Technology is always making headway in the business world, entrepreneurs and many business veterans have been incorporating the innovational ways to transcend their rivals.

           They say if Content is the king, Customer experience is the queen. 

Customer experience purely depends on how you make your customers feel during the interactions. The way you sort your priorities and your business representation needs to excel.

Compared to B2C, B2B is more demanding in terms of productivity and thus needs special attention for the providers. And why not, a B2B buyer offers you orders in big volumes. Remember the efforts you put on for insisting a B2C customer to purchase one item. This time, the desired effort magnitude is a thousand times higher.

This article illustrates everything you need to know about how you can improve the B2B customer experience with your e-commerce endeavours. But before delving deep, let’s have:

A sneak-peak at why customer experience matters in B2B

The B2B decision-makers every time have a vendor selected in mind even before a purchasing group is formed. As a result, the stakeholders offer a fat chance to let a new party in. And, that is the only space you are provided in the process.

B2B offers very little room to allow aberrations. You can’t just play around when your prospects are that reserved with their choices. It turns really important to strike the right note in the limited time frame. Above all, their existing vendors have set a threshold with the services and retention offers. Your strategies need to whipsaw the existing filters to initiate the possibilities.

Now, here is a pie-chart that explains the ill-effect of serving bad. According to Groove, 82% of customers let go of a company due to bad customer experience in the past.

From the sales point of view, the ratio is alarmingly high and needs to be addressed right.

The same source also claims that the customers are willing to pay extra, in exchange for a better CX. The clients are ready to spend around 140% more than usual, based upon their past user experience with the company. That being said, a B2B owner can expect their clients to come round again with more revenue. The only condition is if they develop a more Customer-centric approach.

Proven Steps To Improve B2B customer experience

B2B business owners can dramatically enhance customer experience and achieve the bottom line gains by utilizing buyers’ familiarity with some common B2C site functions. Above all, they need to make sure that they are saving the clients’ precious time and pitching their best in the nutshell.

Being said that, we have jotted down the most tried-and-tested ways that can level up the way customers perceive your business.

An interactive ChatBot optimizes the chances of conversion

A famous quote says “The first impression is the last impression.” That’s why Chatbots find themselves useful on most websites these days. Keeping the prospects engaged is one way of making the interaction more riveting.

Attending the customer can actually take them down the lead funnel quicker. Compared to Email Marketing and cold call attempts, Chatbots are rather dynamic and can fetch their details with much ease.

Modern-age Chatbots can make the rate negotiations on your behalf, even when you are off the system.

Concise Content that defines your purpose

The businesses are well aware of the market and prefer to research before entering into any deal. While they are in touch with you, they are alongside considering other vendors to get the best product at the best price, they have already explored your websites deep and the surveys that relate to you.

You can take this as an advantage; strengthen your contents, let them speak of your motto well aloud, let them define your endeavours and objectives with clarity. All this be done in a well-directed manner.

User case studies bridge the gap effectively

Case studies have played a crucial role in bridging the gap between a customer and the business. It needs a good grip on the buyer’s persona and a clear understanding of your product.

The B2B owner can take help of their existing clients, who play the lead character in the plot. Case study portrays main character’s problem and the solution offered by the product.

In most cases, the customers find themselves on the character’s shoes thus offering the much-needed connection.

With Product Personalisation, customers can have a better choice

What if the customer liked the design of your product, but not the colour? What if he denied just because he disfavored the text? There are tools that can save you from losing the ground.

Product Personalization allows your customers to have products of their choice. They can select the design and variant on their own.

It is now a part of the major State of the art eCommerce websites. With several variants of the same product, the customer has better chances of getting converted.

B2B owners can find such applications across all the major e-commerce platforms.

Image Source

With personalized recommendations, make them feel more valued

Keeping in mind that the other side of the B2B model is a procurer, the content needs to be highly personalized for specific customers. Features like product recommendations and customised best-seller lists can give B2B companies the chance to grow personal relations with the buyers.

The Sellers can pitch Upselling and Cross-selling strategies to enhance the possibility of closing the deal.

Influencing the C-Level decision maker

A chain of multiple decision-making layers is one of the major factors that differentiate B2C from B2B.

At an average, 6.8 people are involved while making a B2B purchase.

The Champion stakeholder among the decision makers plays the lead role. Friendly referrals or impressing the champion can effectively break the obstacles.

C-Level decision makers seek concise and focussed interactions. Time is a big constraint at these sessions. The best part- they favour a lasting relationship.

Adding a lead score on customer’s growing interest

Attaining a lead is not the end of the journey. A lead, if nurtured well can get you bulk orders.

Adding lead score for every advancement by the customer can help you classify their status and the chances of them being converted. Most B2B owners pitch further knowledge of services with the rising lead score.

Image Source

The picture above is an example that represents the way, the lead score is offered at every step.

Managing Abandoned Cart to remind them of the purchase

B2B prioritises a lot of segments, thus wrapping up for the deal can often take time.

On average, more than 60% of the purchases are cancelled during the checkout. It is thus necessary to manage the cart abandonment with utmost priority.

Most B2B owners pitch discounts within 15-30 minutes of cart abandonment. As per Salecycle, 28% of the carts are rescued in the process.

Data Analytics attracts Buyers

The B2B customer is a marketer, and data is their native language. How easy would it be for the buyer if you lt them keep a track of their orders on the website?

With Data Analytics being integrated into the b2b website, the Buyer can view order histories and other related information. These user-specific graphs are highly personalized and offer a special treatment to your buyers.

Here is an example of the same: Handshake for B2B.

