Undoubtedly, you’ve heard many times that empty phrases about the fact that e-commerce will significantly grow during this COVID-2 crisis. Of course it’s a truth, but in single line without any words of explanation, it’s just a buzzword, which is trendy today.
To fully understand the current problem, we’ve analyzed many different case studies from China, Italy and US market. It gave us a lot of conclusions, which can positiviely impact on your e — commerce business.
Back to the past
Let’s make a little throwback to 2002 and 2003 when China was plunged into a crisis related to the SARS epidemic. I would venture to say that in those years, e-commerce was not yet as predictable as today to be able to assess in which direction it would be sailing in that case.
From the past crisis many companies can learn how to react on several things. I will bring the two examples — TaoBao and JD.com. Both companies successfully reacted on the situation and won a lot. Alibaba wanted to become the eBay competitor and after few years, they’ve achieved that. Only in 2015 Alibaba GMV Was Over 5.7-Times More Than eBay GMV (gross merchandise volume).
Will the current crisis bring the new tech giant like Alibaba or JD.com? We don’t know, but for sure there is a chance for that!
Coronavirus forces and pushes companies to e-commerce
According to the China market, which is a perfect example how to react on crysis. We will base on it, because we can say that they’ve won the first battle and they started to live normally.
Lockdowns have huge impact on many industries. In China the coronovirus wrecked the car sales. United States is probably next, only in March, there are predictions that sales will be over 20% lower than in the previous year. To see the scale of the problem, it’s worth to read the Scott Evans words in Motor Trend article — “To understand how the coronavirus could affect the U.S. auto industry, we must first understand what caused Honda sales in China to drop by 85 percent, Toyota to fall 70 percent, Volkswagen by 91 percent, and G.M. sales were down 92 percent,”. The reason is simple. People are locked at homes, so industries that rely on in-person sales have 100% down of the sale. But is it the only scenario?
Of course not. Dealers started to look for new opportunities for their businesses to reduce the loss:
- Adding new services to their online sites
- Offering at-home vehicle delivery
What about education? It’s a perfect time to invest in e-learning. Self-quarantine caused by school lockings result in online learning. Teachers started to prepare an interactive lessons, exams. This is a perfect example that every part of economy is connected. Lockdown results in demand on e-learning, demand on learning results in surge on iPad sale, surge on iPad sale results in higher production, which is currently impossible and results in sale pause. However it’s a good news for US company, that
Grocery? It should be called eGrocery now. According to the JD.com scores,sales of fresh food only in 10 days period jumped 215% to almost 15,000 tonnes. It’s nothing special, that customers decided to jump into online world. It reduces the contact with people, allows to meet the quarantine rules and allows to fulfill your needs. We can easily provide the example from our domestic Polish market.
Szopi.pl — it’s a platform to make an online shopping in groceries like Lidl, Biedronka, Carrefour. Only in March the interest in their services doubled, so they had to hire additional people to provide deliveries.
Confirmation of above can be found in the Managing Director of Szopi.pl words:
We see a very large increase in the number of orders. In each of the cities we serve: Warsaw, Krakow, Wrocław and Poznań, the number of orders increased several times compared to previous days. We are aware that the demand is huge, especially from the elderly or those fearing for their health, so we devote every moment to strengthening the team of drivers and increasing our capacity.
Furthermore, they’ve made an interesting move and for people older than 60 years old — deliveries are made for free. In my honest opinion, it’s phenomenal move in current situation.
However, spikes are visible not only in groceries. In fact before the huge expansion of the epidemic, we were able to notice growths in many health related industries. People started to buy the immunity protection products, wholesale the disinfectant products.
The outbreak has also triggered a spike in online sales of provisional supplies from those would-be shoppers concerned about keeping their families safe from a viral outbreak, including brands selling immune-boosting products. Online sales of disinfectant produced by the Reckitt Benckiser-owned Dettol rose 643% year-on-year between February 10 and February 13 on the Chinese e-commerce business Suning.com, for example.
Source: https://digiday.com/marketing/coronavirus-outbreak-grinds-e-commerce-operations-buckle-increased-pressure/
Fashion and apparel? Ideal example — Cosmo Lady. The largest underwear and lingerie company in China, decided to run a program aimed at increasing its sales through WeChat — Chinese messenger and social networking site created by Tencent Inc., enlisting employees to promote to their social circles. The company created a sales ranking among all employees (including both the chairman and CEO), helping motivate the rest of the staff to participate in the initiative. Impressive, isn’t it?
