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Google Analytics Conversion Funnel: Track abandon Checkout in Shopify

We all love to measure our win, but for that, you need to make your mind work to plan something rather than just doing it in the same-old-way, then it would surely twice the quality of result you were expecting at the first place.

As a child, you all must have played a group/team game where you or the other player had to strategize a game plan to achieve victory against the opponent.

Similarly, it becomes essential for every online business to set up a conversion funnel or steps by which your leads must go through in order to be a valuable customer — funnel named as — “Goal Funnels” of Google Analytics.

If you are a Shopify user then an app named mCheckout whose core functionality is to allow your foreign customers to checkout in their desired/local currency. But also correspondingly it also allows you as a store owner to track the abandon checkout with the help of Google Analytics Conversion funnel.

We all want our visitors of the online site to convert into a long-term customer. The best way of doing this is by making note of the entire conversion/sales process from lead generation ads to post sales follow up.

And you can do that ‘note-making’ in Google Analytics through Goal Funnels and also track your abandon checkout with mCheckout.

Why caring for Cart and Checkout Abandonment is necessary?

Cart Abandonment nowadays is a slow poison for all the e-commerce stores out there. If you’re a running a store and ignoring your daily cart abandonment then you may have to face a hard time in near future.

I have already mentioned the statistics of cart abandonment in the previous articles that more than 70% of your customer abandon the cart without actually making a purchase.

Though, instead of wondering what would be the key reason(s) for Cart Abandonment, let’s determine the issue with Google Analytics.

Setting up Goal/Funnel in Google Analytics

For setting up the funnel you need to know what your customers or to be customers are doing after visiting your online website. To understand that we’ll setup a cart funnel in Google Analytics as our path to conversion.

Before setting up the funnel you need to complete the process of setting up the goal:

Log into Google Analytics, scroll down into your online store’s profile, and click “Admin” in the top navigation.
Then click the Goals
Enter a Goal Name, anything you like such as “checkout_status”.
Enter a Goal URL, such as “/thankyou”.
Leave the Match Type as “Exact Match”, unless you need to account for multiple variations of your goal or funnel URLs. You’ll see other options such as Regular Expression and Begin-with.

However, for mCheckout you can use ‘exact match’ or ‘regular expression’ because the URL changes depending on which page your customer navigates to.

It is often useful to enter a Goal Value even for an unmonitored lead generation since it allows Google Analytics to calculate metrics such as Page value and Goal value per visit.

Setting up Goal and Funnel specifically in mCheckout

One of the most beneficial reasons for tracking a goal funnel using Google Analytics is its ability to rapidly identify the pages where your to-be buyers abandon the checkout i.e. exit page .

Step: 1 Goal Setup

You can select any option whichever is suitable as per your requirement. In this, we are choosing the custom.

Step: 2 Goal Description

You can write a name of the goal as per your preference. Select the type as destination in the goal description for mCheckout.

Step: 3 Goal Details

In the destination select the option of regular expression, and set the URL of mCheckout as “/checkout/order_status” which is the final thank-you page after the completion of order in mCheckout.

In value option you can set the minimum amount which you consider for your revenue or the lowest product value from your whole store.

In order to setup the funnel please enable the funnel option. Funnels will help you to track the behaviour of the customers on each step of checkout.

Step: 4 Funnel Option

After enabling the funnel option you’ll need to setup the funnels for different steps.

In first step you can set the funnel for the customer info page. In order to create this funnel set the name as per your preference and in field of screen/page set the URL as “/checkout/customer_information” for mCheckout.

If you want this step of customer information as the mandatory step (visitors must view that page) then enable the required button. Don’t enable required button if the customers are directly landing on shipping/payment page.

In the second step, you can set the funnel for the shipping information which can be created by setting the URL as “/checkout/shipping_method”.
In the third step, you can set the funnel for payment information which will be created by setting the URL as “/checkout/payment_method”.
In the final funnel, will be the order confirmation funnel (thank you page) which will determine the completion of your goal and can be set using the URL as /checkout/order_status.

NOTE: It is not required to set all the funnels as mentioned above, you can set it as per your requirements and needs.

Once you set up this funnel it will take maximum of 24hrs to get activated. In order to see the results go to Conversions à Goals à Funnel Visualization.

Results for Funnel Visualization Reports

1)Select the goal which you named for mcheckout from the Goal option select box.

2)To see your funnel visualization, go to
Conversion –> Funnel Visualization

Now let’s analyze the above funnel visualization report.

The URL’s on the left side of the funnel indicates from where your users/customers navigated to checkout While on the right shows the URL’s from where they left the page.

As you can see in the above figure that 14 customers went to the first page of mCheckout that is customer_information and filled their information. And 3 of them left the page from customer_information and didn’t proceed to shipping_information
Then rest of 11 users went further for filling up the details for shipping, among which 2 of them left the page and did not go further for the payment_method page.
Between the funnel of payment_method and thank_you page 5 of them left the page. Thus only 4 customers/users navigated till thank_you page.

All the remaining customers who came till thank_you page completed the checkout process using the mCheckout.

So, from the above analyzation, we can say that the users who navigated till the thank_you page successfully completed the checkout process. Thus you as a store-owner don’t need to focus on this particular area.

The high amount of drop off simply is happening between the payment_method and thank_you page (almost 40%). That is why you have to figure out why they are leaving that page and not moving ahead for the checkout.

The Closing

Thank you for spending your precious time reading this article. I hope can now yourself set the goal funnels through mCheckout app and identify where are you losing your potential buyers before they make payment for your Shopify’s website.

How is Artificial Intelligence Transforming the Retail ‎Industry

From “Okay Google” to “Hey Siri” to “Hey Cortana” —every single thing on this planet is changing its way of doing work with more optimized and effective way.

However, nothing can beat the power of offering personalized consumer experience to drive sales and their long-term retention.

