Most brands took their first technological step when they transitioned to e-commerce. Since then, they have leveraged technology to a much greater extent. From chatbots improving customer experience to logistical leaps allowing for one-day deliveries - tech innovation is directly helping brands increase their topline and cap their bottomline.
Here’s how businesses are using tech to get ahead:
Superior Logistics:
Tech’s ability to weed out inefficiencies in inventory and supply chain management has brought down the rate of errors in the process. This has also helped speed up the delivery process and allowed brands to get their products to customers at lightning speed.
Tools such as AI-driven route optimisation and geofencing have also allowed hyperlocal players to do 15-min grocery deliveries, unlocking a whole new market for e-commerce.
Product Discovery:
Technology has also helped businesses create a seamless product discovery experience. Marketplaces like Amazon are investing in the development of programs that analyse their customers and make recommendations to them based on their personal preferences. This helps in creating a personalised online shopping experience and provides a major benefit to the marketplace - Amazon's predictive analytics-based product suggestion system generates 35% of their total business revenue.
The role of roll up e-commerce companies: Roll up e-commerce companies like UpScalio acquire e-commerce brands and grow them by infusing it with capital, and relevant expertise for every aspect of the business. Such platforms also incorporate the aforementioned technologies in their growth strategies for brands.
For example, UpScalio has created a custom pricing engine tool that keeps an eye on the competition's prices in relation to their own, especially during promotional seasons, allowing them to adjust their pricing in real time to maximise conversions. This is increasing the odds of higher profitability for any category of product in the e-commerce space.
Payment Gateways:
As Indians, we put money in places we trust. This was one of the biggest pain points for online sellers as customers would resist online transactions and instead choose COD options.
But businesses have adopted technological innovations like UPI, Gpay, Paytm, and Razorpay. These platforms have high trust scores, and are built on easy-to-navigate UI-UX that even the non-tech savvy can navigate.
Making a purchase or selling something via the internet has seen a massive increase in volume with over 365 million transactions of Rs 654,351 crore processed in September 2021 on NPCI's flagship payment platform alone.
Superior customer insights:
Data isn’t just for big businesses anymore. Brands of all sizes are investing in data collection and analysis tools, and hiring data scientists to leverage the large amounts of consumer behaviour information available to them.
Collecting data and constructing precise customer cohorts has helped the e-commerce ecosystem to grow at an exponential rate. This increases the consumer affinity as they are targeted more effectively, and marketing expenses can be reduced drastically.
Conclusion
If selling online was the first step, brands have made many technological leaps since. With the rise of tools like video commerce, VR experiences, social listening, and in-store customer tracking - brands have a variety of options available at their disposal to adopt and further expand their footprint.
It’s going to be a test of financial discipline and technological acumen to see how brands double down on leading technologies and create unmatched deltas for their business.
Lots of kickass stuff here.