How Retailers Can Speed Up Their Digital Transformation Projects

Wed, Nov 11, 2020 3:23 AM

With digitalization in retail, start small before embarking on high-cost investments.

Setting new records is online shopping. Ecommerce revenues worldwide produced $3.53 trillion in 2019. In 2020, online retail revenue is expected to hit $4.2 trillion, but the industry is likely to outperform the forecasts.

The COVID-19 pandemic and omnipresent use of online shopping is one of the reasons for this, which has underlined one crucial fact: only retailers with a digital presence can survive. At an unprecedented 275 percent pace, digital chains are experiencing online sales growth.

Today, in order to better adapt to changing consumer preferences, we are experiencing an increase in technology investment, including:

• Customer-centered online and mobile apps work smoothly.

• The mobile and digital payment systems adoption.

• Smart shops, technology-enabled components, and online-to-offline (O2O) integrations are growing.

• Breakthrough technology convergence, such as artificial intelligence ( AI), the Internet of Things ( IoT), and blockchain.

• Greater operational efficiency with cloud-driven technology that allows distributors to gather and analyze large amounts of sales information.

Experts expected a 3.6 percent increase in global spending on retail technology in 2019 to help e-commerce firms adapt better to evolving consumer preferences, the main factor behind the rise in technology investment.

As a consequence, global retail digitalization is contributing to hyper-competition in the market.

Why hypercompetitive renders the latest Battlefield Experience by customers

Today, launching a website and creating a mobile app is not enough to call the company digitally, retain clients, and keep them engaged. The eCommerce market is highly competitive and saturated, where the only real driving force for sales growth is customer experience (CX) and customer loyalty.

A superior customer experience (CX) and successful customer experience management (CEM) are some of the few remaining means of sustainable competitive differentiation. In fact,89 percent of brands are expected to compete primarily on the basis of customer experience.

No wonder: retailers increase their income by 17 percent when they provide their customers with a seamless, personalized, and immersive customer experience(CX), while those who are lagging behind achieve just 3 percent development.

The Psychology behind the actions of consumers

Today's shoppers demand the following from their shopping experience.

• Presence of Omnichannel: During the product analysis, transaction, and post-shopping era, modern clients use several devices and applications. Retailers must ensure that all digital platforms are integrated and deliver a consistent experience (such as shopping carts updated in real-time across devices) as more consumers now connect with online stores via mobile devices.

• Customization: A customized in-store approach is replaced by 24/7 responsive resources and customer assistance, tips, and content tailored to their individual needs.

• Effortless Experience: Customers want their e-shopping to be frictionless, intuitive, and swift, from catalog browsing to order checkout. Customers take a negative attitude to anything that delays their customer journey at any point, causes them to pause and wait, unnecessarily takes up their time, or hurts their feelings.

A superior CX means everything in today's digital shopping, as it is becoming the only way to outperform rivals. If the latter produces a better CX, a better-quality product can draw fewer clients than its rival.

Ways to drive retail digital transformation without investing a fortune

These are the guidelines that help retailers speed up their company's digital transformation with low-cost investments. This enables e-commerce applications to achieve rapid results before proceeding to expensive next-gen technologies.

Site Speed Enhancement

Increasing load speed is paramount: no more than 2.7 seconds is the optimal load time. Above that, every 100-millisecond delay reduces conversion by up to 7 percent.

Companies have many opportunities to enhance and distinguish their website with new technologies: launch an AI-based chatbot, provide machine learning algorithm-generated personalized recommendations, and so on. But speed remains the number one issue, as testing a digital retail platform is still the key consideration for consumers.

Optimized media assets

E-stores can contain thousands of images, causing severe potential website optimization problems.

Speed and website quality is affected by heavy media properties. However, for online shopping, they remain irreplaceable: product pictures are processed by our brain 60,000 times faster than descriptions. The foundation of an integrated CX, and the key to improving online sales, are quality visuals.

That's why retailers need to look for ways to strike a balance between an interface rich in images and outstanding results.

Putting a mobile-first approach at the heart

M-commerce or mobile commerce is predicted to account for 54% of e-commerce revenue by 2021. However, does not correlate with figures that state that mobile shopping is convenient for just 12 percent of customers. That makes turning mobile users into paying customers a real challenge for retailers.

Also Read : Benefits of an eCommerce to Your Business

Handle Spikes for Traffic

For an e-commerce company, an influx of visitors to a website is a fantastic thing, but only if a website is secured against downtime or sluggish operation during traffic spikes. During a traffic surge, if a web page fails or doesn't load easily, they will abandon it.

Tactics for enhancing the online experience of your customers

Optimized images

There are lightweight and easy-to-use applications today that solve this issue in no time. Convert media files without corrupting their content into much lighter versions.

Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network)

The technique enables you to archive the content on various servers across the globe so that it can be delivered from the one that is nearest to a visitor to the website. Decreasing the size of image files eventually leads to a decrease in the overall weight of the page.

Site speed control

In search engines, a high website pace guarantees both improved customer loyalty and higher rankings. A higher PageSpeed Score contributes to a larger number of visits to the website, which leads to more sales. Therefore, the number one move in attracting and retaining more clients is to compact your data and streamline your web output.

Responsive design

Consumers expect companies to have an immersive, dynamic environment characterized by rich imagery and interactions. Retailers must ensure optimum viewing on different screens, screen sizes, and diverse operating systems to satisfy their customers, leading to longer shopping sessions, more viewed pages per session, and higher conversion rates.

Fast Mobile Experience Loading

Retailers can offer a mobile version of their website to consumers that show on every mobile device easily and reliably. In order to do this, they can compress their content and optimize images, even under low bandwidth conditions, to ensure that high-quality visuals are delivered despite their geographical position to any end-user.

Consistent experience with customers

Synchronization of cross-channel carts and inventory alerts in real-time, order monitoring at all touchpoints, and centralized storefronts are just some of the problems that must be taken into consideration when a retailer plans to go mobile. A unified approach enables retailers to sync distribution channels, and when 60% of shopping experiences start and finish on different devices, this is extremely important now.

Summing Up

The digitalization of retail is a multidimensional process aimed at meeting consumer desires and demands, comprising both technical and cultural elements.

Using the different tools that are currently available enables retailers to speed up their company's digitalization and offer the CX their customers want today.

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