Because of the digitization Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming now already the backbone of this digital world. With the help of artificial intelligence consumers, expectations form the retailer of all sizes has eventually increased.

According to Plunkett Research in 2017, ‘Retail’ which is one of the largest industries in the world was estimated to have sales of $5.73 trillion in the US.

If you’re someone who is into retail industry or have interest regarding the same then you must be aware of the fact that due to increased growth in technology, doing business nowadays has become much more challenging than ever.

94% of the retail executives are likely to invest in AI if they’re familiar with it

Thus it is has become obligatory for retailers to make use of AI in their business to stay ahead of the competition and their customer needs.

Now let’s see how exactly AI is transforming the retail industry.

Improvement in Inventory management

Many new features are being innovated in the field of AI with each day passing, which is now used to meet the demands and the requirement of the consumers.

Paper with words inventory management and charts.

Thousands and Hundreds of man-hours are being saved in each sector as AI is giving insight on how the industry can benefit by eliminating the cumbersome process of checking inventory manually.

AI is basically changing the way people buy or sell the product out of the inventory management. Data mining has now made it possible for the retailers to mine the data in more speedier and efficient way, which indirectly helps them to manage their products accordingly.

Personalized consumer experience

A personalized consumer experience has helped tons of brand stay to ahead of the competition. Here are some stats where AI is making its personalized presence. As per the data of worldretailcongress:

48% of the online shoppers believe the importance of providing on-demand personalized advertisings.
While 45% of them want the same option in the online store.

Let’s see two areas where AI is helping retailers with personalized experience

Chatbots have evolved over the years and it is found that it has served both buyers and sellers efficiently by keeping them engaged 24-hours with customer service and personalized

Machine Learning is helping companies by providing their customer with more personalized product by suggesting them the relevant product or exciting offer through pattern recognition or shopping habit of customers.

Wrapping it up

Global AI market is expected to reach an astounding value of $35,870 billion USD by 2025. A retailer cannot ignore that huge number as it itself articulates a serious business consideration for the retail sector.

AI is helping to transform the way businesses are reaching shoppers by integrating advanced digital technologies.

If used in an organized and appropriate manner Artificial Intelligence can be a fruitful and powerful tool for any retail business.

Magento or Shopify: Picking up the Best

You may have read or probably heard from many about the importance of good schooling. Because a school is the base tool which helps prepare us for life.

In the same manner, if you choose the right platform for running your own e-commerce business in the first place, then it would not only get you more sales but also ease your life.

In the few articles back I had discussed on the Shopify vs WooCommerce, in this post we’ll talk over the essential difference between Magento and Shopify and which ones would be the best suitable for your e-commerce business.

However, it is safe to say that the design aspects, the capacity of these platforms and their strengths simply go beyond the graphs.

All I wish from you is to not judge any of the platforms till you’ve read the very last word of this short post.

Popularity

Shopify claims that it has over 600,000 companies using their platform whereas Magento claims of having 260,000 companies.

As Magento is open-source it is more popular among the users who are willing to make frequent customizations on their websites. Because of its nature of open-source many theme developers offers a large pool of themes and templates to give your online store a look and feel which suit your products and taste.

While Shopify, on the other hand, has an impressive range of themes and comes with more than 54 different store template. And all these themes have their own unique variations, which means technically you’re getting more than 100 separate design. All the Shopify themes (even the free one) are being developed by their professional theme developer or web-designer.

When it comes to privacy and security Magento and all other open-source players loses the game as Shopify provides level 1 PCI DSS compliant which makes it more relevant option for anyone in this digital era.

Ratings: Shopify- 4/5 Magento-3/5

Ease of use

If you’re a person who is technically sound and has great knowledge in coding then Magento would the platform may suit your need as it is open source. Magento is self-hosted which means you have the full control over your store for the design and customization.

Though this may be a time-consuming task as you have to develop every single thing from scratch to make the online store as per your requirement.

Shopify is a hosted solution and you don’t require to be a geek in coding for getting your store up and running. It is a one-stop-shop, drag and drops website builder. This means you can effortlessly customize your store by moving elements through the page exactly the way you desire.

In Magento, if you get stuck somewhere then they have a pretty extensive user guide that escorts you through tricky methods. But unlike Shopify, they don’t have 24/7 phone support.

Ratings: Shopify- 5/5 Magento-3/5

SEO

It is found that more than 50% of online purchase begins with an online search. After you want to attract more and more potential customers to your online store right? Thus it becomes an important criterion for finding your online store and its product via Google and other search engine is essential.

You can also find apps and integrations in Shopify’s App Store and Magento Marketplace which can help you enhance your SEO efforts.

Shopify is user friendly as well as SEO friendly. You must be knowing that nowadays more than half of the website traffic worldwide is generated through mobile phones. Which implies you not only need to optimize your desktop site but also the mobile site for the SEO factor.

An app named ‘FireAMP’ in Shopify App Store which makes your mobile site 85% faster creating AMP pages automatically for all the product.

Magento also has great SEO apps whose count is over 250, but if you have got your budget high then you can think of using them, some apps are around the $300 mark.

Ratings: Shopify- 3/5 Magento-4/5

Time Investment

Before going further in this, I can tell you that Shopify requires much lesser time for building things up and running in comparison with Magento.

Shopify’s area of designing the platform is too simple and requires less custom coding. ‘Liquid’ programming language makes life easier for the developer to work with. You can create your own Shopify store within minutes. Installing new apps, adding new products, features are just a few clicks away.

Unless you are a coder you’re going to have hard times for restyling the design, modify your required changes. Magento is a robust and great platform, but it takes longer to set up and go live.

If you’re someone who doesn’t want to invest more on the developer for setting an e-commerce platform than Shopify would be recommended as it would save your major investment dollars that can be better spent on marketing and new ideas.

