Is Virtual Reality a next E-commerce frontier?

Virtual Reality is developing its route into e-commerce, but the thing is how it affects the consumer engagement? Is it nice to have it need to have for the engagement purpose?

The CEO of the merchant service provider Cleveland Brown quoted that, from July 2015 to June 2016, $2 billion was invested in virtual reality and startups. Mergers and acquisitions for the virtual reality and augmented reality are hiking to $850 million during 1 year.

Many brands that deal with E-commerce are embracing the virtual reality to enhance the customer experience. For instance, Wayfair was up with the Patio Playground, a virtual reality app that enables you to browse the catalog, selecting outdoor furniture and design a background setting. Wayfair is making possible through a Facebook-owned Oculus Rift headset.

Wayfair used this to enhance the customer experience and engagement with virtual reality. It is for the brand awareness and no for the transactional experience. Mike Festa, head of Way fair’s Research and Development Lab, said Wayfair is looking into adding e-commerce to its next iteration.

Festa initiated that, Patio Playground holds core focus on the opportunity to showcase some of its items in a new setting. He said that this demonstrates Wayfair’s thought leadership in virtual and artificial reality field, e-commerce industry and increased awareness.

Currently, they wished to use the Patio Playground to test the virtual reality experience, check out how customers are engaging and integrate that Facebook in future applications. By doing this, Wayfair has been able to track the number of downloads, the length of time playing, and how often certain features are being used, such as teleporting, loading products, saving and more.

Consumers would not adopt the virtual reality technology for few years as they are not aware of it but once they adopt they will be having a high advantage of this platform. It is a great platform for the consumers who are looking for the new things in their life.

How to get your eCommerce site ready for Black Friday

Do you think it is quite early to get your websites and applications ready for the holiday rush of the consumers? Today more and more customers are looking for the online deals and hence, your eCommerce website would be in the boom than ever. Recent statistics has shown that the biggest eCommerce sites like amazon.com, target.com have been struck down by the Black Friday outages thanks to unprecedented traffic spikes brought by sales and deals. By this, they are not only able to make purchases but also not no access to the websites.

Performance is the key
Some noteworthy things like website performance, page loading, perfect information on a page, and much more is very difficult to ensure that the consumers stay on your website and make purchases. According to the statistics, even the milliseconds does matter.

• In just an eye-blink consumers get away due to the little delay in page load
• Page delay leads to the fewer page views, a decrease in the customers, reduction in sales and customer satisfaction
• For instance, if your website earns USD 90,000 every day, you risk of losing more than USD 2 million annually if your site is slow
• Complex websites, multiple pages, dynamic content fields, site overloads and many more things lead directly to the bottom-line results

Additionally, this performance distracts all the necessary ideas that your website is actually up and running. Have you ever thought, what would happen if the site fails or buckles up in the middle of the process? You can lose valuable sales, need to spend a lot of time and resource trying to fix the problem and running again in high demand.

Holidays can put much pressure on the websites and their backends as they can on consumers and wallets. You can get ready if you put all things in a correct way.

Worried??  Consult an experienced eCommerce solutions development company to get the right solution!

How to successfully start eCommerce business

Despite great depressions or recessions, it remains certain that there always is room for businesses created by innovators willing to continue dreaming. While different markets and industries decline over time, others rise to take their place. Commerce would always be vital in some form or another so long as humankind exists. 

Business persons are driven to continuously create, innovate and sell. Furthermore, as technology continues to shape behavior online, people are leaning towards eCommerce as their way to purchase. Applying specific attitudes and ingredients would make an eCommerce startup business successful. There are strategies to build a successful eCommerce startup business, which include the following:

1. Plan for the eCommerce business. Planning could include a company description, which is a high-level overview of the business, products or services, consumers and competitive advantages. There should also be a market analysis, a research on the industry and target market. An operational plan covers the daily business operations, from location, hours to accounting and inventory. An operation and management plan tells a person about the major players of the business, who owns it, manages it and more.

2. Prepare the budget for the startup. eCommerce startup businesses need an accurate budget to help balance the finances and create business goals. One could design a weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly budget. A startup should develop one general budget that will capture projected expenditures and sales revenues. Without a solid budget, a new business could spend more than it will earn and become insolvent. Avoid overspending by keeping aware of the money allocation but leave enough room for unexpected costs or income shortfalls.

3. Focus on services and quality. An eCommerce business should focus on creating a structured system that will define how every department of the startup, such as marketing, finance, HR, tech and more would be run at optimum output. To make the systems sensible and workable, there should also be the right tools to handle daily operations. Select a business model that works for the startup and determine who to market to, why they would want the product or service and how much they will pay for it.

4. Prepare marketing and strategy. There are plenty of ways to market a startup. The key to marketing successfully, however, heavily relies on the ability tell stories that the target audience could relate to. The following are strategies that offer substantial and measurable returns.

5. Strategic and collaboration partnerships. Align the online startup with companies that have already significant reach. Find opportunities with brands that will complement the product offering for unique value for customers.

6. Create relationships with influencers. Build real relationships with people who are influential in the industry. They could give the startup a push through endorsements, resources of publication in a high profile magazine and introductions to major decision makers.

7. Growth hacks and sharing incentives. Make sharing a crucial part of what makes the buying experience rewarding, fun, meaningful and exciting for customers. It is a strategy that works for a lot of successful companies such as DropBox that provide free use of their premium course work to capture attention and buy-in from users.

8. Put content on steroids. Assess what the competition in making and how they are performing. Pay attention to content that performs well and then go a step further to make something better.

Conclusion:
Business entrepreneurs always are driven to continuously innovate, create and sell. In addition, as technology continues to shape online behavior, more and more people are leaning towards eCommerce as a way of buying. Applying certain attitudes and ingredients will make an eCommerce startup business become successful, particularly in today's time.

Salesforce acquires Demandware of 2.8 billion and enters to E-commerce market

As salesforce continuous to branch-out the new cloud computing customers it's willing to pay steep prices to what it can't buy.

Salesforce made its recolonization initially with cloud-based programming to help salesmen deal with their leads and close arrangements and today the organization stepped into the matter of offers itself. Today the organization reported that it would burn through $2.8 billion to get Demandware, a cloud-based supplier of e-trade administrations to organizations enormous and small. The Salesforce's announcement on Wednesday agreed to buy Demandware and also agreed to pay premium of 56% to buy the company that includes L'Oreal and Marks & Spencer as customers.

This deal will create a new commerce cloud for the Salesforce's cloud software. CEO Marc Benioff said in a statement “yet another billion dollar cloud” while announcing the planned deal. And from now, Salesforce existing customer will access the commerce management tools and Demandware's customers will get a chance to use Salesforce marketing, analytics and sales tools.

“The acquisition of Demandware positions us to capture this multi-billion dollar commerce market,” president and COO Keith Block said in a call with analysts and press earlier.

The agenda is to additionally generate the revenue between $100 million and $120 million through Demandware by the end of 2017.

Since June 2013, Salesforce became the largest and the biggest since it acquired the exact targets and made it the centerpiece of new marketing cloud. At a very early phase, it purchased mobile-friendly potential Rival, Relate IQ for $390 million.

Burlington, Massachusetts-based Demandware had presented at Salesforce's annual conference, Dream force as a partner in past years.