Asna, Author at E-commerce Made Easy in India | E-commerce Solutions India - ANS Commerce

Simplifying E-commerce for India – Vibhor Sahare in conversation with Vishal Krishna

Vishal Krishna, a Business Editor at YourStory, held a live session on the 5th of September 2020 with Vibhor Sahare, CEO and Co-founder of ANS Commerce, discussing about brand revolution in India and how ANS Commerce is helping 90+ brands scale up with its full-stack solution offering borrow 500 online.

Titled “Simplifying E-commerce for India”, the event attracted a plethora of speakers, industry experts, emerging startups, and attendees from across the country and abroad. The discussion started with how ANS Commerce is helping brands enter the world of online commerce, whether they are established or DTCs (direct-to-consumer) brands. Vibhor shared some of his insights on the retail e-commerce market of India and online penetration. Identifying e-commerce as not being a core competency of these brands, he explained why a full-stack e-commerce solution is what brands need in order to focus on their core product. You can request for our full-stack demo.

Vishal Krishna follows this up with the concerns and issues faced by the e-commerce industry in today’s world, with respect to choosing the right e-commerce platform, digital marketing, paid ads, promotions, coupons, optimization of products, warehousing, marketplace management etc.

Here are some of the key highlights from the session –

How does Kartify help with the performance marketing of a brandstore?

The majority (~80%) of traffic on brandstores comes from paid marketing campaigns, which can range from 0.1x to 1.0x of sales. Hence optimizing ROAS (return on ad spends) and maintaining ROAS at scale become critical to brands’ e-commerce viability. For this, brands prefer Kartify’s marketing-first perspective, to improve ROAS and maintain it at scale. Brands often leverage ANS Commerce for both solutions. Brands generally start with performance marketing followed by website management to further boost sales.

Does ANS Commerce have any client preference in terms of sectors or segments?

ANS Commerce is sector agnostic and keen to work with brands in all categories – whether it is retail, beauty, home, fashion, electronics, etc. We work with brands big and small, ranging from Fortune 500 giants to DTCs still completing their company paperwork.

Does ANS Commerce have any plans of going international?

ANS Commerce believes India is a fairly large and growing market for consumer brands, and so is completely focused on Indian market for the next 2-3 years. However, we have few international clients and lot of inbound interest from SEA, MENA and European markets so we are open to expand globally at the right time.

What is ANS Commerce’s revenue model?

ANS Commerce works on the revenue-sharing model. Instead of charging a fixed amount every month for the product or service, they charge a percentage of revenue (sales) in most of the cases. ANS Commerce believes in being a true partner for their clients – aligned with common objective and have confidence in their ability to deliver.

What are the various third-party integrations available in ANS Commerce?

ANS Commerce has its own custom products such as Kartify, LimeReach, Recofy etc. and these come with enhancements to ease out the complexities of e-commerce processes. Additionally, clients can also get the benefit of over 70 (and growing) third party integrations relevant for Indian brands. They span across domains such as logistics (Delhivery, Blue Dart), payments (Razorpay, Paypal) OMS/ omni-channel (Fynd, Unicommerce), loyalty, tech, marketing (Netcore, MailChimp, Freshdesk) etc.

How does ANS Commerce help in overcoming the challenges of warehousing and fulfilment?

Brands want to provide the same ease and speed of delivery for their brandstores as is the norm on marketplaces across India. ANS Commerce optimizes warehouse operations with the help of latest tools and softwares, which includes Warehouse management systems, Order management system etc. They have also partnered with the logistic companies such as Delhivery, BlueDart and Ecom Express to handle the delivery logistics. This enables brand to offer 2-day delivery with tracking for their brandstore orders and optimization of inventory using common pool for all the marketplaces. We work with 15+ marketplaces to enable brands’ presence across long-tail marketplaces. Request your demo for warehousing solution.

How can ANS Commerce help companies operating on Shopify?

ANS Commerce can help these brands to acquire more customers with their performance marketing expertise and can also help them with warehousing and fulfillment.

The session concluded with an extremely interactive and enthusiastic Q&A session. The entire session can be viewed on our YouTube channel.

About ANS Commerce

ANS Commerce is India’s #1 full-stack enabler helping brands sell online. We offer brandstore tech, performance marketing, marketplace management and e-commerce warehousing & fulfilment.

We want our brand partners to focus on their brand and product and leave ‘all-things-e-commerce’ to us. We are currently working with 90+ established & D2C brands across segments helping them sell on their brandstores along with 15+ marketplaces.

We help brands acquire consumers, power brandstore and jumpstart marketplace operations in no time. With us, your brand can offer fast & reliable order fulfilment to your marketplace & brandstore consumers.