Ratings: Shopify- 4/5 Magento-4/5

Pricing

Shopify has transparent pricing scheme which is a subscription-based model. If you’re just a startup or having a small business then the most affordable plan that you suit you would be Basic Shopify Plan of $29 per month. However for an advanced option which has got more features and facilities go as high as $299 per month.

While in Magento as it is a self-hosted platform, the prior thing that you’ll need to decide on is your monthly hosting plan. It would be safe to say that Magento provides more robust platform than Shopify because of which can charge more for that premium experience.

You are responsible for your hosting and security, which may increase of cost, risk, and downtime in Magento. While in Shopify every single thing from hosting to bandwidth is taken care of by Shopify itself.

Ratings: Shopify- 4/5 Magento-3/5

Wrapping it up

Both the e-commerce giants have got their own pros and cons. However, if you don’t want to dip your toes in the term called “coding” or “technology” and just willing to produce quick results by selling then Shopify would be the best recommended for you.

On the other hand, if your tech-savvy and willing to invest some time to get the nuances of the technology and ready manage them all, then Magento can provide you with the great result for growing your online store.

Boost up your International E-commerce Sales using Facebook Ads

With over 2-Billion user of Facebook you really can’t ignore the crowd and its influence on social media. However, with these huge numbers gaining an online shoppers attention is just like shooting an arrow in flying bird’s eye.

Advancement in digital marketing has optimized the way you draw your targeted consumer to buy your product in more personalized manner.

The two Silicon Valley giant followed by Google’s AdWords, Facebook Ads is 2^nd most popular advertising network in the digital world.

As per data of Statista, in the first quarter of 2016 there were 3 Million advertisers using FB, whereas in first quarter of 2018 it got doubled to 6 Million active user using the platform to promote their product and services.

Facebook is a ground which has no bounds. Your family, friends, colleagues everyone are well connected with just a good internet connection.

Thus advertising your brand on this huge platform would not only get your business a prolific attention of the domestic buyers but also it would drive attention of International online buyers too.

Now lets see how to get the most out of Facebook Ads and know how you can boost up your international sales using Facebook Ads.

Tell your Brand’s Story

Not every single person on facebook is looking to make a purchase. Most of them are there to connect with others rather than to shop. Thus you need to advertise your product in such a way that your prospect feels to take an action that is in favor to you as well as for them.

According to recent study it is observed that campaigns that tells a brand’s story before actually asking people to buy something are significantly more effective than the one’s which are directly encouraging people to take an action.

Research by Facebook and Adaptly showed, creating a sequence of ads which conveys your fundamental brand message instead of selling, improves overall conversion rates. In one study, the difference in conversions between standard and sequence of ads was as good as 87% and subscription by 56%.

Make your advertising message in such a way that,

How your product can help them solve their daily life problems
Why it is better than others in the market
Your brand mission, vision, aim.

Blend the message depending on what people know about the brand. Research on what is the most trending thing is going on, or what are people most attracted towards, what are their needs, what makes them interested/happy/laugh following this all you can create an advertisement on facebook which would surely gain you a healthy amount traffic on your online store.

Storytelling is an art, not everyone can master it. When it comes to advertising your own brand, you’re the only best person available on earth who can do that.

Dynamic Product Ads

Setting up dynamic product ads may be the highest ROI strategy ecommerce sites can use. Facebook allows to set up dynamics ads for their partners including Shopify.

Dynamic Product Ads templates would ease your advertising life by automating the tasks like getting the images of the product, product name, pricing and other necessary details from your product catalog. So if you are selling hundreds or thousands of product then this could be a great solution for you.

Using dynamic ads you can advertise single or multiple products ads to customers who have visited your site at least once, added item in the cart, or your regular customer.

To get started with Dynamic Product Ads:

Upload your product catalog to Facebook Business Manager. Include all items you wish to promote with data to show for each product (name, image, price,).
Set up App Event or FB pixel to your site. Modify it to report on consumer’s shopping manner.
Creating a dynamic template. Facebook will automatically populate it with the appropriate products and associated information. Give your ads a title, specify keywords to get images, product names from the product catalog.
Set up Display Product Ads in the Power Editor. Specify if you want to advertise products from your entire collection (catalog) or just selected categories and …. you are all done to run your ads.

Multiple Product Ads

As the name says, Facebook’s Multiple Product Ads give you the ability to showcase different products in single ad, reducing the amount of clicks necessary to get from an ad to an order.

Let say your store is selling bags items. Then you can use different types of bags (hiking bag, school bags, office bags, college bags, laptop bags…etc) in the single unit of ad.

This give your customers more options to choose from.
They can also help you increase conversion rate.
More relevant products a customer sees in the ads chances of buying the product increases.
You can also use them to show different benefits of a single product.

According to Adobe’s research with Multiple Product Ads:

Click-Through-Rates (CTR) got a significant improvement of minimum 50% and as high as over 300 %.
Decrease in cost per click, with cost decreasing by as much as 35 % as a result of higher click engagement driven by the availability of more product options.
Efficiency of Cost per acquisition increased up to 261 %.

Give them a Reason to Click

As mentioned previously, with 6-Million active user advertising their product on Facebook, snatching your prospect’s attention can be a challenge.

When it comes to spending a penny to buy something online – always remember they like to procrastinate. Even though it is most exciting deal you have to offer them, they’d still wait in hope of coming across an even better deal.

To avoid this procrastination you can apply few suggestions such as:

Create Urgency by showing ads like: last few minutes left to grab the deal, limited/few stocks only, prices are going up in next hour.
Include Triggering words like ‘last chance’, ‘hurry’, ‘clearance’ , ‘offer expiring’, ‘You’, ‘New’, ‘Free’, ‘Cheap’… and many more.
Offer an Irresistible deal that you also as customer would love to grab that without even thinking twice.