Detailed Data Sheets with important points making the top of the list

Data Sheet is a must in the store. You need to describe your product for sure. More than that, are you prioritizing the descriptives?

For instance, if your business is selling PCs in bulks to organizations, you are expected to put up the screen size and CPU specifications more than the mouse and keyboard.

You must understand, figure out and present the data that is crucial to your sellers, which can be represented in datasheets

Moreover, you need to keep the description brief, yet detailed. An article here will help you with the same.

Standard Certification and Easy Return policy for the products

B2B relies on trustworthiness. With standard certifications by your name, you can easily replace the existing vendors in the list.

With your landing page showcasing the awards and the certificates, your branding is already a few levels up.

Easy Return plays a key role in offering high-end customer experience. The option to return, reassures them for the quality of service offered and thus steering them to the next stage of the lead funnel.

Here is one example of the same where the business owner is a SaaS provider and offers B2B services:

The B2B owner presents the certifications they received on the landing page while they take charge of the product quality as well

A precise search engine saves time and trust

A customer at B2C often scrolls for random products and is quite unpredictable with the choices. However, a customer at B2B is more focussed and understands his niche products better.

Your Internal search engine should offer the customer highly refined searches with lesser possible inputs. The best-known eCommerce sites keep a track of the searches and repeat purchases in the past to make things more precise for specific buyers.

B2B Progressive Web Apps to empower your mobile presence

Mobile phones have certainly helped to boost B2B and B2C models at large. The involvement of a regular mobile phone in the business endeavour is credited to Progressive Web apps or PWA.

The new-age application model combines the features offered by modern browsers along with the benefits of mobile experience. The parties can thus engage in a continuous loop on and off the systems.

Final Thoughts On B2B Customer Experience

In a survey of about 10,000 US-based consumers, Tempkin Group once found that around 86 per cent of the users who received a great customer experience were more likely to resume. There are several more stats that advocate the importance of Customer Experience in recent times, across all the known business models.

B2B is a highly focussed arena where the customer is specific to its needs. The Seller thus needs to come up with better efforts to channelise a highly delivering business. Above all, it is the way you approach and retain your customers, that matters the most. The demand for B2B services and competition are at an all-time high; differentiate yourself from the crowd and earn the right to ask for the place.

The post B2B Customer Experience, 13 Actions Bringing Better Results appeared first on ReadWrite.

BigCommerce says, 51% of Americans prefer to make a purchase online, and 96% of Americans have made at least one online purchase in their lives.

Just a decade ago, physical stores were the only shopping solutions for customers. Today, with the headway in digital trends, it has become easier for merchants to reach out the tech-savvy customers anytime, anywhere.

For instance, the growth of smartphone users has added to the surge of e-commerce. The screens of these smartphones serve as the doorways to e-commerce stores. Features like mobile shopping, easy payments, great checkout discounts, test-and-try on yourself, free shipping and timely delivery options have quite been useful in convincing the toughest of shoppers (including the millennials) to shop online who once preferred in-store shopping as the most reliable method.

The emergence of new technologies in e-commerce sector has led to the paradigm shifts in recent years. The E-Commerce sales graph has projected a huge amplification until 2019 and is expected to cross a mark of USD 4.878 billion by 2021. The high-tech innovations have transformed the way people shop and the retailers market a product/service.

Source: Data via Statista

Let’s have a sneak peek into,

Shifting E-commerce Trends in 2019 and Beyond

Considering customer as the driver of e-commerce gains, the key to successful e-commerce lies in providing customers with seamless shopping experiences while ensuring that merchants achieve their desired revenue base.

To offer personalized experiences, utilizing automation services, optimizing processes, simplifying decision making, and using data insights to improve operations, e-commerce merchants are investing in adopting new measures for upgrading their e-commerce game.

While maneuvering over the latest e-commerce trends, merchants are also making sure that the chosen technology should be worth their efforts. Here are some common changing e-commerce landscapes that will rule the e-commerce space beyond 2019.

1. The era of Internet Of Things (IoT)

Internet of things is a combination of products, services, and customers. The shifts to IoT is necessary to keep pace with the ever looming expectations and shopping habits of customers. It is stated that by 2021, about 70% of businesses would be using IoT to enhance their customer experiences. So, considering the IOT technology at each stage of the ecommerce business plan becomes inevitable.

Key Takeaways for Merchants:

• Smart Warehouse Management including Inventory and Supply Chain Management

Smart warehouses make use of IoT enabled smart devices for real-time visibility into operations. The IoT sensors and RFID tags make it easy to streamline inventory management in true-time. Besides, instant monitoring and tracking the inventory, these sensors and tags minimize the chances of any human errors that can occur while handling the goods. This becomes the base for automation that can help you over conventional paper-based methods, excel sheets, or accounting tools.

The RFID tags and GPS technology help you in seamless supply chain management. Besides tracking goods, it helps you in instant monitoring, decision-making, and accurate product management.

Moreover, IOT comes out to be a warehouse management solution. The temperature-monitoring and humidity sensors are used to raise alarms whenever any product in the warehouse exceeds a threshold level of temperature or humidity.

Nowadays, various warehousing options are offered by 3rd party aggregators such as Amazon and eBay that can facilitate merchants in managing the order fulfillment process, streamlining omnichannel business and delivering to all major zip codes across the globe.

E-commerce giant, Amazon is leading the way by adding innovative automation in the process. It is making use of robots in the warehouse to increase the efficiency and accuracy in the picking and packing process. Thus, if you sell in more significant quantity or want to extend your business reach to multiple countries, fulfillment by Amazon services could be the services to look forward to.

