10 Do's And Don'ts For Enterprise Ecommerce Brands In 2022

So much has changed in the enterprise ecommerce industry. In the past years, we see how buyers’ behaviour has evolved, how sales channels have exploded, and how customer demands have been increasing. To prove the point, here are some statistics.

• 76% of buyers prioritize convenience and product experience over price

• 73% of millennials are decision-makers in B2B buying and use the latest gadgets like smartphones, tablets to finalize a purchase 

• 94% declare ‘convenience’, ‘ease of use’ ‘order customization' and ‘control over purchase’ as the top purchase drivers

• 45% want personalized content

• 60% use social media to research products 

Source: LinnWorks, First Up, Techjury

Let's shed more light on the topic. Modern buyers turn to several channels like websites, Google search, social media, etc to research the brand and make a purchase. This indicates that shopping channels have progressed from single channel to omnichannel.

Their demand for payment methods have also shifted from offline methods ~ cash, cheques ~ to online methods ~ credit cards, mobile wallets, etc; with 100% security to their transaction data. 

Want to capitalize on the changing customer behaviour? Stay tuned as we are revealing top 10 do’s and don’ts to be careful about in 2022.

10 Do's and Don'ts for Enterprise Ecommerce Brands in 2022

Below Do’s and Don’ts can elevate your enterprise ecommerce brand reach and reach new customers, while opening new revenue streams and building customer loyalty. 

1. Do: Provide Customer Psychology Based Pricing

How to retain customers and grow customer lifetime value? One is by adopting psychological pricing. First, you need first-hand knowledge about what motivates buyers to buy. Then you can plan a high converting pricing. 

Want some pricing secrets to fire-up your sales? Check below. 

• Tip 1: Price Anchoring:  The best way to sell a $70 watch is to put it right next to a $200 watch. Why? Because in this way you are influencing their cognitive abilities by offering them the first piece of information i.e. contrasting high-end products near standard options automatically builds product value for standard as they think that it is less expensive.

• Tip 2:  Artificial Time Constraints: Are you familiar with slogans like "1 day only sales!" or "50% off, only for today! Does it tickle urgency? Customers will believe that the sale is for a limited time and will likely complete purchases immediately, rather than next week. 

• Tip 3: Charm pricing: Prices ending with the No. 9 is the greatest technique of all time. But is it still impactful?  Yes, it is! Research revealed that product prices ending with 9 (or 99/999/9999) were able to outsell even lower prices for the same product.

Research also discovered that women’s clothing price tagged at $39 versus $35 outperformed the lower prices by 24% (approx).

How Can StoreHippo Help?

StoreHippo has inbuilt dynamic pricing settings, which allows ecommerce stores to adjust product pricing according to customer’s location, device, cart items, recent products, browsing behaviour, etc. You can even build discounts, coupon codes, loyalty points right from the dashboard, to reward loyal customers and make them purchase more.

Don't: Provide Too Many Pricing Options

Charging one price for your product is almost always inadvisable as it leaves no room for your customers to upgrade. Having said that, a single price point is easier for potential buyers to make quick decisions. You should first find out answers to these questions ~ “Who are your potential customers?”, “What do they want?”, and “what they’re willing to pay?”.

2. Do: Offer In-Depth Products Details

Studies show that 20% of unsuccessful purchases are due to a lack of product information (Nielsen Norman Group).

Tips to write money-squeezing Product pages

• Justify your product quality through customer testimonials in the form of video, text, or image

• Include enticing, high-quality imagery of your products

• Add a live countdown timer to arouse FOMO and encourage users

• Include social proof (reviews, trust badges, etc.) to instill trust and improve conversion rate

• Embed actionable “call-to-action” buttons on your product pages. Make them clear, short and creative. For example: “Place Now” or a bit more whimsical, like “Apply discount” or “Save Now”

How Can StoreHippo Help?

With StoreHippo, you get access to amazing features that help you create beautiful and conversion-friendly product pages. You get SEO tools, customizable themes and templates, faceted search functionality, drag and drop design tools, discount engine etc to create pages and add above specified elements. You can even integrate social media channels and other advertising tools like Google Ads and Facebook ads to promote your products effortlessly.

