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Carrying around a laptop and using it whenever and where ever has not been that desirable for many people, they feel burdened at the idea of taking care of their luggage and concentrating on their laptop’s screen at the same time. Mobiles have solved this issue. A mobile version of your online wholesale directory or website will be in access of your target customer no matter what time of the day it is and what his location is.

Customer’s Convenience

Regular Smartphone users find it very hard to visit and browse the websites which do not have a mobile version and hence skip visiting them. If your website is one such websites, no matter how much value you offer to your client, he will not be comfortable in availing your services through his phone, which is his prime tool for online shopping.

Reliable payment mode

Unlike e-commerce, transactions made through mobile phone promise more protection. It is because the scammers have not yet found their way in to break the security barriers of the Smartphone and we hope that they never do. Reliable and easy means to make online payments for wholesale products has made M-commerce a great tool for young and old customers alike.

Saves time and power

Smartphones are very handy and the technology has made them even easier to use. This process of making Smartphone more desirable for the people is on and many new features have made these phones indispensible for the users. Using Smartphone is easier that using desktop or laptop and it also saves energy.

In India, infrastructure is the first huge hurdle. Power supply is inadequate to meet the demands of industries in achieving high capacity utilizations. Due to frequent power cuts, manufacturing units and service industries without their own captive power plants are able to achieve only 60% to 80% of their full capacity. These power problems affect not only production but also constant communication between the suppliers and the sellers.

The second significant hindrance is the communication with the government officials and politicians, most of whom are corrupt. Unless bribes are negotiated and paid, nothing moves easily. If foreigners want to trade with suppliers from India, they should be ready to understand the subtle communications conveyed by those in power. The recent failure of a communication satellite of India and the 2G mobile phones scam has made communication between India and overseas even tougher. 3G technology and broadband Internet are yet to establish themselves at adequate levels in India. Unless, these communication channels and power supply improve and political interference and unnecessary regulations are reduced, trading with Indian suppliers would remain a major issue.

On the other hand, the success story of China wholesale trade growth in the past few decades has a strong resemblance to the tremendous growth that Japan achieved between 1960s and 1990s. Hence, many economists express doubt whether China would be able to sustain this growth or not like Japan. Further, majority of Indians have English as a compulsory subject in schools and colleges, even if they study in their local languages. In contrast, vast majority of Chinese are yet to learn English, with Chinese being the major medium of instruction. Hence, communication with most Chinese suppliers and labourers becomes difficult for foreign buyers. This would take time to change.

The first and foremost reason of failure of ecommerce website is the unprofessional design or layout of website. Unprofessional design makes it difficult for users to easily through the website. The simple solution is to make the website user friendly. User-friendly interface attract users and retain them as they like the experience they had on your website. Amateur wholesalers and distributors thinks that having a complex design attracts users; however, the case is vice versa.

Shopping process is also one of the reasons of failure of ecommerce website. If the shopping process is too long then users would not like it and never again deal from your site. Keep the shopping process shorter and minimize it to one or two pages. Follow the thumb rule that shorter the shopping process, the better user experience. Bad or no marketing campaigns also result in failures because when people doesn’t know about your website then how is it possible that they will deal with your ecommerce wholesale website.

Without customer’s feedback, the wholesalers will be unable to amend the flaws in their website. Therefore, provision of feedback in every section is also very important. Customers also feel safe with websites, which offers feedback option. Only getting feedback does not end the game, the wholesaler would also need to act on valuable feedback and reply to customers positively. Lack of security is also one of the reasons of online business failure. The current online world is full of scammers, in order to get rid of them the owner would need to apply strict security measures that will keep the business and customers’ information safe.

In the past few years, the popularity of smart phones and abrupt increase in the sales of these phones, have provoked wholesalers to focus towards this segment as well. They have discovered a new marketing segment and that is mobile e-commerce or m-commerce. The craze of smart phones was inculcated by iPhone that have set a wave of smart phones globally. Several applications, compatible for e-commerce marketing, are directly put into the smart phones.

Experts believe that iPhone and iPads have completely changed the mobile phone’s craze and the way of mobile applications in addition to option available in smart phones to download any file any where any time. Mobile phones are easy to carry and easy to use and therefore we expect the m-commerce achieve broader prospects than the PC sides. Internet technology is getting acceptability at large scale and new trends in mobile internet world. M-commerce facilitates the handy transaction sitting in any corner of the world along with number of mobile applications created for the purpose of m-commerce. M-commerce does not provide new market space rather it is a handy option against E-commerce. Therefore it provides more exposure to the business world and at the same time it brings more traffic to your wholesale business due to smart phone applications.

