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Wipro Technologies, has launched a strategic retail solution, ENCORE (Enhanced Commerce Retail Ecosystem). ENCORE is scalable platform that helps retailers engage customers and manage online retail operations seamlessly.

ENCORE is scalable platform that helps retailers engage customers and manage online retail operations seamlessly.It is an end to end solution that allows retailers unparalleled visibility into their e-commerce enterprise without substantial investments in time and infrastructure.

ENCORE provides unique customer experience with engaging features that include Social Media integration, e-mobility, personalization, seamless cross channel experience, recommendations, referral tracking and much more. ENCORE provides retailers the ability to ship to over 200 countries globally, thereby providing access to new markets.

Wipro’s ‘ENCORE’ solution apart from enabling e-commerce and retail business services with multi-channel and next-generation capabilities also provides ‘on-demand’ business intelligence to our retail customers.”

The ENCORE platform consists of four aspects, each of which addresses a specific challenge faced by e-commerce enterprises. Wipro will offer these four aspects together as a complete solution, or individually, as needed by a retail customer:

•  ENCORE TRANSACT enables retailers to transact better with their customers and allows shoppers to customize their own experience.
•  ENCORE MARKET enables retailers to understand their market and provides insights into customers’ opinion about the retailer.
•  ENCORE ANALYZE has deeply insightful analysis tools that can provide intelligence to retailers on areas of operations where they are successfully engaging their customers, and areas that need improvement.
•  ENCORE MANAGE has powerful offerings for aspects such as business process, people and technology that allow retailers to optimize and improve the functional elements of their business.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Now buying your favourite fruits and vegetables is just as simple as ordering pizza, Thanks to Vegwala. Its an online vegetable & fruit shop, its a Bangalore based service started by Mitera Agrotech. I have earlier tried other similar services but discontinued because of various reasons- service wasn’t prompt, need to meet their minimum order amount etc.

Couple of weeks back I tried Vegwala and was impressed with their service, within 1 hr of ordering it online i received the items. Vegwala charges extra Rs 10/- as delivery charges for bill below 200/- and no delivery charges if bill meets 200 or above.

Salient features of Vegwala-

• Products are competitively priced.
• Directly delivered at user doorstep, just a click away.
• Fresh vegetables and fruits soured everyday.
• Handpicked, hygienically packed and ready to be placed in refrigerator, user is saved from cleaning etc.

To save time for users in selecting vegetables and fruits, Vegwala has packaged box system containing vegetables/fruits/mix of fruits & vegetables for a nuclear family of 2 or 4 person. Great packaging and bundling by Vegwala.

- Allow users to discover the products in the store easily,  Products that are on SALE has to highlighted, there may be products that should be brought under the users attention because of other reasons e.g.  very popular.

- Most people like to browse through the store for seeing what they have and whether something attracts their attention. Browsing is made easier when products are categorized in ways that customers expect them to be. Use structured navigation such as a Double Tab Navigation with Breadcrumbs.

- Often people aren’t clear which product they want to buy. They may have several options that they want to compare before buying. So, enable a Product Comparison tool which  can address this need of a online user.

- User wants to see the product, try to assess the look and feel of the product though online products can’t be felt but effort should be made to get closer to it. User should very well know how it looks from all sides. Implement Gallery and capture all views and important aspects of product.

-  Many shops have shop assistants that help customers to find the right product for them. Online this is difficult to do so best thing to do is encourage users to recommend, rate, comments on product they have bought. Collect these recommendations and implement them smartly. Users tend to buy products on other users recommendations.

- Needless to say Shopping cart is one of the most critical element of an online shopping site. Shopping cart allow users to choose the products and give them the flexibility of buying products. Choosing an item and buying an item is altogether different use case.

- Many times when people shop they do not find anything for themselves but they find something that might interest a friend or relative. In that case they want to recommend it to others or letting others know about the existence of the product. Provide  them “Send a link” feature.

The essentials of shopping should be taken into account for online shopping as well since they have little to do with the medium itself.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Have you received feedback that your web site is not very user friendly or in other words hard to navigate and difficult to find the desired product? Are your users “dropping off” your site after only a couple of minutes or page views?

If so, take some time to focus on your site’s “usability” – the golden ticket to an engaging online experience. If your site visitors can find information quickly and easily, and feel comfortable navigating your site, you are one (very important) step closer to “converting” them – the industry term for getting a visitor to take action, whether it is joining, purchasing, subscribing, downloading, logging in, bookmarking, forwarding or returning!

So what actions can improve your site’s usability?

1. Time to re look site’s goals and objectives. Why do visitors come to your web site? What information will users be looking for on your site? What information do you want your visitors to view on your web site? What do you need to get out of your site?