What is the last thing on which you should focus? Preparation for fast recovery.
As you can see on the infographic above, the Chinese market is noticing the straight, constant growth. We can expect that increases will only be faster. However we have lack of details to predict how this curve will look in both Americas or European market.
Now let’s look at the more practical part and check how you can improve your online store during the crisis and how to take benefits even in current situation with few simple steps.
How to grow with GrandNode during the crisis?
It’s a perfect time for you and your store to reach a new level. Each e-commerce should be prepared for every scenario. That’s why e-commerce is very flexible industry. Goverment won’t close your business, you don’t rely on in-persons sale, so it’s only your choice how you will act during the COVID-2 crisis.
Below you can find a detailed checklist of features that should be implemented in your store.
Easy and fast contact with support service
Remember that your customers have a lot of time to sail through internet. This fact will result in generating a large number of questions and doubts related with your offer. On that field you can lose the most.
Easy contact doesn’t mean that you will respond on emails in a minutes. Of course the response time is important, but it’s just the part of the solution. Easy contact means that you should bring as many ways to ask question as possible. Don’t limit your customers just to the contact us page.
Let’s look on the GrandNode example, meet the each point of below checklist and you can be sure that your store will significantly grow.
- Personalized contact us form
Each industry, each store has reduce the number of misunderstandings. During the first contact, if you have knowledge that you will need specific information, don’t hesitate to ask for them during the first touch.
In GrandNode you can achieve that with Contact Attributes. When our customer reach our support service via our ticketing system, we know that we will need information about GrandNode version used by customer. That’s why instead of lengthening the way to solve the problem, we shorten the number of contacts by asking for version while writing the contact message. Thanks to this, we can almost immediately start analyzing the problem, instead of sending an additional email about the version of the store uses.
The same scenario can be applied in your store. In GrandNode just navigate to Admin panel -> Catalog -> Attributes -> Contact attributes. Here is the list of attributes, you can create your own or edit existing.
The creation process is very simple. You can ask for additional file with file uploader attribute, you can set the dropdown or radio list attributes. It’s flexible solution for every store owner.
If your questions depends on themselves. Use the condition tab, you will be able to make one question to appear when different one will be setted.
In current situation customers will more likely use the phone to ask questions about product. To engage them to leave phone number and contact with you, you can create an interactive form with phone input. How to achieve that was desribed in our how-to tutorial.
2. Product pages modifications
Give customers possibility to ask questions directly from the product page. Sometimes it’s important to collect feedback directly on product, to avoid the situation that customer will leave the page without purchase.
First apporach to collecting feedback is presented on the screenshot above. Ask Question Enabled setting in Admin panel -> Configuration -> Settings -> Catalog Settings, allows you to show the contact icon on product page. Customer press the button and is redirected to the independent contact page related with product. It can be customized by designer and developer — just edit the AskQuestion.cshtml file in Grand.Web -> Views -> Product folder.
Second approach is displaying contact form directly on the product page. To enable it, just go to the same place as before and set the Ask Question On Product on true. On default product page will appear a new tab called “Contact us”.
3. Improve communication after purchase
In the crisis situation you have to stay in contact with your customers. It’s more important than ever to inform your customers about their order statuses, shipment statutes, problems related with deliveries and so one.
To avoid the email contact and to keep all necessary information directly on the order, you can use the feature called — Order notes. It’s two-way communication between you and your customer. Your customer add notes and comments directly on the order page and store owners can add comments directly on the order details page in admin panel.
It’s just a simple example of usage, usually not used, the most common usage of this feature can be adding additional information for store owner.
For example you can ask store owner to give the courier information about pickup without touch. Leaving the package under the door to avoid contact with the courier.
Allow customers to cancel their orders. It should be a point for you. To don’t waste time on managing the order cancellation just give your customers possibility to cancel them directly on the product page. Of course it’s applicable only to unpaid orders.
It’s also simple setting, just navigate to Admin panel -> Configuration -> Settings -> Order settings and set the User can cancel orders to true.
4. Collect feedback
Feedback can be collected in two ways. One is more interactive and the second way is simple.
Starting from the second way, the simplest one. Create a simple poll, which will be visible on public store. To create polls just navigate to Admin panel -> Content management -> Polls. To create a new one, just press the add new button. Provide your question and set default answers. It’s just simple radio button choices, so think carefully about options.
Above presented configuration will result in following poll:
The first way to collect feedback is to configure the customer action with reaction — Interactive form.