Conclusion

Facebook ads has a great influence on your potential customer as well as your regular buyers. Your competitors are already making tons of bucks using the most used social media platform till date.

However if you’re feeling that your ads don’t deliver the ROI you expected, work on ‎increasing their relevancy, grab your audience’s interest and supply them with ‎a robust reason to click.‎

‎5 Mistakes Ecommerce International Sellers ‎make.‎

There is a famous saying, “Fools learn from their mistake, whereas wise learn from the mistakes of ‎others.‎”

According to federal government data, International sellers typically outperform those who sell domestically. Hackernoon researched that Global Ecommerce sales in 2016 was 1.859 Trillion USD.

Statista’s information says that in 2017, retail e-commerce sales worldwide amounted to 2.3 trillion US dollars and e-retail revenues are estimated to grow to 4.88 trillion USD till 2021.

If you’re reading this, it probably means you have taken the initiative to sell your product globally, but maybe you are not making the figures, profit, revenue, sales that you had made up in your mind at the first place.

Remember every mistake you make on an E-commerce platform will cost you trustworthy customers, as well as, a huge amount of money.

Let’s quickly go through the following Ecommerce mistakes that websites tend to make and also know how to avoid them:

1) Not Creating Buyer Persona

Imagine you’ve invited a new friend over for dinner. Which of the following processes would be more efficient? Making a sandwich and then asking your friend if he/she has got any food allergies as you place the attractively plated sandwich in front or vice versa?

Unless if you’re prepared to throw away the whole deliciously made sandwich when the friend tells you that they’re extremely allergic to bread, the answer should be pretty obvious.

Similarly, it is happening in the digital world. Many e-commerce websites are just selling their products online without even doing a tiny research of what their potential/targeted customers are.

If you start building an online brand without even knowing who your customers are, then you’re probably going to have a tough time and wastage of money, which could have been saved if you had created and referenced your buyer personas.

2) Running more than 1 online stores

Maybe you are already running multiple e-commerce stores for selling in different geographic. Maintaining more than a single store can be niggling, and time-consuming.

Merchants usually create multiple online stores to sell beyond their border and to reach a more international audience. But while doing this they overlook the cost they’re spending for maintaining the store, manpower utilized, because of which they won’t be able to focus on their niche customers and starts losing sales.

If you’re running your store on Shopify and still handling more than 1 store for International selling, then you are doing it wrong.

That’s fine if you want your customers/visitors to see the products/items pricing in their local currency, but creating a different store for the same is not a good practice.

An app named “Multi-Country Pricing” helps you to set different prices for different countries and that too without opening a new Shopify store.

Not only this if you want to show less or no shipping rates for your targeted areas, the app will allow you to set/include the shipping rates or extra charges in the base price of the product itself. So your customers would feel that your store is localized one thus the shipping charges are zero.

3) One/Blurred Product Image

Yes, that is one of the primary reason that your customers are not likely to buy a product just because they see only 1 visual image of the product.

Not only International but your Domestic online visitors are also always desperate to see the product’s multiple images from different angles and in different colors. And if you fail to offer them this flexibility then you’ll only see the graph of your sales/profit going towards the X-axis.

Your online store has all the products that your potential buyers are ready to buy but they can’t see the product properly and the reason behind this may be many :

Too small image
Blurry Image
No zooming functionality
Bad color background
Clicked Angles are not proper
Low light image
Flashy Image

Thus you need to have a professional photo shoot of the products before you decide to display the product on the online store.

4) Choosing the wrong E-commerce Platform

Most critical part comes while choosing the platform, where you want more sales by delighting your online shoppers and eventually establishing your own brand. However, many of them finds it difficult to delight as they chose their platform off beam.

As an online store runner, you need to do some market research regarding which platform suits their needs and sales. It happens that the platform you chose/use may not be the best place to sell the product in some other International regions.

E-commerce giants like Alibaba, Myntra, Tencent and Snapdeal lead the Asian e-commerce but a lot of Western retail capitalists aren’t familiar with these platforms.

Different geographic locations have different market needs and expectations. Factor by which your customers of one region is pleased may not appeal customers of another locality.

Using an online platform like Shopify which constantly keeps updating their services to react and evolve with international consumer’s behavior, trends, and technology innovation is something you must hunt.

5) Checkout only in “Single Currency”

Finally, your international (potential) customer has added all the desired product in the shopping cart and now they are ready for the checkout.

After filling all the necessary details they find that your online store doesn’t supports/shows their native currency in which they were going to make the payment. Thus unwillingly they just abandon the shopping cart.

According to Shopify’s data :

92% of the online buyers don’t purchase from the site that does not offers to make payment in their native currency.
33% are likely to abandon the purchase if the pricing is only in US dollar.

Offering your buyers to checkout in multiple currency can largely increase your international sales. Eventually you will also gain an invaluable amount of trust form your online buyers by allowing them to pay in their native currency.

If you’re Shopify user then an app named “Multi Currency Checkout” will automatically detect the location from where your store is being accessed and then accordingly show prices to your buyers for the checkout.

Wrapping it up

There is no harm making mistakes, the only harm is when you repeat the same mistakes again. Learn from it, evolve from it, don’t be afraid to take risks.

Make yourself and your online store organized, equipped and complete so that errors are minimized to zero and the productivity of your store is maximized to two zeroes followed by “one”.

Top 3 Retailers who are Mastering Cross-border Commerce

The advent of cross-border commerce has turned a game changer for the small and the medium-sized businesses. The online marketplaces have become a great investment for the online retailers. They have turned out big players and developed strategic partnerships amongst other foreign countries. This has helped them engage in both offline and online relations with various brands and customers.

While in the process, the customers also have evolved and involved a lot. They now focus on the brand shopping rather than the channel shopping. Moreover, they are more inclined towards the web rooms than the showrooms. This has completely blurred the line between the online and the offline shopping. To be specific, this has blurred the lines amongst different geographic locations.