Don’t: Just Sell A Product, Sell A Whole New Experience 

You should not make everything about your product, instead, revolve it around customers' needs and pain points. Enterprise ecommerce brands that focus on products rather than customers, experience a hard time in maximizing their revenue and sales. That’s where emotional selling comes into picture. 

Emotional selling is a more personalized way aligning your products with customers' feelings. Humans are motivated by 3 fundamental emotions while buying: power, affiliation and achievement. If your sales pitch satiates any one of the emotions, you hit the jackpot.

Expert Tips on Emotional Selling

• Focus on the personal benefits: Provide reasons on how your product helps customers in making their life better or business profitable or health stronger; based on the product you are selling

• Highlight the specific ROI: Try showing the monetary return customers will get after using the product. For example: Save $100

• Capitalizing on emotional words: Use words like guarantee, improvement, satisfaction, secure, trusted, quick, reward, valuable, powerful, etc to win trust

• Use badges or certificates: If your enterprise ecommerce brand has received any awards/ recognition or additional product-related certifications, boast about them

• Prove others have already put their trust in you. Do you have any recognizable companies already using your product? 

• Help them imagine a brighter future. How can you paint the picture of a more desirable future? What would the ideal scenario be for your prospect?

3. Do: Build a Secure Site

In the past, large enterprises have lost billions of dollars to cybercrime. For example, US ecommerce brand Target lost sensitive card details of 40 million+ customers, which stained their reputation. Just like Target, your brand can also become prey to these breaches — malware, stolen information, password guessing and phishing. So it’s time to ensure 100% site security by implementing the below measure.

• SSL Encryption: Secure your customer data and site data by implementing an SSL certificate on your enterprise ecommerce website.

• PCI-DSS Compliance: PCI Security Standards Council is a global organization that maintains and promotes compliance rules for managing cardholder data.

• Two-Factor Authentication:  Two-step verification adds an extra layer of security. For example, when a customer uses Net Banking, they first have to fill in their username and password. As a final confirmation, they have to fill out an OTP sent to the registered mobile number.

• Tokenization: Tokenization is a process by which a 16-digit card number gets replaced by a digital identifier known as a ‘token’. It eliminates the need for storing credit card data with the vendor (which is at higher risk of being hacked).

How Can StoreHippo Help?

StoreHippo offers multiple types of authentication factors to enhance site data security. Such as Two-factor authentication and Multi-factor Authentication. This prevents any third person from accessing the sensitive data on your website. 

Furthermore, StoreHippo has 60+ integrated payment gateways that are PCI DSS compliant. Meaning, they encrypt all the transactions and block hackers' paths to leak payment details. You also get the unique threat intelligence of Microsoft Azure, which offers extraordinary protection to websites built on StoreHippo.

Don’t: Sacrifice Security Of Your Customer And Business Data

Ecommerce industry undergoes 32% of the total cyberattacks. A report by IBM revealed that the average cost per data breach amounted to $4.24 million. To add more, 29% of site traffic contains malicious requests that could infect the data.

Such cyberattacks have contributed significantly to financial losses, reduced market shares, and tarnished reputation. 60% of small ecommerce stores who have become victim to cybercrimes, don’t survive more than 6 months.

This eventually threatens the survival of many businesses. To protect your business and customers' data, never ignore payment security.

4. Do: Leverage Mobile Commerce

Want to create a fast loading, accessible, mobile optimized ecommerce site? If the answer is YES then you are on the right track. As today’s customers want easy navigation, easy search, aesthetically pleasing design and device-friendly. So it is important to create a mobile ready site. 

• Provide secured payments: Use lock icons to let shoppers know you use an encrypted payment system. Plus, go for PCI-DSS payment solutions only

• Simplify navigation: Making your mobile navigation easy can keep customers engaged with your brand. To improve navigation and simplify product discovery, try Including faceted search, menus, product sorting, breadcrumbs etc to your site

• Easy checkouts: Average cart abandonment rate is nearly 59.22%. To reduce this rate, try implementing a 2-step checkout process. Allow people to edit their order within the cart. So that they don’t have to go back to remove/add an item or change the quantity

• Offer mobile promotions: Mobile coupons can positively influence your sales. In fact, 77% of customers spend about $10-$50 more when they’re redeeming a mobile coupon 

• Send in-App notifications : Best way to engage with your customer and build powerful relationships

• Leverage Progressive Web Applications(PWA): Through PWA sites, users can browse PWA on their browser with an URL (like a regular website); but right after they land on PWA, they get the experience of using an “app” 

• Mobile friendly themes: All the StoreHippo themes are mobile responsive i.e. loads fast on smartphones and automatically adjust the layout according to user screen size 

How Can StoreHippo Help?