• Providing a personalized customer experience

IoT can help you personalize your e-commerce marketing campaigns to increase visitor engagement, CTRs and revenue while offering an improved experience to the customer. This helps in magnifying the customer and merchant relationship.

By gaining insights from data exchanged amongst IOT devices, e-commerce merchants can attract more customers and sway their buying decisions. Moreover, you can also provide customized solutions to the selected audience to offer a higher value with lesser efforts and delivers a sense that you care for your user’s needs.

• Parcel delivery via Drones

Soon drone-assisted online parcel deliveries will be done by major e-commerce marketplaces.

E-commerce giant Amazon in 2016 conducted its first prime product delivery via drones. The routine air deliveries through drone could probably start in 2019 or 2020.

Many other e-commerce brands around the globe are planning to test for parcel deliveries with the help of drone-like devices in the future. Currently, scientists are seeking workable measures and counter-measures for challenges like regulatory issues, capital cost, additional human labor costs, children or animals as obstacles, and more. Once they overcome these problems, in a few years you might find your package dropped by unmanned drones that are fully tracked by the sender.

2. Location Independence

Today ecommerce is not location dependent. Where having and maintaining a physical store was limited to selling to a restricted area, ecommerce if managed correctly has an excellent opportunity to attain exponential growth in a very short time-frame. Selling products online allows you to cross geographic boundaries. As content is the medium of communication innovatively presenting a simple product, a robust content strategy plays a significant role in running a successful e-commerce store. Even if you don’t have a team, many online portals are available where you can order content from. One such example is ineedarticles.com, where you need to put keywords and pay for articles based on a total number of words.

A plethora of online platforms exist which help to hire efficient ecommerce writers and provides excellent customer support in the low budget. Platforms like Odesk and Elance can help you get started with your e-commerce venture irrespective of the location.

Key Takeaways for Merchants:

• Cross Border ecommerce

Merchants can now sell internationally by using various techniques. Devising a well-planned marketing strategy can help you expand your businesses to any part of the world. Here are some quick pointers that can help merchants:

• By providing multiple currency pricing and localizing the payment methods to simplify the buying process for customers.
• For better cross border ecommerce, merchants can up multi-sites with each site displaying different language, different or same product line, and different prices based on location
• Merchants can use strategic planning tools such as Ansoff Matrix which can facilitate merchants to have a natural market expansion for their product range. Using this product versus market matrix marketers can analyze their potential growth and the risks that are involved in each strategy.

(i) Market Penetration: This strategy relates to increasing the sale of existing products in the existing market.

(ii) Product Development: Under this strategy, marketers launch new products into an existing market. For example, a prominent china based smartphone brand Xiaomi is focussing on meeting its growing customers’ needs by introducing new products such as smartwatch and power banks.

(iii) Market Development: It relates to launching existing products in a new market. For example, Xiaomi launched its existing smartphone product range in the American market for expansion in a new demographic.

(iv) Diversification: This strategy focuses on launching new products into the new market. The risks involved in this type of e-commerce trend are more. It can be related or unrelated diversification depending upon what kind of product is launched in which type of market. In another effort to cater to a new audience with a new product line Xiaomi introduced Air purifiers.

With the Ansoff Matrix, merchants can experiment by testing new products, new markets, take measures to generate a high revenue, thus increasing the profits.

They can also extend the sale of their product range across various zip codes. Analyzing risks, conducting research and gathering insights into customer’s/market’s needs, e-commerce merchants can expand their reach. It also allows merchants to grow their competencies for driving innovation to sell seasonal products throughout the year.

3. Integrated Shopping Experience

76% of customers expect from e-commerce companies to understand their needs and expectations.

This is the key reason why retailers across the globe are investing in online and digital methods to enhance customer engagement. Many are looking for providing integrated shopping experiences.

When a customer purchases something, he makes contact with several touch points. Keeping this in mind, merchants prefer providing an integrated customer experience which means retailers must holistically plan, devise, and execute across multiple channels, irrespective of whether the sale occurs in-store or through the online store.

Key Takeaways for Merchants:

• Providing Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel Marketing is a strategic approach under which all the physical and digital channels are connected with one another providing cohesive user experience. The goal is to provide customers with an integrated approach with an anywhere shopping experience. Major brands like Disney, Bank of America, etc. are using Omnichannel marketing.

Many strategies increase conversions; a few essential ways are:

• Offering discounts and coupon vouchers
• Creating user responsive pages
• Sharing user-generated content
• Form relationships with customers with a customer-centric view
• Optimizing mobile experience
• Integrating social media channels

Providing omnichannel experience to customers help merchants improve customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, and customer lifetime value.

4. M-Commerce

With the increasing popularity of smartphones, the number of users is expected to grow over 4.78 billion by 2020, adding to the surge of e-commerce continually.

Source: Statista

Such a massive increase in the number of mobile phones, merchants are shifting their gears towards advanced techniques like Accelerated Mobile Pages, Progressive Web Applications, and more.

Key Takeaways for Merchants:

• Using Mobile Predictive technologies

Retailers are employing analytics tools and predictive technologies to personalize their content. This helps merchants to gather data and translate them into a meaningful context for delivering a tailored customer experience to their website visitors. Using predictive technologies can help you improve your business intelligence, reduce fraudulent activities, practice price management, target promotions and in many such measures.

An ecommerce business that utilizes predictive analytics has better chances of converting a prospect into a repeat buyer. Many tools such as Lattice, SAS, Alteryx are available that can help to track and understand customer’s behavior and intent in the right way.

