ERP, CRM and eCommerce Blog

While the ecommerce market in the U.S. is now considered to be a mature segment of the retail industry, In Asia Pacific the expansion of this space remains in its early stages. eCommerce in USA still continues to outpace traditional brick and mortar retail. However in Asia Pacific the growth in eCommerce is staggering. However, unlike traditional beliefs that Asian consumers are averse to shopping online a report released in 2010 on Global Trends in Online Shopping revealed that only 13% of Internet users in Asia Pacific had never shopped online which was lower than the global average where 16% of users had never shopped online. This forecasts the ecommerce in Asia Pacific will continue to grow fast and only may become one of the largest markets world-wide. The report surveyed over 27,000 internet users in the world.

• The China Internet Network Information Center said the number of internet users in the world’s most populous country jumped 28.9% in 2009 to 384 million, which is more than the entire population of the U.S.
• According to this article on CNBC , “Sales done online nationwide in China have doubled to almost $80 billion in 2010, according to iResearch data, compared to total retail sales, which have grown nearly 20 percent per year in the last five years.”

While this spending burst could be a result of many things, experts say shoppers in Asia Pacific are fast-becoming comfortable with the ease of mobile e-commerce, compared to their Western counterparts. In addition to their web savvy ways, their economy is experiencing a consumption boom which should last for many years. Users in Asia Pacific are more likely to do a purchase using the mobile phone than users in North America.

Here are some key trends we’ve discovered by reviewing all the surveys including the Nielsen one referred to above and others from ComScore and Forrester Research:

• What they are buying: Outside of travel, Items that Asia Pacific shoppers like to buy online are books, clothing/accessories/shoes, cosmetics, videos/DVDs/games, and groceries in that order.
• Where within Asia Pacific are they buying: Total online spending as a percentage of total monthly spending varies by country with Chinese and Korean online consumers allocating the most via the web than any other in the region. Online consumers in New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia and Hong Kong allocate the least.
• Who is buying: The developed countries in Asia Pacific such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan follow the same online gender profiling as North America where women dominate men in the traffic to online stores. Less developed countries like India, Vietnam and Philippines have men more dominant in visits to online retail stores.

So with this information, how can you begin marketing to the Asia Pacific part of the world through your ecommerce site ? How can you get their attention and keep it? Here are some tips on what you can do to build out your Asia Pacific ecommerce store.

1. Offer diversity in your online product catalog: The #1 reason shoppers in Asia Pacific go online is when they cannot find products in the store or for diversity. This is very different than the North America buyer where price is often a very significant reason to shop online. So you don’t need to be the cheapest price in town if your store can bring significant diversity. The more products you can offer the higher your chances of success will be in this market. Those testing the market with a very narrow catalog may find that they are setting themselves for failure.
2. Stay simple: While a broad catalog is desired, the store should be simple, easy to navigate and not overly complex. Most online retailers in Asia Pacific make the mistake of throwing a lot of flash and a dizzying array of colors. A busy look and feel is the most common and the least successful. Go for the clean and simple look and feel with a powerful offering.
3. Reviews: Online product reviews are more important than in North America. The strong social connection in Asia pacific means that consumers will like to read and research a lot more before they buy. Reviews (both negative and positive) will help increase the conversion on your store. Don’t sanitize your reviews
4. Promotions: The least used and yet most successful promotion in Asia Pacific is Free shipping. While it is hard to make shipping cost-effective in the region – if you can make that your strength. How do you make shipping pay for itself – tie the free shopping offer to a minimum order size e.g. the equivalent of $50. That will drive up your order size and the difference will pay for the shipping. The free shipping in itself will increase conversion significantly. Shoppers in Asia Pacific are very sensitive to shipping cost.
5. Mobile: The web should be your #1 priority. However the mobile experience should be a close second. Users in Asia are much more comfortable with the cell phone than consumers in North America. Take advantage of this and put in place a mobile offering much sooner than when you’d do it in North America.

Email us at ecommerce@ignify.com for more tips.

Pankaj Kumar is the Chief Technology Officer at Ignify. Ignify eCommerce is the only PCI certified eCommerce solution in the market that is available in the Asia Pacific region. Ignify has been included as the fastest growing business in North America for four years in a row by Deloitte, Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine. Ignify was ranked in the Red Herring Global 100 in 2011 – this list represents the top businesses world-wide with disruptive and innovative technology.