2. Analyze your website reports Take some time to review your web site’s reports – the statistics on how your site is performing. This data can reveal a lot about your site’s usability. For example, you can find out what pages are losing your visitors. Also, you can see how long visitors are staying on your web site. These types of signals can indicate your site’s ease of use.

3. Fine-tune your site’s search function. More than 90% of web users search during every online session. Users are comfortable finding information this way. Does your web site have a good search tool? If your web site is complex, can the search tool provide advanced search options? Fine-tuning this tool can be a valuable addition to your site’s usability.

4. Check out the competition. Look at some other web sites in the similar space, Can you navigate those sites easily? Is information readily available and easy to find? How do these sites compare to your own? Taking some time to evaluate your web site’s ease of use will put your business one step closer to having an effective marketing and selling tool in your web site.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Don’t force Guest to signup before Checking out:

Its a big turn off for me when i need to signup for the service to buy a product, i generally prefer to transact as guest, when the experience is good and satisfying i signup on that online store on my next transaction. Basically as an e-commerce store you need to have a very good reasons why forcing guests to register to purchase products. Try to simulate the offline shopping experience. Do you have to open an account when you buy stuff from a new retail store? Don’t make that mistake online. Allow guests to check out.

But you also need to sell reasons why guests should register. It’s all about making it easy, now and in future.

Slick and Fast -

Facilitate user to checkout easily, the process should be as fast and slick as possible. Remove any Ads which may distract users, never ever try to up sell or cross sell in this page. You can do that in product page or when the product is added to the cart. Here the objective should be to collect the payment, If out of greed you tend to entice the users to choose other stuff there is a high risk of them abandoning the cart.

Collect user feedback once payment in through -

Once a visitor has converted, rather than show the standard confirmation page, why not also ask for some feedback on their experience? User can use tools like Surveymonkey to create feedback form and collect their responses. You can add some of the questions like -

• Were you able to find products you were looking for easily?
• What you liked or disliked the most about our website?
• Please tell us how we can improve your next visit?

This qualitative feedback is priceless to e-commerce portals. Not everyone will put their views but believe me you will collect feedbacks from the smart users and don’t forget to inform them once you make the suggested changes.

Handle Errors Gracefully

Problems occur during the check-out stage. Cards are declined, people enter invalid email addresses and they forget to specify their preferred delivery method. To cover all eventualities, you should display messages that are:

• Contextual
  Put the message next to where the error occurred.
• Useful
  No “Error code 21″ messages please. Write friendly, useful error messages, such as, “Sorry, we believe your email address is invalid. Did you accidentally add an extra full stop or space?”
• Conventional
  Error messages should be red. People understand that red indicates a problem.

Mithaimate is a online sweet store which delivers sweets at your doorstep.  User can buy sweets, chocolates, cakes, bakery items from their portal and can get it delivered at desired shipping address.

In other words Mithaimate is the branded mithai delivery service in the country. All the products at Mithaimate are sourced from famous sweet shops of respective cities to provide unmatched quality and are hand delivered. They basically fullfill the procurement process and delivers at the address specified while making the order.

MithaiMate collects the fresh stock from the vendor and within 24 hours, delivers the package to you. These sweets are delivered by Mithaimate staff themselves at customer’s doorsteps. Customer can a personal note while gifting the sweets to their loved ones and it will be tagged with the sweet box to be delivered.

User can browse through sweets catalog, they are categorized quite neatly and also user can filter the sweet listings by price. Mithaimate serves 150+ cities in India.

I recently used Mithaimate service and was quite impressed with their turn around time, product was delivered within 5hrs at a place in Delhi. Mithaimate seems to be targeting NRI audience largely and would be interesting to see if they cross deliver i.e sweets sourced from Delhi sweet shop and courier it to a Bangalore based user.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

ItzCash Card Ltd an entity of Essel Group has received RBI nod for issuing mobile wallet under ”The payment and settlement systems act 2007″. By procuring the licence ItzCash Card can offer mobile wallet feature to cell phone users.

ItzCash claims to be India’s largest non-bank semi-closed prepaid payment instrument issuer and also the first to introduce and facilitate m-commerce and e-commerce in India. ItzCash has gained good traction in past few years and have become a poupular choice of payment among users who are uncomfortable in swiping Credit/Debit card.

ItzCash also boasts to currently facilitate about 60,000 SMS transactions per day for various merchant services. This new initiative by RBI is expected to increase these transactions by at least 100 per cent. This service will bring under served / unbanked populace closer to digital convergence and help enabling a cashless society. We are happy to include more and more people in financial inclusion through this service.