These tools offer meaningful insights that can help you optimize your e-business processes. So, this way you can formulate a strategy to work towards removing bottlenecks in a longer run.

These intuitive tools can normalize the data from multiple data sources to an extent where you can predict the intent for the customer; they also provide an estimation for the total number of sales that you can expect in the upcoming season at a product level.

Another way is to use a product research tool which helps you measure accurate data for the monthly sales and estimated monthly revenue. You can track the product movement in real-time.

• Use Progressive web applications (PWA)

PWA, a new software development technology, is the future of e-commerce. It offers customers a fast app-like browsing experience by combining the functionality of a regular web page and the mobile applications that increase the customer experience of an app with the accessibility of visiting a website. Many popular ecommerce platforms are implementing this technique to let merchants empower their e-commerce stores. For instance, the Magento 2.3 update launched a PWA studio which provided merchants with tools to personalize their content, add local preferences, and provide the consistent user experience.

Progressive Web App technology converts mobile shopping into an engaging and lightning fast experience.

• Using Accelerated Mobile Pages

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) helps you provide quality content to users and a mobile web experience which is faster and better than the regular mobile apps. A lightning-bolt symbol represents websites using the accelerated mobile page technology before their URLs. For instance, SEMRush is using AMP-immersive technology for its blog pages to provide a better user experience.

Though initially this technology was built for blogging websites, later its functionality was extended to e-commerce space where low page speeds were a major issue. Faster user experience in e-commerce websites ensures reduced bounce rate, faster conversions, search engine visibility, and boosted ROI.

So, implementing accelerated mobile pages to the homepage, product pages, and product category pages allows e-commerce merchants to maximize their sales, improve average order value, and maintain flexibility and control. Considering its myriad advantages, different brands are today shifting their gears towards their AMP-lification of their e-commerce businesses.

For example, the largest online fashion retailer in India, Myntra implemented AMP technology in about 11 days wherein they covered all of their essential landing pages from Google and the individual product pages by implementing PWA technology to derive better performance from those pages as well. As a result, the brand observed that the page load time was lowered by 65% as well as the bounce rate was reduced by 40%. So, there was an overall improvement in e-commerce results.

• Using Near Field Communication (NFC)

NFC is a class of communication protocols that allows two electronic devices to set up communication by bringing one device within the vicinity of 3-4 cm from each other. In this contactless radio technology, one device is portable (mobile phone), and the other is a fixed terminal. E-commerce is one of the popular applications that are supported by NFC technology.

Consumers can pay for items by tapping an NFC chip against an NFC terminal. Thus, technology not only saves customers’ time but also provides safety to user privacy. For instance, customers can use their NFC enabled mobile phone device against a reader to pay for a make a purchase.

5. Augmented Reality E-commerce

How is it possible that Pokemon Go does not come across our minds while talking about the Augmented Reality? When extended to use in the e-commerce industry, it is known as Augmented Reality E-commerce. Where installing AR apps allow customers to have an immersive experience while shopping, it will enable merchants to have an increased conversion rate. Augmented Reality bridges the gap between an in-store shopping experience and a mobile shopping experience.

Key Takeaways for merchants:   

• Provide Product Visualization before buying

Merchants use Augmented Reality to imitate real in-store experiences. For instance, Sephora‘s Virtual Artist is an Augmented reality-based app. These apps allow users to see what type of product will look good on them. It will enable you to try different makeup products like lip colors, eyelashes, and more. Apps like these create an exciting experience for women as they can ‘try-on’ everything.

Similarly, websites like IKEA helps its customers virtually view what kind of furniture will look better in their home. This type of application attracts more users, and it is likely to increase conversions. From the user’s perspective, it offers a rich online shopping experience.

• Providing Body Measurement Solutions

The Body Measurement App is a revolutionary way to measure the most accurate virtual fitting of the user’s body. AR app is a perfect solution to fitting problems that arise while buying wearables online. Users can try a product as per their measurements that accurately fits before buying.

• Virtual Product Aisles

Instead of in-store shelves, the surge in AR technology has led shoppers to view and buy from neat virtual shelves. E-commerce retailers are now using AR-based mobile applications to build product aisles showcasing a variety of products. These product aisles are the virtual simulations that can be projected on the walls of a customer’s living room. Customers can click on the products to grab more information about them and purchase them.

6. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Machine learning is a part of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides an ecommerce system with an ability to automatically learn and improve from customers’ experience without the need of being programmed. With Artificial Intelligence gaining momentum in the ecommerce sphere, the merchants use it in many applications to provide better services and improve their customer base.

Key Takeaways for merchants:

• Providing Personalized experiences via a recommendation engine

E-retailers today are deploying the machine learning algorithms for offering their customers the personalized experiences. For example, implementing Machine Learning algorithms in your e-commerce stores can help you display recommended products based on recent product search history either on the product page or the checkout page.

• Visual Search instead of Keyword Planning

Artificial Intelligence technology is helping marketers to implement the visual discovery of the products. This technology is replacing the use of keyword planners. Currently, the best examples are Google Lens and Pinterest Lens. Users need to hold their camera lens focussing on the specific item, and the algorithm works itself to find that product on the web. Implementing these artificial intelligence based visual search helps merchants to provide ease to their users. So, your products have to be optimized to rank in those listings to increase the chances of reaching to a greater audience and convert sales.