Our extensive experience across product, e-commerce, retail, and marketing helps the brand achieve higher sales and stronger brand differentiation. We work with you to identify the right e-commerce model & partners for you.

If you are a brand planning to go online or need any e-commerce assistance, then drop us an email on [email protected]. We are currently offering a free marketing audit!

For more information about our offerings, visit our website.

What should you consider while choosing an e-commerce platform?

Nearly 72% of India’s urban internet users and 57% of rural users access the internet daily. With this huge rise in internet penetration, brands are constantly looking for ways to expand their customer base. The explosion of online shopping in the Indian market has given retailers a new outlook towards building their own e-commerce websites.

Building your own e-commerce website can be a long and intimidating process if you don’t have the right resources. Not only do you need backend support but also a team of dedicated individuals who know your needs and can provide you with solutions that tick all your boxes. The easiest way to set up an e-commerce website is to develop it on an e-commerce platform – where you get technical support readily available and do not have to deal with the hassles of finding modules or extensions repeatedly.

With the staggering growth in the number of options available, there are a multitude of e-commerce platforms available to select from. And if not done correctly, it can be an extremely expensive affair. It is quite easy to get lost with this so we have curated a list of things to consider when selecting your e-commerce platform. These pointers will help you prioritize your business needs and filter out platforms accordingly.

Considerations to keep in mind while choosing an e-commerce platform

Technology:
Being the nucleus of your e-commerce website, it is important that you put emphasis on the technological aspects of the e-commerce platform you are selecting. It is quite possible to get turned around in technical jargon if you are new to this. For this purpose, you need a hands-on team that offers you technical assistance.

Kartify, a brandstore solution by ANS Commerce, offers you comprehensive tech options for your platform with a “no-code” usage for configuration. With no add-ons needed, you can start a fully functional store out-of-the-box. With more than 50 third-party integrations, Kartify strives to make your experience only better along with continuous bug-fixes and feature development.

Secure:
It is no news that consumers value their data and their privacy the most during online shopping. Hence it is imperative that your e-commerce platform is secure and provides customers reassurance regarding their data, especially during transactions.

With regular security audits, Kartify ensures a smooth running website for your brand. It also comes equipped with Cloud armor, regular backup and version control as well as data encryption. It also enables brands to set up payment gateway and payment methods as per their needs, including payment with coupons, COD as well as wallets, and UPI.

Scalable:
While all brands aspire to expand, it is quite possible that the platform may not be able to cater to the size of the expansion. Therefore, it becomes important to choose such an e-commerce platform, which does not put a limitation on the number of products and traffic that your site can have.

Kartify provides you with a scalable platform for your e-commerce needs with automatic deployment and scaling (Google Cloud + Kubernetes), real-time image optimization with cache and DB replication. Not only that, but the platform is also load-tested for more than 1 million concurrent users, making sure that traffic does not hinder the smooth running of the website.

Customizable:
Setting up an online store should not feel like rocket science. You want the ability to fully capture the feel of your unique brand. One solution for this are website templates because they don’t require you to hire outside help or to be a design whiz to create a professional look and make a bold statement.

Kartify offers you a fully customizable UI/UX including user flows, menu, layout, filter, etc. It not only provides a feature of editable CSS/HTML for front-end but also checkout view customization packed with features such as guest mode/login, shipping/handling fee, cashback, COD fee, sales promotion, and many more.

Integrations:
Another factor you should take into consideration is integrations and plugins. Look for a platform that integrates with your other existing systems and marketing channels.

Kartify is an omni-friendly platform that already has more than 50 third-party services integrated including logistics, payments, loyalty, and engagement partners. It is also integrated with four leading omni-channel partners which enables fulfillment from offline shops for online orders.

Analytics:
While every brand wants to put in efforts for their growth, it is also imperative that you monitor that growth and then make data-driven decisions. The business will soon rake-in money so it is important to monitor the store’s performance. You don’t want to play the numbers guessing game hence you should look for an e-commerce platform that helps you keep tabs on all of the important things – number of sales, payment methods, order amounts, and more—and displays stats in an easy-to-understand format.

Kartify enables you to get reports straight to your inbox or phone with dashboards that are standard and also customizable. Kartify gives you the option of viewing and analyzing data for sales and orders, returns, products, customers, promotions, marketing funnels, and trends. And a cherry on top is that the platform can be integrated with any business intelligence tool.

With the ‘new normal’ slowly making its way into our routines, consumers are looking for ways to buy products without having to put themselves at risk. This is where e-commerce platforms come in, making shopping easier with the consumers’ convenience at its core. Hence, there couldn’t be a better time than now for brands to invest in an e-commerce platform and establish an online presence.