Another great advantage of m-commerce is that users can conduct business anywhere anytime and can interact with customers too. M-commerce gives the liberty to the users to customize the services and business related activities according to needs and preferences. Wise entrepreneurs and manufacturers also apprehend their interest therefore they have already spent a lot on making their websites suitable for mobile phones. It shows you must also pay attention towards m-commerce as mobile applications have become battle field now and the best will survive only.

The magic of dot com world is no more just a magic, it is today’s biggest reality. Several business models of e-commerce world are being implemented by wholesale businesses to achieve success. The advantage out of all is to spread wholesale business to the global market at minimum possible cost to get the maximum benefit.

• A wholesaler can manage his supply chain in a better way with the help of e-commerce strategies. Being a wholesaler, you can ensure a better coordination through out the supply chain from the manufacturer to your customers. You can monitor all the tasks from the buying of material till the selling of products to the customers on internet. Different wholesalers dealing in different products can utilize the internet powers for the hassle free supply chain management.

• Another e-commerce strategy that can be very effective regarding wholesale business is customer services. It is to ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction by providing customer-friendly services and solving any issue regarding your products if they have. You can take your customers views about your wholesale business services (such as in-time delivery of products) as well.

• Major issue that most of the wholesalers face is the inventory management. E-commerce strategies help wholesalers in managing the inventory and warehouses. Wholesalers are usually unaware of the stocks and quantity of products in the warehouse and so they spend enough in purchasing more wholesale products that leads to higher expenditures and poor management. E-commerce tools and software help wholesalers to keep a check on the quantity of wholesale products and lower down the inventory costs.

There are several e-commerce websites that are facilitating the online business transactions by providing user-friendly applications and easy browsing features. Different kinds of e-commerce software, secure payment methods assist these websites to perform better in selling and purchasing of wholesale goods. If you are a starter just, then take advantage of these effective e-commerce strategies in your wholesale business.

A well designed website which have effective mixture of colors and remained like it over years, the company must have developed familiarity among its customers. Colors and design always let the customers to perceive about the product of a company. Loyal customers will feel a bond of consistency with the company; consider it like a home brand due to its consistency. Website’s style, design and selection of colors are so much important for the company because it determines the specific type of audience whom you are targeting. Different colors inspire the different set of audience. It does not make sense that you represent a baby product with black & red color background or any spa advertisement in orange background.

These are not the rules of thumb that must be applied but it is quite obvious that baby product should be displayed in soothing light colors like pink, white and sky blue. While mostly it is taken into account that blue, white and black background is safe for all kind of websites and the font size should be easily readable. Several times it is seen that websites have black background and writing color is white or vice versa which is the safe choice. All in all, simplicity makes the things go right.

There are several websites which that have flashy banners, logos, text styles, icons and whole landing page is overfilled with colors that give the page messy and non-professional look. Such websites look like advertising websites and people do not take it seriously because these websites do not convey their complete message. That is why mostly people close such websites within few seconds without reading complete message. And on the other side, search engines like simple websites more than messy and crowded pages. Make your site simple, clean and insert easy layout in it so that it will be user friendly along all descriptions.

It is also true that we can get the better ideas while looking at illustrative examples of other ecommerce websites. Let me summarize few points to improve the effectiveness of an ecommerce website.

Homepage

The homepage should be excellent and well organized. A customer should not feel messed up at the landing page but the homepage should be very effective. All kind of content should be well organize, visible and easily accessible to clients.

Categories Outlook

Ecommerce websites are established for online sale mostly that is why the purchase process should not be complex such as entering a delivery address, payment method and then confirming the order. The process can be simpler like there should be a slight but comprehensive description under each product displayed along the option to “Buy” and break the purchase process into small portions.

Featured Product Photos

There should be a category of “Featured products” of the day or week that are hot favorite sold products of the time. These products should be categorized and highlighted with the images, these images should not be plain but from multiple angles and vivid description.

Automatic Confirmatory e-mail

Once a customer has placed his order, an automatic confirmatory email should be sent out to him that should be brief, straightforward and representative of company. This thing is quite minor but will enhance the customer’s trust and he would love to come again to have business with you.

Colorful Appearance

Last but not the least, the website must look alive, colorful and pleasant but at the same time it should be elegant with user-friendly features.