• ChatBot Assistance

With artificial intelligence, it is easy to provide chat bot assistance as customer support at any time. eCommerce brands are offering chat bots asking about the needs of their customers and how they can help. The chatbots implement machine learning algorithms to interact with human users. Using chatbot, you can minimize your support team effort where the bot can answer the frequently asked questions and be available 24 hrs taking up the query and providing answers to the customers in real-time. Advanced bots can also negotiate the pricing and win sales over competitors based on user intent and the minimum selling price you set for a particular product or service.

• Assisting Marketers to strategize their campaigns

Marketers can analyze neural networks to understand customer behavior and predict market trends. It helps to plan what should be eliminated from the organic and paid PPC campaign. This way you can run more targeted campaigns Devising neural marketing strategies can help marketers gain the return on investment by formulating targeted campaigns for various customer segments campaigns.

Final Thoughts On Changing E-commerce Landscape

In today’s uber-competitive e-commerce environment, companies seek to attract customers through a radical approach by providing highly-engaging and meaningful user experiences. With the technological advancements, the upcoming years will experience changing e-commerce landscape more than ever. The modern techniques blending with eCommerce sphere is providing an exponential hike in sales and customer satisfaction. With technologies like Augmented reality, merchants have been able to give the best visual shopping experience at the convenience of their homes.

Moreover, with the newer wireless technology trends such as 5G, it is guaranteed to provide greater speeds approximately 10 times the 4G, with high throughput and almost 0 latency. With the launch of 5G, the number of AR and VR based consumer applications will be more commonly seen in the future.

The artificial intelligence learning capabilities will also be improved with the deployment of 5G. Indeed, there will be better personalization, high speed and accessibility of the Internet.

Let’s see how 5G will widen the e-commerce horizon for merchants. Which e-commerce technology do you like the most? Do share your views.

The post Changing E-commerce Landscape: Global Trends for 2019 and Beyond appeared first on ReadWrite.

The rise of mobile device usage has surpassed that of the desktop from previous years. Now, the mobile page rankings, the volume of organic search traffic, and the load on the servers — all require equal momentum on mobiles as on desktop web page. But, how can you keep pace?

Using Google’s advancements in mobile page ranking, e.g., by creating Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is the most reliable method.

With AI beginning to embed itself into every aspect of our lives, e-commerce businesses have started using AI with AMP to provide better mobile-friendly and seamless user experience. This article illustrates what role does Google Accelerated Mobile Pages play in e-commerce businesses, how AMP works in E-commerce and how AMP is using the artificial intelligence.  

Before digging deep, let’s start with the basics. 

What is Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)?

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source framework formulated by Google aimed at making the mobile web experience better, faster, and more beautiful.

Technically, Accelerated mobile pages (AMP) are the stripped-down HTML copies of existing webpage content that offer faster load times than standard HTML5 documents. The AMP pages can be served by the websites, implementing the rel=amphtml tag within their HTML.

AMP is indicated by a small grey lightning bolt next to some of the Google search results. This flashing AMP symbol denotes the website is optimized to load quickly on mobile devices.

Examples of mobile search results with AMP implementations are shown above

Components of Google Accelerated Mobile Pages

Comprised of the lighter form of popular coding languages, these pages with the AMP framework contain a three-step AMP configuration:

• HTML: As Javascript is not at all permitted, a different markup of traditional HTML code along with unique tags is used. The AMP framework also requires you to use a streamlined version of CSS.
• JS: It is used to fetch resources and stripped down to eliminate unimportant rendering. Using AMP’s vast JS component library, you can load content, create animation, modifies layout, and much more.
• CDN: The proxy-based content delivery network (CDN), commonly known as AMP Cache, is a critical component of the AMP platform. It retrieves the AMP content and caches it for fast delivery.

Basically, with minimal code, when you integrate AMP to standardize your mobile responsive pages, you are considering the speed and readability as a top priority over anything else — even over shareability. This is what makes AMP mobile browsing different from non-AMP Mobile browsing.

How does Google Accelerated Mobile Pages load a page faster?

To load a page faster, Google AMP works in the following way:

1. Execute all the AMP JavaScript asynchronously that is AMP creates individual JavaScript for all the blocks of the content, and load separately. So, for one particular section, the entire page doesn’t have to endure in rendering.
2. AMP loads the size and structure of the page without any assistance from resources. Usually, the browser is unaware of how long does the structure of the page is going to be, however, in case of Google AMP, it determines the size of the ads, content, or visuals.
3. Keeping all the third party JavaScript in sandbox iframe, Google AMP ensures that the third-party JavaScripts can’t block the rendering of the main page elements. Simply put, third-party ads won’t damage the load speed of the main webpage content.
4. AMP can prioritize resource loading which allows the webpage to load essential elements like content, images, etc. faster.

Having understood what Google AMP is, and how it works, we should know why it is important for e-commerce.

Google Accelerated Mobile Pages For E-commerce

Initially, AMP was built for articles, blogs, and another static content to load faster. But, over the years, with the advancements, it is now highly advisable for e-commerce. While e-commerce websites run slow on mobile, so eCommerce development teams consider adding AMP-functionality can help decrease their page-response time.

About browsing the web on mobile, 46% of people dislike waiting for pages to load. It takes 15.3 seconds on average to load a mobile landing page.

According to the study, a one-second delay in page load time leads to:

• 7% loss in conversions
• 11% lesser page views
• 16% reduction in customer satisfaction

Moreover, 50% of the mobile users abandon a page, if the load time is more than 10 seconds.

Source: Instapage

When you are running an e-commerce website, providing customers with the accelerated page load speed is an excellent way to increase your product visibility and conversions. Based on how visitors’ behavior is changing, Google AMP has become a necessity for any website.

