E-commerce on chat | AIYO LABS

E-commerce on chat

If you’re a multi-billion dollar business, like Amazon, you can afford the hundred of millions spent on marketing, promotions and advertisements needed to make these deals profitable. But what if you’re a small or medium business without millions to spend on billboards and TV ads? Can you get in on the action? Are there ways in which you can maybe even do it better than these megaliths?

Thursday, December 13th, 2018
Clearly, competing directly with the bigs guys is not going to end well. But where you can get the upper hand is, funnily enough, from your customer, or more accurately listening to them. Converting, one-time customers, into regulars is the key to not only retention but also increase revenue. That’s where chat apps like Whatsapp come in even the playing field. What does the mean exactly?

The best way to illustrate the point is through an example. Let’s say you create a website or an app to take your retail/e-commerce business digital. You’ll need to invest in getting a designer to create a design that is not only user friendly but also communicates your brand voice strongly. Then, you’ll need to hire developers to build the whole thing and ensure it’s running smoothly without any errors, has an order management system and integrate a payment gateway and so on and on.

OK let’s say you’ve done all that, you’ve spent time, money and energy creating the website that looks great and works well too. The challenge now is, how do you get your users to firstly hear about your website or app and then take to further step to actually visit or download it?

That’s where you end up having to spending even more time, money and energy marketing and promoting your website. At this rate it’s going to take ages for the revenue that you earn from your website to actually recover all the money you’ve spent, let alone turn a profit!

The cheaper, quicker, easier and quite simply better way of engaging with your customers is to go where they are, instead of expecting them to come to you. And where are your customers? On Chat.

Whatsapp has over 240 million monthly active users in India, but more importantly, your customers are on Whatsapp and don’t need to download a new app, or visit a new website to connect with you. In fact, they spend a significant part of their day on chat apps for personal as well as professional conversations. So reaching out to them, being available to them and facilitating transactions on Chat is going to make their life so much easier and make your business open up another channel to generate revenue.

You can build the entire customer engagement flow directly on chat apps. Starting from reaching out to customer with personalised messaging, to completing the transaction (including taking payment), to fulfilling delivery can all be done on chat itself. Even you after sales service and support can be easily handled on chat. Chat replaces any need for websites or app or payment gateway. It is the complete, end to end solution that works for small and mediums business of all kinds.

If the benefits of engaging your customer aren’t apparent enough even now, here are a few more pointers that will help close the case in favour of chat:

  • Improve customer service
  • Automate handling enquiries
  • Ease order fulfillment/delivery with location sharing
  • Take payments with no need to additional gateway integration
  • Target customer based on their interest and previous purchases
  • Proactively reach out with updates and offers
  • Identify what doesn’t work and get rid of it
  • Measure what works and double down on it
In an increasingly competitive market, with big players changing the rules of the game, taking your customer engagement, sales and after sales offerings on to Whatsapp will go a long way in evening the playing field.