StoreHippo helps you deliver latest promotions and other significant offers to your customers' devices via push notification feature. Furthermore, to increase traffic and ROI from social media, you can integrate popular social media platforms onto your application to let customers discuss your products and services. 

You can set up live chat on your app and deploy it over existing instant messaging solutions such as Messenger or WhatsApp. StoreHippo also offers by-default PWA apps so that you don’t need to wrestle with complicated code or optimization tools. PWA apps also work in offline mode, when internet connectivity is low on the user's side.

Don’t: Avoid Developing A Mobile App 

Speed and convenience are the top reasons customers download your mobile app. After all, mobile apps offer an outstanding shopping experience. One such example is Amazon. It heads the shopping app category with 150.6 million+ users. There is a huge opportunity to drive customers by building apps. Let’s learn more.

Amazing benefits of creating mobile apps: 

• Bring high conversion rates

• Customer loyalty

• Step ahead of the competition

5. Do: Embrace An Omnichannel Strategy

Have you ever wondered how many channels or devices a D2C customer uses for online shopping? It is about 6-8. So let’s name them — desktop and mobile website, mobile app, social media pages, email campaign, digital ads, Youtube channel, brick-n-mortar store, digital voice assistants and even beyond. Now you must have realized the value of omnichannel shopping for you and your customer. So here are bonus tips to create an omnichannel strategy.

• Identify key Customer Channels: Want to boost customer engagement and enhance the user experience? Want to increase business likeability? Start by identifying and prioritizing key channels and devices that your customers prefer

• Integrate all the Channels: Channels Integration is the backbone of a strong omnichannel strategy. Failure to bind channels together will result in catastrophic loss of revenue, brand image and D2C customers

• Conduct Audience Segmentation: Customers get frustrated when they receive irrelevant content. Segmenting the audience and sending personalized marketing messaging is key to avoiding frustration. For this to work, first collect data like gender, locations, a past purchase, interests, browsing history, previous engagement level, etc

• Offer omnichannel customer service: Do you know which channels today’s customer prefers to communicate with your enterprise brand? There are many — Twitter, Facebook messenger, chatbot, live chat, emails, social media comments, forums, etc. The best is to present on relevant channels to best serve your customer and give an omnichannel experience

• Offer same prices: Leverage dynamic pricing or real-time pricing, to customize product prices based on various factors. An omnichannel buyer wants consistency across channels. Therefore, your job is to simplify their shopping by offering the same promotions and site content, regardless of the channel or device your buyers discover products

How Can StoreHippo Help?

With 300+ inbuilt ecommerce features and a headless architecture at its core, StoreHippo simplifies the process of going OmniChannel. With one-click integration, you can connect with the best-in-class tools and technologies available across sales, marketing, payment gateways, logistics, etc; using StoreHippo SaaS ecommerce solution. You can also build personalized buyer journeys easily using the agility and power of MACH architecture.

Don't: Set Your Territory Across All The Available Channels

Going omnichannel does not translate into being on all the channels. You need to choose your product mixes and sales channels based on data driven insights. Let's look at the parameters you need to scrutinize before maximizing on a channel: 

• Your target customer should be in abundance

• How much time do people spend?

• Are your competitors on that channel?

• How effective is the channel in converting buyers into customers?

Asking these questions would bring more decisiveness and will plummet the risk. Need some suggestions on which channels are best? Here you go! 

Regardless of business model and size, the best channel is the one you own i.e. website, mobile site and apps. Choose your channels with caution and experiment and add one new channel at a time to understand the way it is helping your business grow.

6. Do: Leverage Headless Ecommerce Architecture To Develop Faster

In traditional CMS, change in user experience requires rebuilding the user interface from scratch. Headless architecture gives the development team complete flexibility to design phenomenal front-end experiences via API framework — without restructuring the entire enterprise ecommerce site.

Why Do You Need Headless Ecommerce?