To implement AMP for e-commerce, there is a slightly different approach. Let’s look at how does AMP for e-commerce Work?

Three kinds of pages in e-commerce where AMP is effective are: The Homepage, Product Category Pages, and Product Pages.

1. Homepage

When it comes to AMP for e-commerce, the homepage is one of the best pages to start-off. If the homepage loads fast, you can save plenty of potential customers.

2. Product Category Pages

The product category pages are the next vital pages to add AMP on your eCommerce website. Thus, when a user Googles the product, the AMP powered pages have increased chances of ranking as they are relatively fast.

3. Product Pages

In product pages, AMP prioritizes the loading elements: product images and product descriptions being important factors. AMP recognizes the elements and delivers those elements first. All the third party JS will be loaded later.

So, you can implement AMP for e-commerce in your product pages by using various components like amp-selector, amp-access, amp-carousel, amp-bind, etc.

How To Enable Google AMP on your E-commerce Website

To add Google AMP on your e-commerce store, you need the following elements:

• Adding AMP to the Homepage

Homepage, being the facade of your e-commerce store experiences more traffic as compared to the inner pages. So, to make your buyers’ journey smooth through to your homepage, it is essential to simplify the layout of your homepage with the content not being static.

So, add ‘amp-carousel’ component on the homepage which allows you to display different images along a horizontal axis. In this case, use type=”carousel” to display a sequence of images as a continuous strip.

Source: Ampbyexample

Learn about enabling e-commerce AMP on the homepage using AMP by Example website.

• Adding AMP to the Product Pages

The product pages comprise a description, pictures, reviews, and prices of a product. Use amp-selector to make the user choose from a list of options which could be text or image.

Example of an AMP-enabled product page.

I am using amp-selector along with amp-bind to update the product page for showing the price of the product, the size availability, the gallery, and preview of images.

You can use amp-bind to update the price of the product depending on the selected color. To let your users share product links, use  ‘amp-social-share’ element.

Likewise, you can also use amp-list for displaying the related product list as shown here.

To add tags for all elements on your product page, use ‘amp-accordion’. For additional information on how to edit product pages, check out Amp by example.

Benefits of using Google AMP for Ecommerce

• Improve conversions with a fast, user-friendly experience

Adding AMP to your eCommerce store increases instant page load speed which enables your buyers to find your products easily and quickly. Linking your most-used platforms such as Google, Bing, Pinterest, and Twitter to AMP pages, help you create a supercharged discovery experience for users. This enhanced user experience often elucidates into better conversions and engagement.

• Maintain flexibility and control

Even if you choose to adopt AMP, you can still use CSS to customize your styling, dynamic data to fetch the fresh data wherever needed, and A/B testing to experiment and build the best possible buyer-experience.

• Improve average order value and Maximize sales

With AMP, your eCommerce store performs well and the number of returning customers increases. So, be it a smaller shop or a marketplace, AMP can enable you to make the sale.

Demerits of AMP for Ecommerce

• Implementation is not easy

The major drawback of implementing AMP in your e-commerce store is that you would require an expert e-commerce developer. Having said that, the implementation is much easier, if you are an owner of a WordPress website. In that case, you need to merely add AMP for WordPress to your website.

• Higher Rankings are not guaranteed

An important thing to note about enabling AMP on your e-commerce store is, achieving higher rankings directly in the search results are “not guaranteed.” Apart from the increased speed that results in ranking the websites higher, Google also considers other ranking factors while doing so.

Customize Google Accelerated Mobile Pages

Webmasters, by using Google Search Console or your HTML, can optimize the AMP code to make them more customizable and trackable. The AMP cache is updated by using the “update-cache” request.

You can customize numerous options for adding more functionality to your AMP pages such as ads and analytics, dynamic content, layout, media, presentation, social, and much more.

Here are a few examples of how to customize your AMP HTML document.

• amp-pixel: tracking pixel
• amp-analytics: analytics tracking
• amp-animation: add animations
• amp-dynamic-CSS-classes: dynamic CSS elements
• amp-iframe: display an iframe
• amp-app-banner: fixed banner

You can have a complete list here.

Google Accelerated Mobile Pages And Artificial Intelligence (AI)

As AMP is on a quest to deliver an enhanced experience to the customers, it is now shifting its gears towards harnessing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to provide an effortless experience.

When AMP is combined with Artificial intelligence, the digital marketers are more capable of turning their e-commerce website a site ‘worth seeing’. To provide a seamless user experience, AMP + AI offers a human-centric approach which further facilitates business to bring a deep human touch to their services with ‘mass personalization’.

How AMP combined with AI helps businesses.

Artificial Intelligence is designed to learn and create connections with buyers. Google uses RankBrain (an AI tool) to determine relevant search results. It is capable of establishing a website’s content as relevant even though it doesn’t contain a search phrase. It is beneficial for the ranking and digital marketing strategies of your business.

Though it’s is quite difficult to rank your content high, the flourishing presence of artificial intelligence will now increase your rank targeting range from the first page to the top three.

Many AI tools are in development mode today, which can help businesses identify buyer personalities and predict their buying habits by continually analyzing customer purchase processes and social media habits.

Final thoughts on Google Accelerated Mobile Pages

Indeed, AMPlifying for your content website or e-commerce is a sensible choice. All you need is to be meticulous about implementing it while figuring out the highest ranking landing pages and the third-party satisfaction.

Furthermore, the AI-powered AMP can facilitate online content and e-commerce businesses to enhance digital marketing strategies, increase the rankings, and better mobile-friendly experience.