While Retail has generally been lagging with the exception of a few specialty retailers who have carved out a niche, eCommerce continues to buck the trend and 2010 was one of the most successful holiday seasons ever for online retailers. Both the Chase Paymentech's Pulse Index and MasterCard's Pulse Index round the Q4 2010 online holiday spending season to be the largest on record. Forrester's five-year forecast predicted a 13% growth rate for online retail in 2010 over 2009; online holiday sales were predicted to grow by 16% in the US Online Holiday Retail Forecast, 2010.

A recent report published in January 2011 Five Retail eCommerce Trends to Watch in 2011 by Forrester Analyst – Suchitra Mulpuru shows that web growth has outpaced non-web growth for years. In a survey that Forrester conducted with Bizrate Insights in December 2010, 49% of recent online shoppers agreed with the statement "I shopped in stores less because I shopped online instead" when thinking of their Thanksgiving shopping experiences.

The growth however has slowed down. Just a few years ago, online shopping was growing at more than 20% per year. But today, that growth is stabilizing, as shopping habits have shifted to make buying online a more regular occurrence. This means ecommerce competition is even fiercer than in previous years. So how do you define your online brand and be successful in this intensely competitive market?

Here are some tips for you based on expected trends for eCommerce in 2011

• - Mobile ecommerce and Tablet commerce: The trend for mobile has deepened and strengthened. More buyers now not just browse but will also shop online. Ms. Mulpuru in her Forrester report calls the Table Commerce T-commerce. Mobile optimization requires a few things. At the low end, you want your website to render appropriately in a mobile browser without errors. Most mobile operating systems including Windows Phone 7, iPhone, and iPad do no support Flash. So it is time for you to get rid of the flash and use simpler AJAX or Animated GIFs to provide similar effects. At the higher end you want to have an optimized mobile browsing experience. The latest version of Ignify eCommerce brings to the market an experience optimized for mobile with a separate mobile store in addition to the web store that is optimized for PCs. Finally – if you have enough traffic and volume you may want to consider a mobile app – but that requires you to have enough scale to justify a download by the consumer. The Forrester report points to the fact that putting store hours and locations center-stage in the mobile version is important as most consumers looking up a store on a mobile phone are typically looking for this information while the ‘T-commerce’ will go deeper into the product catalog.
   
• - Marketplaces: Most successful online retailers now realize that they need to not just depend on their web store but need to further the channel by listing their catalog on marketplaces such as Buy.com, Amazon.com, eBay, Bing Shopping etc. Ignify eCommerce integrates with Microsoft Dynamics commerce services to offer the ability to publish to multiple marketplaces. That allows our customers to be able to take a single catalog and publish it into multiple marketplaces without having to create listings for each marketplace individually thus increasing revenues and lowering costs of selling online.
   
• - Multi-channel: Brick and mortar (BAM) retailers may find delight in this one. The ability to buy online and pick up in store is gaining currency. BAM retailers with effective and integrated online web stores are able to. Ignify ecommerce in its next version integrates with the Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail point of sale to allow for this to be a reality where customers can buy online and pick up in store.

Email us at ecommerce@ignify.com to learn more ways on how Ignify ecommerce can also help you stay ahead of the fierce online competition.

Sandeep Walia is the Chief Executive Officer at Ignify. Ignify eCommerce is the only PCI certified eCommerce solution in the market that integrates with the Microsoft Dynamics ERP and Sage ERP solutions. Ignify has been included as the fastest growing business in North America for four years in a row by Deloitte, Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine. Ignify was ranked in the Red Herring Global 100 in 2011 – this list represents the top businesses world-wide with disruptive and innovative technology.