Under RBI guidelines, the semi-closed wallet service by ItzCash will allow any mobile user to pay for various services and products for a transaction value up to Rs 5000 only. This clearance by RBI will give a major boost to the government’s aggressive initiative towards bringing banking and financial services to remote areas as part of its inclusive growth program.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

Flipkart has raised its second round of venture funding from New York-based investment firm Tiger Global Management. Sources familiar with the development told VCCircle that the new round of funding was closed a few months back and is believed to be in the tune of $8 million to $10 million. Flipkart earlier raised funding early venture capital firm Accel India.

This development comes as Flipkart has expanded from being an online book retailer to offering products in movies, games and music. It also plans to launch sale of software like Norton Anti-virus, Adobe, Windows, and others. Indian CD/DVD market was worth approximately Rs 10 billion in 2008 and is expected to grow to Rs 16 billion by 2013 at an yearly growth rate of 10 to 15%, said Flipkart.

Flipkart currently has over 6 million titles listed ranging across all categories. The Bangalore-based company is targeting revenues of Rs 100 crore by March 2011, said a  recent release. The funding from Tiger Global, which has backed companies like local search firm Just Dial and coaching institute T.I.M.E, will help in this expansion. The new round of funding for Flipkart had attracted several venture capital firms, said a source.

Flipkart had revenue of Rs 25 crore in 2009-10, Flipkart said in an interview to CNBC-TV18 recently. It was set up in 2007 by IIT Delhi classmates Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, who later worked at Amazon before starting Flipkart. The company has a team of 200 members and currently operates from offices in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi.

TolMol is a social comparison shopping platform. With millions of products and online/local businesses listed on its website, TolMol offers one of the most comprehensive shopping destinations for consumers in India.  TolMol is one stop search and comparison service that saves your time – you no longer need to jump from site to site to find that best deal on the product you are looking to buy.

TolMol’s mission is to empower people in making informed decisions. Using TolMol, user can search and compare prices, features, and ratings of products and services in all popular categories like Mobiles, Computers, Electronics, Clothing and more.

Lets analyse their monthly traction -

Unique visitors (estimated cookies)	150K
Unique visitors (users)	170K
Page views	420K
Total visits	160K
Avg visits per visitor	0.99
Avg time on site	6:50

vcBytes review – There are some obvious bugs which needs to be fixed, i clicked on Nokia products and result sets is showing Samsung products on top, webpage loading time is quite high, it took 10-13secs on an average to load a webpage and i am browsing it in 1Mbps, not acceptable.

-Hitesh, vcBytes.com

The definition of a landing page is simply “the first page that visitors hit on your site”, so it is not strictly a certain page but any page that a user “lands” on. All websites have landing pages, whether they like it or not, even if it was not specifically designed as such. Understanding this is a key part of good website marketing.

anding pages can have a substantial impact on your e-commerce website. A poorly-developed one can hasten its breakdown just as an effective landing page can drive traffic to your site,  respond to calls to action and make your business website a success.

One vital measure of the effectiveness of your ecommerce website is the “bounce rate”, or the percentage of visitors who immediately leave your site without making any other click. The bounce rate is inversely proportional to the effectiveness of the landing page. Basically, this means that a high bounce rate indicates that your landing page isn’t compelling enough for the visitor to pursue his interest or take some other action.

Most users prefer to skip information which is irrelevant to their needs. They want to get directly to their search, hence the need for a landing page that delivers just that. They are spared the time and hassle of having to navigate through layers of data when they already have an idea of what they want. The bounce rate is a key measurement for determining the effectiveness of landing pages.

Another measure for landing pages is the success of a “next action”. It might be purchasing the product, requesting more information, signing up for a free trial, etc. A concept that is intrinsic in creating effective landing pages is “alignment”. This is the connection between your source (where the visitor came from) and your landing page. The more connected they are, the higher the success of conversion.

A good example is a banner ad for a specific product from a beauty products company. Clicking on the banner ad and being directed to a landing page showing the exact same product yields a higher conversion rate. Conversely, if the alignment is absent, there will be a significant drop in conversion rates.

In general, a landing page must stir these positive emotions in a visitor for it to be effective:

• Credibility
  Your page must be able to capture the visitor’s trust by presenting a credible appearance. Get rid of red flags, such as lack of contact information, typo errors and wrong grammar, use of incorrect jargon, low-resolution graphics, and excessive use of Times Roman font.
• Recognition
  Your page must provide your visitor a “This is what I’m looking for!” moment upon landing.
• Persuasiveness
  Your page must be able to convince visitors that your product or service can help them achieve their goal. Keep in mind what attracted the visitor to your product in the first place so you will understand what he is looking for.
• Action
  You must highlight an action for the visitor to take while he is in your landing page.

Techniques to Use with Landing Pages

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