The post A Comprehensive Guide To Google Accelerated Mobile Pages appeared first on ReadWrite.

Traditional commerce and trade practices have always kept the customer in dark about the products being sold and it’s business information.

Sellers always had the upper hand while interacting with buyers. This means the true product value was never really made clear to the customer before the purchase. Even when purchasing a discounted product, customers were not so sure whether they are being charmed with decoy pricing, or if they had managed to strike a fair deal.

However, things have changed drastically since the evolution of the web and e-commerce.

The modern-day customer has instant access to unlimited information about products, brands, and competitors through several online resources that help in validating their purchase.

E-commerce has not only put the customer in the driver’s seat but has also solidified the fact that a brand cannot simply attain success by just providing a quality product or higher discounts.

The ever-evolving purchase paradigm of the modern day customer has outsmarted the traditional eCommerce experiences and it’s about time that eCommerce ventures enhance their store experiences to catch up with their customer expectations.

The Solution: Adaptive eCommerce

According to a prediction from Gartner analysts, by 2020 personalization engines used to recognize customer intent will enable digital businesses to boost up their profits by 15 percent.

With purchases being triggered based on peer to peer opinions and eCommerce experiences, an adaptive and personalized eCommerce experience has become the need of the hour.

E-commerce websites are not only expected to provide a flawless purchase process but they are also expected to establish an emotional connection between the brand and the customer.

However being adaptive doesn’t mean simply identifying the user and referring to him with his name in your website CTA’s and other interactions.

Delivering an adaptive eCommerce experience involves making your visitors understand that you do not just know them but also care about them. To achieve a truly adaptive eCommerce experience, brands need to personalize the overall eCommerce experience. This will include the user interface that handles, the customer onboarding, product ordering, fulfillment as well as marketing.

In a perfect world, the adaptive eCommerce model behaves differently for different users.

For instance, if an existing customer is searching for new products, the eCommerce store should adapt based on the past purchases and impressions of the customer and highlight the most relevant items within the search results.

Similarly, if a user has added a product in the cart, then the cart page should adapt to display relevant quality assurances about the product in order to promote purchase impulse.

However, to what extent can we stretch the adaptive boundaries of an eCommerce experience? With this article, we are here to find just that.

How to Implement Adaptive eCommerce

Adaptive eCommerce can only be executed by gathering precise and curated data about your customers. This data is then segmented in order to setup eCommerce store logics which personalize eCommerce experiences for customers.

A fancier term for this process is “User modeling” where the adaptive eCommerce system consistently gathers and maintain user data in two different ways:

• Implicit data modeling
• Explicit data modeling

Both data and adaptation are two faces of the same coin. How adaptive an eCommerce system can be, directly depends upon the extent of data being collected and the variety of data models being generated from that data.

To emphasize the relation between data modeling and implementing adaptiveness in an eCommerce system, we have divided the complete process of adaptive eCommerce setup into two phases.

• Phase 1: elaborates the data modeling process.
• Phase 2: discusses the ways to utilize the data models for implementing different facades of adaptive eCommerce.

Let’s discuss these in detail.  

Phase 1: Understanding data modeling for adaptive eCommerce.

In the eCommerce ecosystem, data is a very ambiguous term. With modern day analytics solutions such as Google’s enhanced eCommerce analytics,  you can set up virtually endless data points.

However, in order to actually convert such huge amounts of data into actionable metrics and deducing why a visitor is on your store, data analysts have segmented data into an implicit and explicit data type.

i) Implicit data and how to collect it.

If a visitor has navigated to your website from a backlink, browsing from the product listing page to the product detail page, read the product description, maybe watched a video about the product, they have provided data about their interactions in an implicit way.

In other words, if you’re able to track any user data without the knowledge of the user then it is Implicit data.

Key facts about implicit data:

• This data is collected Implicitly by tracking user behavior.
• This data is then utilized to enhance business logic.
• Best way to generate such data is through google analytics and social media pixel tracking.
• A non-intrusive approach is used to generate implicit data.
• Some common data points include Past order history, Search queries and impressions.

ii) Explicit data and how to collect it.

Contrary to implicit data, explicit data involves conscientiously requesting information from the users about their preferences in order to provide them with personalized experiences. One of the most common examples is the “save our cookie” prompt that we see on every other website.

Explicit data gathering involves a value proposition to the visitors in a minimal way, convincing them that the data being asked for will be used to make their experiences more secure, reliable and personalized.

Key facts about implicit data:

• Data is explicitly collected from the user with his content and actions involved upfront in the collection process.
• Contact forms, surveys, Feedback forms, Newsletters are used to generate explicit data.
• This data is intentionally provided by the users.
• Some common data points include Reviews, Ratings, preferences, demographics, etc.

Capturing the right data at the time right time, eCommerce stores can be tuned to adapt for dynamic user preferences a deliver a truly adaptive eCommerce experience.

Phase 2: Adaptive eCommerce design best practices.

Once you have started accumulating actionable data about your audience, it’s time to put it to good use. With the evolution of technology, there are new ways being introduced every day for making eCommerce stores adaptive.

Exploring all of them will be way out of the scope of this article. Therefore, we will cover the most essential aspects of adaptive eCommerce that must be personalized for delivering a user-centric eCommerce experience.

i) Adaptive user interfaces.

When it comes to personalization in eCommerce, user interface personalization is naturally on top of our list. The user interface is the presentation layer of any web application and it plays an essential role in engaging a customer.

