards other crucial aspects of the business and progress quicker.
Customer experience
The e-commerce industry is a vast, boundless sea offering a plethora of opportunities. However, with consumers having an abundance of options to choose from, they naturally gravitate towards brands that offer impeccable customer experience, making it imperative for SMEs to do the same to drive business growth. For every business, customer satisfaction needs to be the priority, but SMEs often find this challenging due to a lack of sufficient resources. It can, however, be easily solved by making a few alterations to the business model and policy.
For instance, revisiting the return/refund policy, personalising products/services based on insights garnered from the browsing or previous purchasing history, etc., would go a long way in ensuring the online shopping experience is seamless and enjoyable for customers. Besides, it will also be beneficial to ramp up customer experience by investing in technologies such as AI, blockchain, ML, and data analytics to bolster customer services and drive customer loyalty, satisfaction, acquisition, and retention.
Bottomline
2021 was a year of progress, evolution, and innovation for the e-commerce industry, with the total e-commerce sales estimated at around $56 billion. Given the uptick in demand, 2022 is bound to kickstart the next phase of growth for the industry, and SMEs that overcome the challenges they face by implementing simple yet effective solutions will thrive.
(The author is CEO, Shiprocket. Views expressed are personal.)
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