As mentioned in an earlier blog, I will be delving deeper into how you can grow your revenue by increasing your ecommerce website traffic. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming more and more valuable because of the sheer volume of websites, blogs, and social media sites. There is a lot out on the web today, but that doesn’t mean everyone knows the tips to enhancing SEO. Here’s your chance to get “one up” on the competition by following these 5 simple tips:

1. Research Your Ideal Consumer. Before you write a book, you want to make sure someone out there wants to actually read it, right? Same goes for creating an effective ecommerce website. Define your target consumer and make sure the site is perfect for them. Once you have this panned out, create keywords that pertain to that consumer and create your keyword strategy so that when your customers are searching for you…they’ll FIND you.
2. Optimize your Product Pages, URLs, Page Titles and Landing Pages. Enhancing organic search engine optimization may be the most important step to ensuring you land on the top of the search engines. Although paid searches get top of the page, most often consumers trust organic search because of product reviews. Ignify ecommerce uses a folder structure with each page organically search engine optimized with URLs and web addresses that are humanly readable. Page Titles are also automatically filled in with product or product category names instead of a generic single page titles across the store, catching the attention of search engines more often. With Ignify ecommerce, every product page is also automatically built to be a landing page. In order of priority, here is what is important for your native search engine ranking
   1. HTML Page Title: This is the most important piece of the puzzle and you want this to be automatically generated with search engine friendly terms
   2. URL or Web Address: The web address needs to include the category name and product name in it.
   3. Page Description: While the page description doesn’t intrinsically increase your native search engine optimization a good page description will increase the changes that
   4. Keywords/ Meta tags: Surprise! But the keyword field is the least useful when it comes to native SEO. Most people focus on this as opposed to the Page Title.
3. Gather and Encourage Product Reviews. As I mentioned above, product reviews play a big role in beating out the competition. If someone is searching for a sweater at two different ecommerce sites, and one has a good review over the other that has none, the numbers show the customer will go with the one showing more credibility. This is something advertisements cannot show. Product reviews are genuine and from everyday consumers.

   With Ignify ecommerce, you even have the ability to choose which reviews you display on the product page, keeping you in control. In addition, the little and most important secret about product reviews is that it improves your organic search engine optimization. You now have 3rd party generated ‘free’ relevant content to the product you are selling – nothing beats getting free content.

   Finally – ensure you show the total number of reviews and the average ranking in the product search pages and category pages. While this will not impact search it will help increase your conversion – which is your ultimate goal. Product reviews should not just be limited to the product page – the summary on the category pages, search pages is very important as it helps customers in identifying which are the high quality products when they get a product listing.

    
    
    

4. Update your Content on a Regular Basis. Google likes new content, which is why the blogging scene has become so big the past few years. Blogs ensure content is updated regularly. Make sure you have a planned process for updating your ecommerce site before Google starts ignoring you all together. Ignify ecommerce allows several ways to do it:
   1. Editorial reviews: In addition to a product description you can add a review of the product from your company. The more unbiased and neutral the review the more reads it will get which in turn increases your search engine rankings
   2. Articles and videos: Add content articles around the industry or segment you are in. This helps build credibility of your store with customers and also drives traffic as the content is now crawled through by the search engine.
5. Ensure Fast Processing of your Website. Okay, you succeeded in getting your customers to your site. Congratulations! But the time it takes for them to browse your website is driving them crazy. In this day and age, if a website stalls for more than a few seconds each click, the user will lose interest even quicker. Google also ranks websites for their processing speeds, so make sure your website is up to speed! To do this
   1. Horsepower of your hardware: Continually monitor memory consumption, log file sizes and CPU consumption. You should have performance counters on your servers to be able to view your usage. In regular periods your CPU usage should be under 40%
   2. Image sizes: Ensure you are not using large size images – while these can look pretty they can slow down the page. Reserve the larger size images for zoom – your product listing pages, search pages and category pages should use smaller size images
   3. Web Store application: Ensure your eCommerce application is optimized for performance and can serve up the pages quickly

Search Engine optimization for web stores is a tricky and wavering topic. The rules and trends change often, but one thing to always keep in mind is to have your customers in mind. If you think like your target customers, you will stay one step ahead of your competitors.

Sandeep Walia is the Chief Executive Officer at Ignify. Ignify eCommerce is the only PCI certified eCommerce solution in the market that integrates with the Microsoft Dynamics ERP and Sage ERP solutions. Ignify has been included as the fastest growing business in North America for four years in a row by Deloitte, Inc Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine. Ignify was ranked in the Red Herring 100 finalists for 2010 – this list represents the top businesses in North America with disruptive and innovative technology.