The changing diaspora

With the on-growing demand for the global products and brands, there has been a constant rise in their presence in both online and offline catalogs.
E-commerce is gradually shaping up the world into a one-unified market. The strategy behind is to make the products and brands available locally and globally in the markets.
Cross-border commerce has been growing to make its presence crossing every geographical border.
By 2021, the Global B2C E-commerce might reach over $424 billion. This market share targets the E-commerce bloomers like Asia, North America, and Europe.

Here are 3 top brands and retailers who have scored high in the “International Retail Index” and have managed to master the cross-border commerce game with engaging customer experience over the years.

ASOS

ASOS, the great fashion hub and global retailer, is ranked number 3 in the International Retail Index. It has surpassed the likes of the leading brands like Aldi, Apple, and John Lewis. ASOS offers great fashion at even great prices. This brand has expanded globally over the countries like France, the US, Germany, and Spain over the last few years. David Green, the MD at ASOS, discussed how the brand leveraged the technology for an engaging customer experience.

For a frictionless experience to its customers, they integrated type-ahead address verification that enables the customers to quickly fill in their address. The team at ASOS easily captures the data and insights for a cleaner and more accurate checkout for its customers. The global retailer also has laid more emphasis over the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). This ensures the data capture happens in a compliant manner. Moreover, it sets the right balance between the customer experience and the compliance.

Sephora

The other Global Retailer that ranked 8th in the International Retail Index is Sephora. Ian McGarrigle’s, the chairman of the World Retail Congress selected this French brand for the World Retailer of the Year. He also stated that this French brand has leveraged every international opportunity for over 4 decades. It potentially monitors the customers’ behavior and the brand offerings. Today it globally operates in 30+ countries which include the US, China, and Italy.

Setting a benchmark with its global presence, this leading Global Retailer has seized the opportunity what Digitalization offers. It also analyzes the customer demands and the insights of their businesses. With such a strong customer base and digital platform engagement, this has been driving the youth fashion and continues to grow globally. Along with the digital approach, it has adopted the local intelligence. This helps the brand to understand the demands of its shoppers. It also betters the customized offerings to its customers for both local and online stores.

The most powerful feature is the social media engagement of the brand for its valuable shoppers. The Sephora Assistant feature available with the Facebook Messenger app allows the shoppers to easily book their items in the nearby stores.

Walmart

Robert Gregory, the Global Research Director for the Planet Retail RNG selected the Global brand Walmart. The brand ranks 9th in the International Retail Index. This brand has been a consistent player in the E-commerce world and the Retailer’s Market. Walmart has a strong physical presence in markets at over 30 places. Over the past few years, to make a digital presence over the global platforms, it has been continuously reinventing itself.

Walmart has already engaged digitally in the cross-border markets in countries like India and China. Recently, it made an investment in the Indian E-commerce giant Flipkart to set its roots in India. Flipkart has a strong customer base. The startup-turned-giant has been a leading E-commerce company in the retail market with over 100+ brands under its umbrella. The partnership between Walmart and Flipkart is likely to be a great business for both the parties and a great venture in the E-commerce and cross-border markets.

‎9 Proven ways to increase your International sales on ‎Shopify‎

I hope you might be selling on Shopify beyond your own borders? If not, then it’s high time to expand your online business not only domestically but also internationally.

And if yes, then you already know that if you don’t expand to fill a gap in the marketplace your opponents surely will.

We’ll look at specific techniques that you can use for increasing your global sales, while also exploring the solutions for executing each of the techniques.

After completing the detailed reading of this post, you will be able to take your International e-commerce business turn it into a powerhouse that generates sales day and night.

1) Think Local

Your store might be doing amazing business domestically, but at the same time, it is failing to achieve the target you had previously decided.

92%of online customer prefer to shop and make purchases on sites that price in their local currency.
33% of them likely to abandon a purchase if pricing is in US dollars only.

So, you need to localize your stores and products currency in your customer’s local currency.

Reducing the mathematic calculation for your buyers of translating the currencies in their local ones can genuinely increase your International sales.

Recommended App: “Auto Currency Switcher”

2) Set Multiple Prices for Different Countries

Selling in the international market is challenging for most sellers as a result of various factors involved like:

High shipping charge and taxes.
Setting up different stores and different prices in different countries.

All of these makes running an online store difficult and also lessens the chance of earning maximum profit.

Setting different pricing for different countries can largely increase your sales, revenue, and profit. However, one requires to create a separate online store for different countries in Shopify if you want to achieve the same.

There is an app, by which you can achieve the same within your existing Shopify store.

With that plugin, you can include customs duties, taxes, and shipping charges in the products price itself. So by including all the extra prices in your base price you can offer/show them a “free shipping” option to your customers.

By offering/showing your customers the facility of free shipping, they might keep coming back to your store and this indirectly increases your overall revenue.

Recommended App: “Multi-Country Pricing”

3) The mystery of Abandon Checkout

The pain of shopping cart abandonment affects both small and large business alike. An average eCommerce store loses over 75% of its sales to cart abandonment. Some e-commerce industries experience average cart abandonment as high as 83.6%.

It is found that 92% of online customer prefer to shop and make purchases on sites that show prices in customer’s local currency.

But due to Shopify’s limitation, your customer’s are not able to make the payment/purchase in their desired currency.

When they see a sudden change in currency at the final stage of checkout they just feel like your store is not localized, and thus they will abandon the purchase and leave.

There is an unpublished app especially for the Shopify users, which allows buyers to make payment in their desired/local currency. It supports 120+ currency option for checkout.

Recommended App: “mCheckout”

4) Engage online store visitors with live chat

Having a real-time support for answering the questions of online buyers while they are in the middle of an online purchase is one of the most important features a website can offer.

