In India, the ecommerce revolution has become a reality and the future of ecommerce seems promising. With a 25% increase seen in 2022, ecommerce sales are about to reach $80 Billion and are expected to hit the $100 Billion mark by 2023.

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The ecommerce industry is not only attracting consumers but also sellers, retailers and entrepreneurs to harness success. But ecommerce businesses need a sustainable strategy to unlock exponential growth.

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Well, starting an online business is easy–you can either create an account on a marketplace or build an online store using shopping carts. But as you move on to the most crucial part of your business, i.e. increasing sales and driving growth—they can be difficult to achieve.

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Though the internet is overloaded with advice, this isn’t just another generic post about simple ways to grow your business. In this blog, you will learn how online brands can gain a competitive advantage to fast-track their growth on ecommerce channels with tactful strategies.

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How can online brands achieve ecommerce growth: 10 actionable steps

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1. Build a strong online presence

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Ecommerce success starts from being available online—and this is exactly what you have to do. Brand awareness has always been important, but it's especially true when it comes to ecommerce brands. Creating a strong online presence will help you increase your brand visibility and recognition, ultimately enabling you to capture the attention of online shoppers.

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Here’s how you can engage with the right audience on the right platform and at the right time:

• Create profiles on each and every social media platform
• Be active and follow the latest social media trends
• Create quality content either on social media or your blog to inform or educate your customers
• Engage with your customers by replying to comments on social media and your blog, or see if people are discussing your products on forums and get involved in the conversations

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2. Sell more, a lot more

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After grabbing the attention of online shoppers, it’s time to increase your ecommerce sales. For that, you must establish sustainable strategies to boost conversion rates on multiple sales channels—Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Ajio, Tata Cliq, Nykaa, your brand website, and more.

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Here’s how you can accelerate your sales to achieve ecommerce growth:

• Sell on multiple sales channels simultaneously to increase the chances of sales
• Use advertising and run ad campaigns such as Google ads or Facebook ads that appear on search engines, social media, mobile apps, and videos
• Optimise your product page by creating content-rich product descriptions, using high-resolution images from all angles and using SEO-driven keywords in your listing
• Run promotional events like a flash sale and festive sale on your brand website and participate in sales on marketplaces
• Stick to guidelines and policies when selling marketplaces to maximise profit, visibility, and sales. Else, your seller account can be suspended
• Ensure proper inventory management to prevent stockouts at the time of purchase
• Use email marketing, SEO, and SMS marketing to generate traffic from cross-marketing
• Collaborate with social media influencers and celebrities
• Increase your Average Order Value (AOV) by offering product kits, providing product recommendations, using cross-selling techniques and introducing loyalty programs

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3. Combat shopping cart abandonment

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In an attempt to gain ecommerce growth, you must make every effort to seize every sales opportunity on your brand website. The best way to increase sales is to decrease your shopping cart abandonment. However, it's tricky to reduce cart abandonment while selling on marketplaces. But you can always provide quality products at competitive prices and showcase them through a great product listing on a marketplace.

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Here’s how you can reduce cart abandonment on your website:

• Ensure a fast checkout process with 3-5 steps—the shorter, the better
• Be crystal clear about all costs, and don't surprise customers with hidden costs
• Provide free and fast shipping with easy returns and refunds
• Offer multiple payment methods like debit cards, credit cards, UPI, digital wallets, and more
• Build customer trust and credibility in transaction forms
• Provide world-class support with live chat, toll-free customer support, and email
• Avoid sign-ups and give guest checkout option
• Add testimonials of customers to build credibility
• Use exit-intent popups to recapture the attention of customers that are abandoning their carts
• Re-engage with customers and give them incentives like coupons and discounts
• Send recovery emails, including images of the item they selected, reviews or customer testimonials

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67.91% of all shopping carts are abandoned worldwide in a year, i.e. $4.6 trillion worth of merchandise.

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4. Ensure superior fulfilment

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Order fulfilment is a crucial part of the ecommerce landscape. You need to ensure a hiccup-free fulfilment to achieve growth in ecommerce.

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Here’s how you can make fulfilment your revenue driver to reach your goals:

• You can optimise critical processes of fulfilment like order management, order processing, inventory management and warehouse management in-house
• You can also outsource fulfilment to a 3PL that can streamline your entire fulfilment to ensure incredible order accuracy by following Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to make it as efficient as possible

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5. Ship the right way

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With the advent of quick ecommerce, online retail in India has pushed fulfilment to the next level via high-speed deliveries.

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Here’s how you can drastically improve your shipping speed and last-mile delivery, you need access to a strong shipping network:

• You can invest in a distributed network of fulfilment centres across the country and tie up with multiple courier partners
• You can also partner up with 3PL like Eshopbox, which has a robust shipping network to reach customers across 29,000+ pin codes in India while saving 45% on shipping costs
• Eshopbox has strong tie-ups and discounted rates with multiple courier companies, you can take advantage of bulk delivery discounts and provide fast order deliveries while minimising shipping expenses.