For a demo for e-commerce solution, drop your query at [email protected]

How to improve your marketplace sales?

A perspective by ANS Commerce in SARAL 2020 – India’s biggest virtual e-commerce summit organized by Unicommerceзаймы микрозаймы без процентов на карту

Unicommerce successfully organized SARAL 2020, India’s first-ever virtual mega e-commerce summit on 30th May 2020. The summit brought together thousands of e-commerce sellers, brands, retailers, SME’s, and enterprises on a single platform to discuss on the theme ‘How can eCommerce Selling be Simplified’. The Industry leaders shared their thoughts, ideas, and plans to enable businesses around the country to understand and find solutions to their challenges in a post-COVID-19 world.

One of the key sessions was conducted by Amit Monga, Co-founder, ANS Commerce, on ‘Optimizing e-commerce presence through marketplace and carts’. He talked about marketplace scaling and how it is vital for a new brand or any brand on its e-commerce journey to get the marketplace model right and identify core marketplaces, and long-tail marketplaces that suit a brand’s product categories.

Here’re a few highlights from his session:

In-source vs out-source: A brand needs to choose whether it wants to do its e-commerce operations in-house or outsource it to a specialist. It’s a fine balance between promoter time/ cost and speed.
Horses for the courses: Many factors such as model complexities (B2B2C, B2C, Dropship), categories, SLA levels for each marketplace, and returns management to ensure healthy sellable inventory must be kept in mind to achieve growth targets.
Amazon Easyship vs FBA: Amazon is a marketplace that has various models for any brand aiming to become a seller and how a new brand must consider what product category it is in, how it should ship its products out to the end customer, and how it should manage inventory. For instance, a new fashion brand that is just starting out should preferably choose Easyship over Amazon FBA as a marketplace as it has the flexibility to ship products to the end customers from its premises without having to worry about splitting and replicating the inventory with Amazon warehouses and can also naturally progress to Sellerflex once the brand has scaled up.

After identifying the right marketplace model, managing these four important hygiene factors is the game-changer in any market:

Catalog management is essential to optimize content such as titles, keywords, enhanced A+ content, and product descriptions as these are critical for higher ranking, better conversions, and customer experience. Utilizing the assets available in the marketplace, such as having a brandstore and performing A/B testing with the brandstore can help achieve these objectives.
Identifying the right assortment that works for which market and observing the right trends and competition benchmarking can help you set achievable goals. To forecast future growth planning, a brand needs to identify the strength of the market in terms of pricing, the level of assortment in a category, and the right inventory planning.
Payment and inventory reconciliation with the help of business analytics is essential to grow at a sustainable and profitable rate. Every brand should recognize and understand the significant cost heads for each marketplace. To ensure that a brand grows sustainably, it must make full use of the information available in analytical reports and coordinate with the category teams to curate and execute marketing plans.
Reputation management or reviews from end customers on product, seller, or service are important. One should monitor the reviews and ratings to improve the quality of products, services, and pricing.

Now it’s the time to scale

Leveraging each marketplace to scale your business

Once the right model is identified and basic hygiene is taken care of, one must have insights on how to leverage the strength of a marketplace to drive visibility and growth of business and how a business must plan its resources well to take advantage of each of these marketplace levers. For example, Amazon has a marketing platform known as Amazon Marketing Services (AMS), which the brands can use to drive CPC driven campaigns, product display ads, sponsored ads, or drive CPM promotions with category teams. Similarly, Flipkart also has its marketplace tools to improve visibility and ranking like product opt-ins. Other marketplaces such as Bigbasket, Nykaa, and Grofers have product sampling tools that help the brands to segment the right set of customers and reach out to the right target audience, which has become very crucial to surviving in the e-commerce space. These marketplaces also allow brands to run performance marketing campaigns on traffic driven websites such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat.

ANS Commerce enables execution across 15+ marketplaces and harness marketplaces’ reach while optimizing brand’s resources. We integrate all your marketplace platforms to deliver a consistent brand experience to customers everywhere and manage inventory effectively. We process orders worth >4 Cr. on marketplaces on a monthly basis.

Our full stack solution offers brands to create their online brandstore and jump start marketplace operations in no time. We use the understanding of strengths and insights of various marketplaces to power brandstore. Our extensive experience across product, ecommerce, retail and marketing help the brand achieve higher sales and stronger brand differentiation.

For more information about our marketplace offerings visit our website.

If you are a brand planning to go online then drop us an email on [email protected]