A research by MarTech concluded that 51% of the online shoppers are more likely to buy from a web-site that provides a live chat option.

48% of customers are more likely to return to the website.
41% of online shoppers trust the brand when they see a live chat.
21% of online customers claim that live chat helps them to shop while working.

From the above data, it is clear that live chat is not something that can be ignored. Many confused buyers don’t make any purchase from the store, because their confusion or query is not solved in real-time.

There is a software by which you can integrate your Shopify store with live chat. It offers you as a store owner the option of real-time chat with your domestic as well as international customers.

Live chat provides faster query resolving times and quicker responses – providing a better customer experience.

Recommended App: ” Olark Live Chat”

5) Upsell your Product

Back in 2006, Amazon reported that 35% of its revenues were as a direct result ‎of its cross sales and upselling efforts.‎

Upselling is nothing but a sales techniques in which you offer your buyers the chance to upgrade their purchase by maximizing the value of their purchase –by purchasing a related product with it.

The indication is to make your customer purchase more (spend more) they originally thought they would spend.

Amazon’s Upselling

What can you upsell?

Most sold product – In demand or best product.
Most reviewed products – For convincing your customers better.
Most relevant products – Depends on customers to customers

There is an app which helps you upsell your customers when they click the checkout button by showing them a creative and eye-catching pop-up window and also offers the last possibility to add products in the cart based on the contents of their shopping cart.

Recommended App: “Upsell for Products”

6) Optimize your store for Mobile view

According to Statista in 2018, 52.2% of percent of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones increased from 50.3% in the previous year.

You see more than half of the internet users are accessing web-site from their mobile device.

Thus it becomes a vital factor to optimize your mobile site. Now let’s see some stats regarding why fast loading mobile page is important to increase your international sales.

Data by Hubspot says:

A 1-seconddelay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
A 1 second delay in page load time means 11% loss of page views.
47% of user expect a web page to load in 2 secondsor less.

As you now know that your online store’s mobile visitors are always in a hurry. Thus you need your mobile site’s loading speed to be really quick, otherwise, there are many other alternatives available for them which they can try anytime.

You must know that if your online store is optimized for mobile then your ranking on the Google will automatically get enhanced.

There is an app which generates AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) pages for the Shopify stores and makes your mobile site 85% faster creating AMP pages automatically for all the product.

Recommended App: “ FireAMP “

7) Leverage user-generated content

Make the most out of your User-Generated contents. It is the fact that when any of your potential buyers read the product review or any content provided by the user of the product, they feel that the content is impartial because one of them has created it and they trust it.

Your potential international buyers will gain trust on your brand easily as they’d see their native one’s reviewing, commenting and more.

Not only you’ll build trust for your brand and product, but eventually, your overall sales will also drastically increase.

What can you do is start promoting your customer’s reviews, comments on various social media. Don’t worry you won’t need to do that manually. There is an app in the Shopify app store which does this task for you.

Recommended App: “Yotpo”

8) Learn Every Languages

Yes, that would eventually be very effective. Not all your competitors follow this practice of learning all the languages and implementing them in their online store.

Just imagine your mother tongue is “English” and you know only that language. And you visited an online store whose displaying language is “German”. Then obviously you’ll be leaving that site even if you are interested in that store’s product, just because you don’t understand the store’s language.

This same thing happens with your potential customers too. According to data 55% of the internet content used worldwide is English.

Just think what about the other 45%? And if you could optimize your store for the other 45% too, then I don’t need to tell how much sales you’ll generate.

In order to target the other 45%, there is an app which will translate your store in the visitor’s desired language. Which would indirectly create a positive imprint on their mind that your store is localized one and they’d not abandon the online store.

Recommended App: “Langify”

9) Do Email-Campaigns

Do you know you can convert your new visitors into your daily customer? Yes, by doing the email campaigns (effectively) it is possible to convert the visitors into your buyers.

Email Marketing is no lesser than a word of mouth marketing. All you need to do is, do it effectively and in an organized manner.

A data says the email marketing has a 3,800% ROI, meaning you can earn $38 in revenue for every $1 you spend.

But, these statistics won’t be of any help to you or anyone if it’s not implemented properly.

There are many app which will automate your email campaigns, create beautiful templates and will also grow your email list.

Recommended App: “Email & Marketing Automation“

Conclusion

I hope this article may be helpful to you. However, these are only the 9 most effective ways, there are many other ways too for increasing your international sales.

If you know any other effective way please mention it below by leaving a comment. I’ll surely add it that in my upcoming articles.

Do tell, which tactic/way(s) have worked for your store to boost the International sales.

Cart Pencil: A Pencil, which reduces your online ‎store’s Returns and Exchanges!!‎

Allowing your online buyers to return or exchange the product back is always a good practice, for making your online site more customer friendly. But what if this practice turns out to be wearisome and ponderous??

According to data from businss2community, it is found that 30% of all products ordered online are being returned back compared to 8.89% in brick-and-mortar stores.

If you’re a running an online store then you must be knowing the pain when your potential buyer just abandons’s the cart or returns the product back. And it is even found that the maximum returns and exchanges happen from the stores selling Apparels.

As Shopify store owners you’re aware of the thing that at the second last stage of buying (i.e. cart page) it is not possible for your buyers to change the product variant (size, color..) . By offering the functionality of changing the product variant within the cart-page could largely reduce your rate of Cart Abandonment, Return & Exchange.

Human mind changes even when we don’t want to, so it may be possible many a times that your online shoppers are willing to change the product’s variant which they have already added in the cart. But due to Shopify’s limitations, they cannot do the same and just park themselves on a chair and see the stats of abandon carts rising.

What is Cart Pencil?

Cart Pencil is an app for Shopify users which allows their customers to change the variant of the product directly from their cart page.