• Makes web optimizations easy and reduces time to market

• Offer omnichannel shopping experiences to unlock more revenue 

• Freedom to marketers, as they can control marketing content and rely less on developers

• Seamless Integration to advanced tools/softwares to upgrade site functionality

• Freedom to customize the frontend according to business needs

• Develop frontends in any programming languages and frameworks

How Can StoreHippo Help?

StoreHippo headless commerce solutions help you to offer personalized, innovative and memorable omnichannel buying experiences. You can quickly implement changes to your customer journey in accordance to given market changes, without compromising the entire business ecosystem. Plus, connecting tools like ERP, CRM, accounting tools, payment gateways, logistics solutions, etc to your site is seamless. 

It also sets markets and developers independent of each other. Meaning, marketers can edit marketing content without developer assistance. While developers can freely work on improving site user experience.

Don't: Rely on Traditional Ecommerce platforms

Why are traditional platforms not advised? The biggest drawback to traditional ecommerce platforms is lack of flexibility and personalization. Traditional solutions were built when enterprise brands require standard and static websites. 

But now everything has changed, from shopping channels to shopping devices to customer behavior. Therefore, making small changes would require extensive back-end coding in a traditional platform to meet new market trends.

Why Shift From Traditional To Headless?

When mobile-commerce first came into existence and then dominated the entire ecommerce, online brands had no choice but to adopt. Their traditional platform could not accomplish their goal of providing device-responsive sites and personalized experience across devices. 

That’s where adoption of headless commerce began. As back-end is separated from front-end, brands quickly scaled their business to tap new mobile commerce trends and other market demands.

7. Do Simplify Your Customers Purchase Journey (Online)

77% of B2B buyers say their latest purchase was very complex or difficult (Source: Gartner). This reveals a huge opportunity for enterprise ecommerce companies to improve user experience and eventually, win customers. 

Pro Tip: Monitor the customer behavior on your site via Google Analytics configuration. Identify what stops them from completing a purchase, why their time on site is low, and other signals. 

How Can StoreHippo Help?

StoreHippo lets you integrate data analytics tools like Google Analytics, app analytics tools, etc in a single click. It will help you analyze data from all touchpoints in one place, for a deeper understanding of the customer experience. StoreHippo also helps in personalizing checkouts for different devices, locations and customer segments.

Don't Miss Acknowledging Customer Needs And Desires

During the purchase journey, customers have many needs. These needs come in tangible and intangible forms like —  Price, design experience, good shopping experience, product performance, brand transparency, empathetic customer service, etc. As a D2C brand, your responsibility is to address customers at any stage of journey.  

How To Address Customer Needs?

• Send customer surveys, organize customer interviews, create social media polls, send customer feedback emails

• Strengthen customer relationships by offering rewards and gifts to loyal customers

• Keep them updated with their deliveries and order

8. Do: Personalize Your Emails 

Personalization at every stage of the buying process should be your priority. It is the most influential factor in dissolving 71% of customer’s indecisiveness during purchase, as revealed in a study by Dynamic Yield. 

Fact: Personalized email marketing messages tend to generate an average ROI of 122%. – Instapage

Here Are Few Tips To Personalize Emails:

• Send a welcome email to new customers and ask about their preferences. Attach a form link to know their preferences

• Segment email list by age, gender, website activity (information received through website cookies), location, preferred email send frequency, email type (newsletter, promotional content)

• Send behavioral emails. If a person browses some categories, you can trigger up for your event. OR send a re-engagement mail, if a customer hasn't seen your site for a while

• Send happy customers anniversary greetings or give a loyalty benefit to your top clients

How Can StoreHippo Help?

In StoreHippo, you can send unified notifications about the deals and discounts, or send reminders about an incomplete checkout or availability of out of stock items browsed by the customer. 

You also get different types of notifications — emails, SMS, push notifications and web notifications to boost customer reach and engagement. You can also integrate your site with Email Marketing tools like Mailchimp, Sendgrid, etc to automate email campaigns and save time. 

Don't: Send Irrelevant Emails And Push Notifications 

Sending irrelevant push notifications to your subscribers will always annoy them. As a result, your subscribers will opt out. And it will be a real pain to win them back. So what can you do? A good way to make sure that you’re never sending irrelevant emails/notifications is to personalize your messaging.