It gives you possibility to create a customized popup with attributes. You can create a bunch of text inputs or few radio lists to collect specific information. It’s totally up to you how you will make it.
Finally, you need to decide when customer should see it. You can create many different actions:
- Add to cart
- Add order
- Paid order
- Viewed page
- URL Referrer
- Customer Registration
Customer actions can be created in Admin panel -> Promotions -> Customer actions -> Customer actions.
Customer action adding process was described in our documentation. You can read it here.
5. React immediately with Firebase Push Notifications
Configure the push notifications to inform customers about all important events, things related with your store.
You have a knowledge that deliveries may be postponed or delayed? Drop a line to your users. They will appreciate that fact.
Maybe you want to run a promo or engage them to use specific way of delivery? Drop a line too.
If you don’t how to configure push notifications, navigate to our docs. In this article, you will get all necessary knowledge about Firebase Push Notifications implemented in GrandNode.
6. Reduce physical contact with shipping methods
Restricting contact is now one of the most important things in every country. Opt out of personal pickups, opt out of courier shipments, or at least limit their usage.
In current situation, golden times have lockers — InPost Lockers (Paczkomaty) or lockers provided by Australia Post for example.
It’s a perfect way to, without physical contact, leave a package in locker, send it and then it can be taken by customer just with mobile app, without touching the locker. Impressive, isn’t it?
GrandNode Marketplace offers at least two integrations which allows the lockers integration.
or
7. Prepare a discounts
Crisis is a hard time for every industry. Many people lost their jobs, many of them will lose jobs in incoming weeks, many people don’t get the salary on time.
It’s important to understand your audience needs. If you notice a sign that your audience lose money, you can probably predict that they will unlikely make purchases in your store. That’s why it’s important to provide a discount system, profitable for you and for them.
GrandNode offers advanced discount management system.
You can select various discount types — assigned to order total, product, category. Then you can set bunch of requirements, which set the minimum subtotal in cart to reach until discount will be applied.
Each customer can get independent coupon code for that discount. Finally, discount can be ended within few days after release. Just set the end date for it.
8. Impersonate sessions and place order for your users
Due to the selfquarantine, many internet providers have problems with the quality of the connection. That’s why you should go out against customers and help them with order placing.
In GrandNode you can use the feature called — Place order. Just login to your customers account, add necessary products to the cart, place order and just send them payment details.
9. Online courses
According to the first part of an article and the problems related with the education, it’s a perfect time to develop your own e-learning portal. Everyone is sitting at home, so it’s ideal time to bring your offline classroom trainings to online.
How to achieve that? I’ve performed a detailed how to article, which is available also on Medium.
And the last question is directed to you. How you fight with the crisis and what are your methods? Does your e-commerce platform help you with the business during the crisis? Leave your ideas in the comments!
Sources:
1. Alibaba vs eBay comparing the platforms size and growth
https://revenuesandprofits.com/alibaba-vs-ebay-comparing-the-platforms-size-and-growth/
2. The coronovirus could drivge car dealers to e-commerce https://www.practicalecommerce.com/the-coronavirus-could-drive-car-dealers-to-ecommerce
3. Coronavirus Wrecked China’s Car Sales, and America Is Probably Next https://www.motortrend.com/news/car-sales-coronavirus-covid-19-america-china/
4. Coronavirus and ecommerce https://www.roirevolution.com/blog/2020/03/coronavirus-and-ecommerce/
5. Demand for Chinas iPad grows as stocks dwindle as kids turn to e-learning due to coronavirus outbreak https://www.techtimes.com/articles/247945/20200311/demand-for-chinas-ipad-grows-as-stocks-dwindle-as-kids-turn-to-e-learning-due-to-coronavirus-outbreak.htm
6. As coronavirus outbreak grinds on, e-commerce operations buckle under increased pressure
https://digiday.com/marketing/coronavirus-outbreak-grinds-e-commerce-operations-buckle-increased-pressure/
7. Carrefour i Szopi.pl łączą siły w darmowej dostawie produktów spożywczych osobom powyżej 60 roku życia https://www.galeriehandlowe.pl/publikacje/retail-news/artykul/carrefour-i-szopi-pl-lacza-sily-w-darmowej-dostawie-produktow-spozywczych-osobom-powyzej-60-roku-zycia
8. How chinese companies have responded to coronavirus https://hbr.org/2020/03/how-chinese-companies-have-responded-to-coronavirus?cid=HBR_Coronavirus_Business_Leaders_03122020