Most of the companies are already using Facebook platform for driving traffic to their sites or attracting customers to their brands and let them recognize the launch of new products. Businesses faced one problem in particular that Facebook is unable to accomplish transaction for those e-commerce sites on its own platform. This issue was resolved by Facebook in form of Payvement Application. Payvment is an application of storefront that directly deals with the transaction issues faced by e-commerce storefronts on Facebook.

This new application has brought revolution to Facebook storefronts and retailers were waiting for such applications so that they can transact directly with the clients. Storefronts owner can use this application and accept money from customers via PayPal account or through credit cards sanctioned via PayPal. I know mostly people do not take Facebook seriously for business purpose but there are several users who prefer to shop online and mostly users are registered on Facebook. There are several others e-commerce applications but Payvment is only application that allows Facebook users to shop from several online retailers and add all items in shopping cart, without leaving Facebook.

Payvment has not all leisure offers for customers only, it allows retailers to sign up for this application and agree to offer discount to everyone who become “Fan” of the retailer on Facebook. You must be thinking that how retailers become agree to offer discount to their page fans? It happens because of the notifications system of Facebook, once the user becomes fan of page, notification is sent to his all friends by Facebook and people become more attracted towards the specific storefront and it is a clever tactic for the retailers that save their money to be spent on advertising.

Let’s construct a database of statements that people consider as the most important in generating customer satisfaction. I am going to start it with a general example, just imagine that you put a query on any business website regarding their product (functionality or design) that you are considering seriously to purchase. And you recheck the website twice, thrice or even more times in a week but there is not any timely response from them. What would be your response? I think you may not like to visit their site again or may defer the idea of purchasing the good from them. Isn’t it?

Therefore I think that a business should respond to a customer before time as soon as possible. Business Owners that consult me for improving their repute in business circle and I suggest to them deliver customer satisfaction through your website and improve the response as much as possible of your website. Now here comes the next question, how is it possible? When you improve the customer services it means you are depicting the best business practices and showing the internal processes of business are running smoothly. You can use number of ways to improve the customer satisfaction being online, such as:

Mostly customers are online now and they want to search the goods or services being online rather than going in the store. Therefore keep your website updated and keep your customers up-to-date about latest products and related queries. If they put any such query online, try to respond them within 10 minutes so that they will know that they are being listened. Next point is, make your “Contact Us” page available on the Main or Home Page of your website. Always encourage them to ask you more by writing “Contact us for further information”.

One advanced step that you can take is to provide your customers with the facility of online chat to provide in-time and better support in asking about anything related to your product and services. You can make “Feedback and Suggestion” page to take their opinion and being actively present over there. Another option is “F.A.Q. Page”, where you can provide comprehensive and detailed answer to such questions that can be asked by customers. If you can afford to hire experts, you can start forums or blogs page with your website’s Home page where you can understand the relevant issues and improve your performance and can give stated instructions to your customers.

1. Payment Options

Whenever you go shopping online, you would have often come across websites that don’t accept your payment option. That not only leads to frustration but you also tend to avoid that site without thinking that the site may have included the payment you option you opted last time. Merchants also loose customers because of unavailability of most used payment options. Even if your gateway service provider does not support a particular rare payment option, even then there are chances that some of the customers might be using those unpopular payment methods, which would eventually result into some revenue & profit leakages.

2. Circumventing frauds & providing advanced security features

Website attacks have always been on the rise and even a lot of bigger names have met with stiffer hacking attempts that resulted into loss of a lot of customers and made your site infamous for payment security. You should never ever compromise on the quality of security being provided by your web host. Good web hosts are PCI compliant and also give the guarantee of your payments being secured. Usually payment checkout pages with secure gateways also open with an https:// prefix, further securing your transaction details through the encryption provided. One key thing that really adds to the security of your transactions is that good web hosts always save your transactional details on their own secure servers rather then you in your browser cache or other temporary folder of your operating system which prevents any other software from getting your credit card or other important information without your consent.

3. Smooth sailing & pleasant memories

It is important to include only required information especially on the checkout pages. This will reduce extra burden on customer’s memory and will help him make decisions more easily. This will also ensure a shorter transaction time removing the unwanted hassle & wrestle the customers usually have to go through in online transaction processes. Feedback links should be on every page and customer service should be prompt. Customers online usually don’t have any kind of direct contact with the ecommerce site and it would be handy if you provide live chat facility as that will also have a significant impact on the customer conversion ratio.