Let me explain you briefly:

Currently what happens is, when any of your customer is purchasing a product from your online store let say a ‘mobile phone’.

So he visits your store selects the product he likes (for ex: White colored iPhone) and adds to the cart.

Now when he visits the cart for further processing, suddenly his mind changed. To him, now White color seems to be little dull and dwindle. So he decides to go for a Metallic Black colored variant.

However, you know as a store owner that Shopify doesn’t provide the functionality to change the variant of the product from the cart page.

If your customer wants to change then he has to go to the process of deleting the product from the cart – then go to home page – find the product again – select the product– change the variant – and then add to cart.

This cumbersome process really turns off many of your potential customers for buying the product from your store. And just in case if they even bought the product, they’d soon exchange or return it back.

Cart Pencil allows your customers to change variant of the product directly from their cart page, reducing the cumbersome process of switching from cart page to product page and adding the new variant.

Not only this, gradually you will also notice that there is an adequate decrease in your overall return and exchange. Due to which, you can not only focus on your sales but also, you will get enough time to work on how you can improve your customer’s shopping experience.

The Working

Cart Pencil provides the “Change” link above the remove button in the cart page itself which will help the customers to edit their shopping cart in the simplest way.

When the customer wants to change the variant, he/she can simply click on the link and the variants of that product will be immediately displayed via the select box, from which the customer can choose the desired variant.

After choosing the variant, clicking on “Update” link new variant will be updated in the Cart automatically.

To whom it may be prolific?

If your store is selling any

Electronics
Apparels
Eyewear
Wrist-Watches
Desserts (i.e Cakes, Pastries, Chocolates)
Jewelry
Luggage Bags
Kitchen Utensils
Sports Gears

Or any item/product which has got a variant of itself, then this is the solution which may be helpful to you greatly.

The stores which are selling Apparel online, they know how much difficult it is when their customers just return their product for just a size change or color change. To them, this app would be really helpful!!

Thus saving customer’s time and improving their user experience by simplifying the steps for buying, which in turn will not only create a user-friendly impression on your customer’s mind but also your average Return & Exchange of online store would progressively get decreased. And they might keep coming back to your online store for shopping.

Conclusion

With Cart-Pencil you’ll able to offer your customers multiple options of changing the product variants in the cart page itself and eventually saving their time. However, if you save your customers time, indirectly you’re saving your own precious time, of not getting the products Returned or Exchanged.

Reducing Returns & Exchanges plays a significant role in increasing your overall growth of the online business. If you are able to do that then as I said you’ll get enough spare time in which you can make efforts on how can you optimize your customers buying experience.

Top 11 Shopify Apps for Online Stores

“Thank you for installing our app, we assure you that our app will increase your online business” – message you usually see when you install an app

Then after few days of use, you click the ‘Uninstall’ button and all over again you go for searching on abundantly crowded Shopify’s app store.

Maybe you have already gone through this or you’ll be facing this in near future.

While it’s nice that there are several thousands of solution out there to you run your Shopify store effectively, but the question remains:

How does one understand what solution(app) to select?

In this article, I have discussed some of the best Shopify apps which will help you create an appealing store, no matter what your budget is.

1) Multi-Country Pricing

If you’re selling your products internationally then this is the app that you must have a look.

Multi-Country Pricing will allow you as a store owner to set different prices in the different country. You must be knowing that the same product has different values in different countries due to varieties of reason.

Therefore, it does not make any sense as a store owner to sell the products at same price in different countries.

If you are doing or planning to expand your business across countries, and looking for an app which allows you to set a separate price for separate country/continent and that too without opening a new Shopify store, then this app is for you!

Pricing: 15 days Free, then 29$/Month

2) Push Owl

If you’re looking for solutions that help you retain customers. Then PushOwl is best as per your requirement. Prominent features are :

Sends automated notifications (via mobile/desktop) to abandoned order with follow up at scheduled intervals automatically.
Track the performance of each individual push notification campaign with highly detailed reports.
Price Drop Alerts, Back in stock notifications, Welcome widget, Shipping Notifications, Automatically capture email of subscribers and many more.

Pricing : Basic (Free), Business (19$/Month), Enterprise (99$/Month).

3) Auto-Currency Switcher

A survey carried out by Shopify, 92% of the customers are more likely to do online shopping and purchase the product in their local currency.

If you are selling globally then you want your visitors to see the prices in their home currency. It also increases the comfort level of a foreign customer as they won’t have to do the mathematical gymnastic.

An app name “Auto Currency Switcher” helps you to do the same in your Shopify store. It detects from where your online store is being accessed from and then converts the pricing of the products automatically. The app uses live conversion rates which get updated twice a day.

Pricing: 15 Days Free, then $9.95 per month.

4) Mobile App Creator

According to a data on an average human spends 4 hours a day on their mobile phones. That means about 120 hours a month!!

Thus in this mobile-oriented world having a mobile app can drastically increase your conversion. Mobile App Creator will create a mobile application (android/iOS) for your online store.

To develop a mobile app all you need from your side as a store owner is Apple(iOS) developer account and Google Play store developer account.

Your customer will also able to make payments through this app which is completely integrated with the Shopify BUY SDK.

So, if you’re looking for a mobile app builder for your Shopify store then you must have a look at this solution by Plobal apps.

Pricing: 14 Days Free, then $103-$239/month.

5) FireAMP

I already discussed above that how much important it becomes when it comes to smart devices (mobile phones). When it comes to online shopping more than 50% of the online shoppers buy from mobile devices.

If your mobile site is slow, then shoppers will leave frustrated and may never return back. And thus, you need to optimize your website/online-store for the mobile devices by improving its page loading speed.

FireAMP will create AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) for your Shopify store and provide your visitors with smooth and fast first-hand experience on mobile which regular mobile pages may not be able to do so.

