While February is all about Valentine’s Day, shoppers make it a rather serious affair to let their loved ones know of their affection by spending huge sums on gifts and experiences. Moreover, as per a survey by NRF, the total expected spending is forecasted to be $23.9B in 2022. 

Going by the recent trends, e-commerce businesses offering chocolates, flowers, fashion jewelry, and more, have the advantage to increase their business profits during this season. Let’s study these stats in deep.

LOVE wrapped in Statistics

Capturing the data from NRF, here’s the list of the items bought most during this time:

• Candy: 55.5% 
• Flowers: 37.5% 
• Jewelry: 22% 
• Apparels: 22%
• Gift Card: 21%

Valentine’s for All: eCommerce Operations at Peak

Not only for couples, but Valentine’s Day has also gained popularity as a way to express your feelings to a potential partner, or to your lovely pets, even to your single friends who might feel lonely this time. People look out for the best possible offers at this time to purchase their long wishlist products making it a rather huge opportunity to boost sales for online sellers and retailers with such a big pool of buyers. 

E-commerce marketplaces are the biggest arena for Valentine’s sales as most couples try and surprise their partners by giving them heartfelt gifts with easy delivery at their doorstep, instead of walking around in stores fetching something for them.

For businesses to make the most out of this celebratory time, all you need to do is market your product and streamline operations enabling faster selling across your customer base.

1. Increase your Sales across Multiple Marketplaces this V-day

Sellers need to come up with special offers on limited stocks that not only work for the target customers making big gestures or efforts for their loved ones but also serve a purpose for the ones interested in getting a good deal out of all this. 

Businesses can go for cross-selling as complimentary items are always appreciated by people. You can also give away huge discounts or coupons on your range of products and include customizable hampers to choose from. Moreover, you can also leverage multiple marketplaces to make the best out of this day. 

Hot tip: Going omnichannel can allow you to retain increased customers. Right from back-end operations, including inventory management and order fulfillment to front-end functions, such as marketing and branding, integrating Omnichannel in your business can enable you to grow your bottom line exponentially.

2. Manage your Fulfilment and Avoid Stock Outs

Valentine’s Day is one of the busiest times for e-commerce sellers with huge amounts of purchases made and orders to be delivered. Impacting their overall revenue exponentially, it becomes the top-most priority for the online sellers to manage and track their inventory efficiently.

With non-stop purchases during this time organizing and processing inventory can become the biggest challenge for e-commerce sellers and retailers. If you fail to manage the flow of your orders and prevent out-of-stock order situations then this can cause some serious damage to your business. A good warehouse management system that syncs your orders and regularizes your inventory, as well as returns in real-time, is what’ll work to achieve this.

3. Deliver on time for maximum customer satisfaction

Once all the inventory is processed and orders are packed, you need to make sure that delivery happens right on time. People plan their Valentine’s weeks in advance and it is extremely necessary for them to get their orders on schedule.

Delayed or unfulfilled delivery not only causes unsatisfactory customer experience but markets badly for your overall reputation as an online seller. Make sure you have the best shipping and logistics solutions in place to manage and track your order efficiently to avoid delays. 

Be Ours this Valentine

Being the next biggest thing for e-commerce sellers and retailers post the Black Friday Sales, Valentine’s Sales need your complete focus to pace up your revenue growth. 

To build on that focus you can never totally rely on your manual workforce, rather you onboard a supply chain management system that tracks and manages orders, inventory, and returns across multiple marketplaces, retail stores, and warehouse locations.

All of this can be done with the help of Unicommerce’s automated and highly scalable multichannel e-commerce solutions.

So be our Valentine this time and make the most out of our solutions to take your business up the trajectory of success.

Let’s start with Unicommerce. Request a Free Demo now !!!

The post Valentine’s Day: 3 Tips to Boost your E-commerce Business This Season appeared first on unicommerce.com.

Drones are the new carriers of customer packages; shoppers are welcoming self check-out kiosks, store to the fridge is a fantastic order fulfilment option to ease customer’s life – such shake-ups in the retail industry are the only constant thing, one can expect.

All these tactics and beyond are to meet the oscillating customer preferences in an omni-channel retail environment so that the retailer is wherever the customer is. It is necessary to inform, invite, engage and deliver to the customer based on their preferences. The dynamic technology inventions are a great tool to achieve that elusive perfect customer satisfaction.

The smart way is to be prepared and adoptive of changing market dynamics and cater to the customers by being omnipresent.

Here are some compelling omni-channel retail strategies that have tested the waters and survived –   

1. Seamless access to shortlisted products

The customers prefer to have a smooth experience of shopping whether they are browsing the products from a laptop, placing them in the cart from a tablet or ordering from mobile. Whatever device they choose to use, the shopping experience must run uninterruptedly from where they had left. An ideal e-commerce platform should enable the retailers to provide such expertise to its customers efficiently.

2. Flexible purchasing options

Not all the customers prefer the same means of purchase. In fact, the best practice is to club the online and offline purchase experience to provide the customers with the ease and flexibility to look-up, buy and pick the product from anywhere they want.

The customer may want to place an order online and collect it from the store, or buy in store and have it home delivered, or some may want to stick to the in-store browsing and buying experience. The retailers must be able to cater to all of these customer preferences overlapping the channels, to give them a consistent brand experience.

3. Create personalised shopping experience in-store and cater online

Investing in a physical store and carrying all that inventory may become a hassle. Instead, the retailers can use their brick-and-mortar stores to showcase their products and offer a personalised shopping experience to the customers through touching and trying the products. They can place the order online and get the product delivered to their doorstep when they want. This strategy scores hugely on providing a personal experience of products to the customers while dismissing the burden of inventory carry costs.

4. Quick and easily redeemable reward programme

Purchase points, coupons, additional discounts serve well to build a brand loyal customer base who make a repeat purchase from the retailer. Reward programme has enormous potential to attract new customers and nurture the loyal customers, by keeping it simple, easily accessible and quickly redeemable on all the channels.

5. Digitally equip the physical store and its staff

Research studies say that majority of the customers do their homework about the product they want to buy before entering the store. They come to the store to explore the product further and have a personal experience. The omni-channel retailers can set up self-help kiosks providing more details of the company and FAQs/review sites, or set up assisted screens to view product features. Alternatively, the companies can equip their in-store sales staff with electronic devices to help customers on the spot, or enable the store with Wi-Fi. These are some of the examples how a retailer can create a digitalised environment in the store to allow the customers make purchase decision confidently and enhance their shopping experience.

Read how Businesses are growing with Unicommerce –

• How a Fashion & Accessories Brand Managed 145 Stores
• How Chumbak boost sales across 58+ Retail Stores with a 99.99%+ fulfillment rate
• Establishing effortless business operations & tremendous growth for Iconic Fashion India
• How Unicommerce’s Multichannel & Warehouse Management Solutions helped TCNS Clothing Co. Ltd achieve 9X Growth in Sales

The post Try These 5 Omni-channel Retail Strategies to Delight the Customers appeared first on unicommerce.com.