9. Do: Offer Multiple Payment Methods With 100% Security

D2C companies that offer flexible payment options see a 17% increase in sales and a 21% increase in average orders. Many enterprise ecommerce brands like Nykaa, Flipkart, etc have been offering multiple payment options to cater to different customer segments. 

Therefore, offering payment options such as: credit/debit card payments, E-wallet, mobile payment, bank transfers, electronic checks, netbanking, UPI, NEFT, is key to business success. To excite customers, you can even add discounts or rewards on using a particular payment option. You may also enable one-click payments to enhance checkout experience.

How Can StoreHippo Help? 

StoreHippo offers you 60+ Payment Gateways that offer mobile wallets and other advance payment methods. By integrating them on your site, you can easily and safely process transactions across various D2C channels. 

You will get both domestic and international payment solutions that are 100% PCI DSS compliant. With a single click, you can activate the payment methods directly from StoreHippo admin dashboard in zero time and at no additional fee. 

Don’t: Run Behind A Payment Solution Advertised As Cheap (But Offers Low Quality Service And Security)

“Cheap” and “Low” words used in relation to pricing attract immense attention. But it often leads to selecting an unreliable payment solution. So ask yourself — Is the solution going to improve business productivity? Are there any hidden costs? Does it offer globally recognized payment methods?. What are other advanced features it offers? This way you can finalize a payment gateway.

Qualities Of Good Payment Gateway

• Integration options: Choose a payment gateway that can be easily integrated to your CMS

• Support Multiple Currencies: If you have international clients, having various currencies boosts conversions

• Easy setup and Instant Activation: Many integrated gateways in StoreHippo offer zero setup fee and have already done half of the set-up processes so that you can save time

• Low transaction fee: More sales and lower transaction fee will boost your business

10. Do Utilize The Growing Popularity Of Social Media 

If you are not utilizing social media for building your enterprise ecommerce brand you are missing out on potential customers and huge opportunities to build trust and credibility. And surely the competitors will treat your absence as an advantage to acquire more customers. They might be reaching out to your less satisfied customers and influence them to shift from your brand to theirs.

Reason To Show On Social Media  

• Boosts Brand Awareness: 72% internet users use Facebook, 28% use Instagram, 25% use LinkedIn and 31% use Pinterest (Pew research). By reaching out to such users through ads and posting, you can boost brand awareness, site traffic and reputation 

• Better Customer relationship: A tweet on twitter or a comment on Facebook or a DM on linkedIn is what most customers want to converse with brands. Although informal, it is mainstream now

• Word of mouth marketing: Customers can easily mention your social media page whenever they share a product review. As a result, their connections/followers might see the post. They may click on the “brand mention” or “link” that will direct them to your page

How Can StoreHippo Help? 

StoreHippo allows you to integrate social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. So that you can push social media users to your website or app anytime. Our inbuilt themes come up with a feature to display the social media links. 

Capability to monitor social media traffic is also supported — how much visitors are converting into customers, how much time they spent on-site, which platforms is briign high value buyers, etc.

Don't: Ignore Social Media Advertisements 

As competition is increasing, the social media algorithm is becoming difficult to crack. Surely, early adopters had an advantage, however, new D2C brands need special techniques to stand out of the crowd. That’s where social media ads come.

Benefits Of Using Social Media Ads

• Faster brand awareness compared to organic marketing. 

• Refined targeting based on location, gender, professions, income, age, behavior, etc.

• Boost quality traffic on our site i.e. increases the website visitors and sessions per visitor or buyer.

• Reduce the marketing expenses due to accurate targeting capabilities.

Final words 

So here we come to the end of our list. Few takeaways to remember is that you should always keep your customer on priority. Here are key things to do in 2022 ~ 

• Adopt headless architecture to create omnichannel experience 

• Optimize your site to benefit from growth of mobile sales 

• Integrate multiple secure payment methods

• Offer email personalization  

• Double down on social media marketing

Need a platform through which you can seamlessly implement these things? StoreHippo is here to help. It is a full-featured enterprise ecommerce solution that offers 300+ futuristic features. Some of them include — integrated payment gateways and shipping solution, inbuilt marketing tools, email tools, mobile commerce, mobile app builder, free SSL certificate, headless CMS and many more.

Need advanced features to scale your enterprise ecommerce website? Get started with StoreHippo’s 14 days free trial to experience its rich features in real-time.