Pricing: 15-Days Free, $7.99 / month

6) Oberlo

Drop shipping on Shopify is made easy with the Oberlo app. With Oberlo you can easily import dropshipped products right into your ecommerce store and ship them directly to your customers – in only a few clicks.

Benefits of Dropshipping with Oberlo:

Less Capital Is Required
Low Overhead
Flexible Location
Wide Selection of Products
Fulfill Orders Automatically
Inventory and prices are always up to date. And many more.

Pricing: Starter Plan free, Basic Plan ($29.90/mo), Pro Plan ($79.90/mo).

7)Checkout Boost

Are you losing your customer at the checkout? Is your cart abandonment rate increased? Then Checkout Boost can solve all the issues regarding the same.

Checkout Boost pop-ups some special offers at the time of checkout and entice your customer to make more purchase within your store. Here are some of the features which increase your conversion :

Pop-up of Free gift / Free shipping / Discount offers by promoting your brand on social networks.
Create urgency by the Countdown Timer.
Exit-intent offers to prevent cart abandonment
BOGO offers that actually convert
Post-checkout Upsell Recommendations to motivate more purchases

Pricing: 15-Days Free, from $20/month.

8) mCheckout (Multi-Currency Checkout)

No one likes to pay in the foreign currency, not even you I guess. Due to which many store owners are losing their potential customer at the final stage of buying that is checkout.

As customers are not able to checkout/make payment in their local or native currency they just abandon the cart and may never come to your site.

It is even studied that if you allow your customer to checkout in their local currency then checkout abandonment rate can be decreased upto 50%.

mCheckout is an unpublished app for Shopify users which allows your customer to checkout and make payment in their desired currency.

Pricing: 14-Days Free, $9.95/month

9) Sufio – Automatic Invoices

Invoice leaves an imprint of your brand on your customer’s mind. So you must have a creative and beautiful invoice builder that leaves a great positive picture of your brand.

Sufio will help you create a beautiful and eye catch invoices for the orders placed in your store. All the invoices are professionally designed by a best print designer. Here’s what Sufio will do for you:

It will automatically create invoices when orders are created, paid or fulfilled.
Invoices can be automatically sent by email, or customers can download them online.
Print or download multiple PDF invoices at once and share them with your accountant.

Pricing: 14-Days Free, $19-$129/ month.

10) Yotpo

Ever wonder what power does the reviews of your customers have for increasing your revenue? Yotpo has found the way to convert that power by bringing new customers to your online store.

Even if you’re getting fewer reviews, Yotpo app will help you generate more reviews immediately. Product reviews not only increase your sales but also make potential customer trust your brand.

Yotpo’s signature in-mail review form is an exceptional feature which increases conversion and sales by generating more product reviews & site reviews.

Pricing: NA

11) AfterShip Returns Center

Return Policy is must for all the online store out there. And your customer sometime may even return a product but it can be a pain to manage the process.

If you don’t have a return option for any of the product then it makes a negative impression on your buyers. AfterShip makes it easy to manage returns.

It gives you a branded returns center that let customers submit returns in a couple of clicks. Also, it’ll automatically inform your customers about the status of their returns and refunds.

Pricing: Free upto 3 returns, $39-699/ month

Conclusion

Thanks for hanging in there!! Is there anything else you’d like to know more about and wish was included in this article? Let me know in the comments below.

You may also like my new article on “What are the common mistakes done while selling in cross-border markets”

Cross-Border Commerce in Australia – A Game of Local Market Share!

Cross-border commerce has paramount benefits for every business scaling itself from small-sized companies to a bigger one in due course. In Australia, many small and medium businesses have sourced their success from global marketplaces, trying to fill in the gap between demand and supply better than local vendors. Such companies that thrive on cross-border commerce continue to increase leads, shares, profits, and revenues in global expansion. Generally, the small startups are innovative, agile and even have the potential to grow much larger than one can expect.

The Small and Medium Business (SMB) community in Australia dominates the private sector in terms of employment. They serve as an employment to millions of Australians and contribute much more than the large businesses to the Australian economy. For the past five years, there has been a drastic increase in the count of actively trading businesses running across Australia. This has primarily led to increased growth of small business communities. The consumer shift has driven the small businesses in the cross-border market.

Such businesses should be encouraged to focus on the values of the sales opportunities outside the Australian market. They should know the fact that billions of consumers await the best quality products from cross-border markets. This inspires them to take a step ahead into the cross-border business.

Impact of cross-border commerce in Australia

There is a constant rise in the demand for the Australian products and services amongst the overseas consumers. This high demand is due to the quality Australian brands offer to their worldwide buyers. Also, the Australian sellers have developed and maintained a strong relationship with their consumers. Such demands have the potential to increase the consumer market in the Australian business by billions.

The “Australian-made” certification had been introduced about 30 years ago. It provides a thrust to the domestic business for excelling in the market of production of goods and services.

Young Australians love to shop!

National Australia Bank conducted a survey that reveals the percentage of total cross-border purchases. The calculation involved a larger ratio of the generation Y as the. Eventually, to meet such high demands, delivery companies had to increase their benchmark of supplies of the international brands online.

The Global brands need to develop strategic solutions to fulfill their consumer’s every need. Whether it is entering the new channels, increasing the data warehouse capacity, or offering prompt delivery and tracking options, they have to cater to every demand. Improvements in the fulfillment mean the online retailers and brand can set up their inventory near to the Australian customers. This emphasizes on cost-effective and quick delivery.

Shipments are off the dial

There has been a staggering growth in the cross-border shipping services when it comes to Australian retailers. The e-tailers in Australia promise fast delivery of all the products from fashion apparel to cosmetics and vitamins. The best selling products with high quality and first-class delivery services have made the Australian business flourish in these markets.

Thus, in terms of shipments, quality products, high demand and strong market shares in the overseas market, Australian businesses have been quite a ruling name.