In order to make your user interfaces adaptive, an eCommerce store can be configured to great lengths for implementing a personalized experience. This includes simply providing a retrofitted layout on the customer’s device or going as far as showing custom content while the user is navigating through the website.

Few key eCommerce UI aspects that must be considered for implementing adaptiveness:

• Content delivery: The UI design of the website should be cross-browser and cross-device compatible in order to deliver website content on different devices accurately. Depending upon the target audience and the website’s maintenance budget, the website should either be adaptive or fluid responsive.
• Prospect engagement: Use cookies to track customer login information, provide relevant product recommendations based on past sessions, generate personalized messages to greet the user, and for dynamically creating product listings based on past history of product impressions and purchases.
• Gamification: A sense of reward while making purchases has proven to enhance the buyer engagement by many folds. By setting up a loyalty points or credits system and comparing customer achievement using their social media data, retailers can generate a sense of competitiveness.
  

  You can also integrate loyalty programs provided by third party service providers by utilizing their plugins if available or using their API.

• Impulse purchase: Subtle actions that intensify the purchase impulse of a buyer are a great way to enhance conversions. This can be done by setting up personalized discounts based on product impressions, creating urgency for a product using “low stock” notifications, and social proof notifications about the product being reviewed by a prospect.Another recommended way to trigger impulse purchase is by setting up dynamic banners highlighting the product quality on the cart page

ii) Adaptive fulfillment and store management.

Implementing an adaptive eCommerce experience needs to be well backed up by an adaptive store management process. This primarily involves order fulfillment and store management.

By identifying business KPI’s and associating them with customer preferences identified through user modeling, an eCommerce business can enhance as well as automate back-end processes to deliver an adaptive eCommerce experience.

Few key fulfillment and store management aspects that must be considered for implementing adaptiveness:

• Customer support: It goes without saying that an effective customer support is the lifeline of an eCommerce business. There can be countless instances when your audience will find the need to talk to a representative before or after making the order.Deploying an actual support team is a great choice, however, if there are budget constraints then utilize AI based chatbots for your store to provide 24/7 support automatically. Utilize available chatbot plugins depending upon your CMS or create custom chatbot of your own using services like Google Dialogflow.
• Stock management: Re-stocking and warehouse management is considered as a conundrum by retailers, especially for startups. A store needs to keep a healthy flow of inventory in order to avoid spoilage, deadstock and reduce storage costs.There are several ways to effectively manage inventory such as setting up FIFO (first in first out) policy, performing regular inventory audits, analyzing past order history and predicting future trends.However, also consider automating the stock management process by integrating ERP or WMS systems with your eCommerce systems to keep a detailed track of your inventory, cost of procurement, turnover ratio, human resources as well as general forecasting for enhanced inventory management.

• Order management: Delivering orders at the right time is crucial for a business to survive. Customers prefer vendors who can ship their orders with minimal delays.
  

  Hence it is essential to manage the incoming orders with precision.

• The process of adaptive order management goes hand in hand with proper inventory management.
• Retailers must analyze past sales data in order to predict future demands and have stocks available when they are needed.

If in case a product is out of stock, utilize back order ability to take orders from a customer and provide fulfillment as soon as the stocks are replenished.

In addition to this, if you are managing multiple warehouses, then plan the stock in warehouses depending upon demographics, weather conditions, local sales trends to accomplish effective re-stocking, timely shipping, and seamless last mile delivery.

iii) Adaptive e-commerce marketing.

The final and one of the most essential frontier for adaptive eCommerce is digital marketing. Luckily, automating digital marketing is getting relatively easy with new and effective marketing automation services being launched with each passing day. The only concern is to utilize these services effectively with a sole purpose of personalizing marketing content for customers.

Few key eCommerce marketing workflows that must be considered for implementing adaptiveness:

• Lead/customer segmentation: Before you actually decide on your market channels and content, it is essential to segment your leads and customers into specific groups.By utilizing CRM tools like HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and Infusionsoft, you can synchronize your eCommerce database. You’ll effectively segment your audience based on past customers, their purchase rate, engagement rate, new leads, hot and cold leads, etc.
  

  These tools can help you target these customer segments with personalized and automated campaigns which we are covered in the next points.

• Email marketing: Emails are the most prominent and successful communication channel for eCommerce businesses.A recent MailChimp analysis concluded that depending upon a size of the company, an average email open rate varies around 20 percent to 22 percent which is way greater than any other communication channel.

  As it is evident that size doesn’t play a huge factor in email-based conversions. Hence email marketing is recommended to everyone irrespective if you are a startup or an enterprise.

  By utilizing personalized emails. Use:

1. Acknowledgment and appreciation of first customer order and maybe including a reward along with it.
2. Setting up cart abandonment emails.
3. Implementing automatic emails for dynamic retargeting.
4. Set-up automated emails for feedbacks and referrals post purchases can substantially increase engagement and conversions for a business.

• Cross-channel messaging: What email misses out on can be covered using cross-channel messaging by setting up: SMS, website messages and browser push notifications.By utilizing automated messages based on multi-conditional segmentation, your eCommerce store can adaptively target customers based on their past purchases, categories, and product pages.

Conclusion

The commerce sphere has been revamped by E-commerce and customers are demanding personalized experiences.

In order to stand out from the competition among the changing trends, one needs to establish prudent personalization based on the contextual awareness that adapts and engages your audience according to where they are in their buyer journey.

While we have not covered every possible aspect, we hope that our effort of discussing the key adaptive aspects within an eCommerce business empowers our readers to build, grow and improve their in-store customer experiences with the changing trends in eCommerce.

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