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6. Embrace cost-efficiency

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Apart from increasing ecommerce sales and ensuring seamless operations, saving costs is a major factor that will contribute to capturing maximum revenue.

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Here’s what you can do:

• You can invest in advanced technology to keep the supply chain agile and embrace ecommerce automation to save time and money
• As stated above, you can reduce shipping costs by splitting your inventory
• You can reduce your fulfilment costs with various strategies
• You can tie up with a 3PL like Eshopbox that will help you save more money down the lane

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7. Focus on customer experience

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86% of Indians value customer experience more than the actual product. It’s evident that customer experience makes or breaks an online business and is crucial for ecommerce growth—to win customers for life.

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Here’s what you can do to enhance the shopping experience and provide the utmost convenience to your customers:

• D2C brands can create an aesthetic website that draws the attention of your customers while ensuring functionality and ease of use
• Ensure a fast, easy and re-assuring shopping experience with great product features and testimonials
• Provide world-class support via live chat and customer service team
• After customers make a purchase, send them personalised emails like a ‘thank you’ note
• Provide full order visibility with real-time order tracking
• D2C brands can also enhance customer experience with a branded tracking page
• Send proactive shipping notifications for order updates via SMS and email
• Ensure high order accuracy to deliver the right products to the right recipients in the right condition
• Create a great unboxing experience with custom packaging
• Ask for product feedback after a few days of purchase to show that your customer’s satisfaction matters
• Give easy-to-understand product care tips and guides over emails
• Send emails to notify customers about ongoing offers and deals
• Indulge with your customers with an exciting loyalty program that offers redeemable points on every purchase

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Research states that 89% of customers switch to a competitor because of poor customer experience.

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8. Make returns profitable

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Returns can be your ticket to bring customers back. Well, it is true. 72% of customers say a hassle-free return experience makes them more likely to shop from an ecommerce brand again.

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Here’s how you can use returns to win back customers:

• Implement a customer-centric returns policy with a definitive time frame
• Offer free shipping on returns
• Ensure a quick and easy process for initiating a return, refund, or exchange
• Mention all the details associated with returns to avoid any confusion

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You must be thinking, what about the cost associated with returns? Well, here’s you can optimise returns management with a 3PL like Eshopbox to make returns easy for your customers and profitable for you.

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• Eshopbox empowers D2C brands with a customer portal in which your customers can initiate returns and exchanges easily
• You can turn refunds into exchanges with easy one-click exchanges
• Eshopbox automatically aligns return shipping of the product with an upcoming scheduled delivery in the nearby location to save on return shipping
• Eshopbox conducts quality checks on returned products and refurbishes them (if required), making sure that the returned product is restocked in your available inventory and is re-sellable quickly

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9. Get a knack for reconciliation

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Reconciliation is the most complicated aspect of running an ecommerce business. You must hire a bookkeeper or accountant to reconcile your payments from each channel or do it all by yourself. But reconciliation is a herculean task—probably because ecommerce accounting is way different from other forms of accounting.

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For marketplace

Different marketplaces have their unique fee structures. Marketplaces deduct various fees before paying you for your sales— these fees also vary from product to product. It becomes difficult to track various fees applied by all the marketplaces and reconcile them against the agreed fee structure respectively.

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For brand website

While selling on a website, you must use a payment gateway. The fees charged by the gateway vary on the different modes of payment—debit card, credit card, Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and more. Again, making it tough to reconcile them.

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Here are the three options you have:

• You can reconcile your payments on your own
• You can hire a bookkeeper or invest in an accounting software
• You can outsource your ecommerce fulfilment to a full-stack ecommerce platform provider like Eshopbox for automated reconciliation across all the sales channels—Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Tata Cliq, and your website. This will help you to track the fees charged to you and the payment received from the service provider and identify—orders for which you have received payment, orders for which you are awaiting payment, orders on which fees are charged more than provisional fees and orders for which your payment is overdue

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10. Take advantage of insights

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Reporting is crucial to driving your online business towards ecommerce growth. For that, you need access to data, KPIs (key performance indicators) and insights. The first step to achieving success is to know your current performance. By measuring your performance, you identify areas where your business is strong and the areas that need to be improved— before they become major issues.

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Here’s what you need to do:

• Invest in robust software to record data and derive insights
• You can also partner up with a 3PL provider like Eshopbox that gives you access to an actionable dashboard that mines data from each sales channel and attain a holistic view of your business.

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Wrapping up

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The ecommerce ecosystem is changing and it is clear that both technology and consumer behaviour are constantly evolving with it. Ecommerce brands that can optimise the latest technologies and enhance customer experience undoubtedly thrive in the brave new world of ecommerce. Fortunately, there is a platform that can help you grow your online business. A full-stack solution like Eshopbox Plus has the capability to unify the entire ecommerce journey and accelerate your growth in unimaginable ways.