by admin | Dec 28, 2022 | Digital Marketing, Web design, Web Hosting
How to Create Your Ecommerce Website is particularly relevant in times when your physical store must close due to unforeseen circumstances. In times like these, an ecommerce solution becomes essential to your bottom line.
Having an offline store is a great way to build a customer base in your local community. If you have had success with your brick-and-mortar channel, you may even have a fleet of physical stores and a well-respected brand. In-store shopping allows real-time customer interaction and gives you control over their total shopping experience. You are poised to offer two important things that customers value: human interaction and individualized help.
While brick-and-mortar stores offer many advantages, creating an online presence to complement your offline retail can help you grow your brand and offer additional value.
The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly sped up the increase in ecommerce, but it was not the only factor. And in a post-COVID-19 world, ecommerce is here to stay.
For this reason, even when the bells on your brick-and-mortar’s door are jingling, it’s still smart to have an online store as part of an overall omnichannel strategy. After all, research shows that your potential customers are spending more time shopping online. According to data from Statista, online sales in the U.S. are expected to reach $476 billion by 2024.
If you’re interested in launching an online store, we’re here to help. Contact us for free consolation.
In this guide, we’re covering everything you need to build a thriving online channel including all the integrations required to set you up for success.
10 Steps for Setting Up Your Ecommerce Website
It can be easy to become overwhelmed with the sheer volume of possibilities in ecommerce. You may want to do it all at once. But remember, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
You don’t need the perfect website right away. You just need the version that gets your site up and your products in the hands of your customers — while leaving you plenty of room to grow and customize after launch.
These are those steps.
- Create a plan.
- Choose your ecommerce platform.
- Create an ongoing budget.
- Choose a domain name.
- Choose and customize your template.
- Determine your product selection.
- Select shipping and fulfillment partners.
- Set up payment options.
- Add products to your store.
- Test and launch your online store.
1. Create a Plan
Regardless of your timeline to launch, you still need to have an organized, detailed plan. Measure twice, and cut once, as they say. You need to take the time to plan now, so you don’t waste your efforts later.
This plan should include the resources you will need, including both tech resources and human personnel, and your overall investment. You need to know who will be managing both building your site and running the day-to-day systems. You also need to know what those systems will be.
Rest assured, with an outlined plan, you can make bringing your brick-and-mortar store into an online environment a quick process.
2. Choose Your Ecommerce Platform
If you’re new to ecommerce, you might not have thought too much about which store builder you will use to provide shopping cart functionality for your store. Before you jump into the creation process, you have to pick the platform.
If you’re trying to get up and running quickly, you likely need a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platform like BigCommerce or Shopify. These can provide many of the necessary features you will need as outlined below.
Easy and quick setup.
To get your site up quickly, you need a site that enables you to build and ramp up your operation with speed and efficiency. This is why a SaaS platform may be the right choice for you.
While there are plenty of strong ecommerce website builders out there, including open source options like Magento, they have a steep learning curve and require near-expert developer knowledge to build your site.
Most SaaS platforms come with many pre-designed themes, either free or for purchase, that you can use as the visual foundation of your site. Uploading products and managing products on the backend is also simple, so you can go live faster.
Security features.
In addition to opening up your site to an expanded audience, having an online store also opens you up to more potential security concerns.
Having a platform with strong, multi-layered security is essential to keeping your business and your customers data safe. SaaS platforms handle updating security patches for you.
You will also want to ensure that the platform you choose is PCI compliant and that your store has a SSL certificate.
Make sure you have customer support.
Even with the best laid plans, issues will come up. Make sure you have someone who can help you solve these challenges. Ideally, the platform you choose should have 24/7 support available to you.
Mobile and desktop responsiveness.
Insider intelligence projects that U.S. revenue from shopping on mobile devices will be $488 billion by the end of 2024. Having a mobile optimized site will also help your site rank better with search engines. Also, from a customer experience lens, you want to ensure customers have no problems viewing product pages on different devices.
All of this to say, make sure the platform you choose is optimized for mobile and desktop responsiveness.
Tools for scaling your business.
While your immediate goal is to get up a site quickly, when you’re choosing a platform, it’s best to think a bit more long term. Replatforming (switching to a new platform once you’ve already built a site) can be a bigger headache, and a larger hit to your bank account, than starting from scratch because you now have data you have to migrate and integrations to manage.
Your ideal platform should be one that not only can get you up quickly but also has the tools to scale with your business as you grow.
Questions to ask a potential platform:
- Is there a cap on the amount of products that I can add to my site?
- Will site speed be affected as my traffic increases?
- Does the platform make it easy to expand to other channels like Amazon, Facebook and Instagram?
Front-end flexibility and beautiful templates.
As mentioned above, to help get you started quickly, you want a platform that provides a selection of beautiful templates and allows you to make your site look like you want it to. Having flexibility on the frontend to customize to get what you need is important.
As with the above, this could be a more long-term ask. Choose a platform that will allow you to get a beautiful site up now, but that also has the functionality to help you customize it later, once you have more time.
3. Create an Ongoing Budget
As we mentioned above, one of the advantages of starting an online store is that the costs are significantly less than starting a physical store. However, that doesn’t mean opening an online store is free. And if you’re not careful, the associated costs can add up.
Make sure you understand any ongoing fees and expenses associated with your online business. Create a budget specifically for your ecommerce. Here are some costs you will want to track:
Platform, security and hosting costs.
If you choose a SaaS platform, hosting and security are included, but you will pay a monthly fee. If you choose an open-source platform, you may not have a monthly fee for the platform itself, but you will have costs for hosting and security management.
Design and development costs.
Depending on your in-house team or your own expertise, you may need to hire an outside agency or freelancer to help you build your site and make it look how you want. These costs will likely be ongoing as you will need to make changes and updates as you go.
Payment provider fees.
Offering different payment gateways to your customers means paying fees to different payment providers like PayPal and Checkout by Amazon. Some ecommerce platforms, like Shopify, also charge a fee for not using their payment provider. Take these fees and percentages into account in your budget.
Integrations and third-party apps.
Once you get online there are a host of product management systems, shipping tools, plug-ins and marketing apps that can help you grow and scale your online business (more on that below). Some ecommerce platforms also have some of these features built-in. As you’re choosing a platform, also look at what features and integrations you will need and what fees those will have.
4. Choose a Domain Name
Your domain name is the part of your store’s URL that identifies it. For example, in the web address: www.gentum.co.ke, “gentum.co.ke” is the domain name.
Think of it as the online equivalent of your physical store’s signage. It should both give customers an idea of what you sell and tell them something about your brand.
If it’s available, you can make your domain name the same as your physical store. However, you might also want to choose a name that is different. Here are some quick tips for choosing a domain name:
- Be unique, but also make it clear what you’re selling.
- Add a keyword to improve your search engine rankings. This will help more people find you.
- Avoid using brand names or registered trademarks.
- Choose .co.ke if you’re in the Kenya or the country code where your business is located and where your primary customer case will be. If you intent to sell to more than just Kenya, you may want to use a .com domain.
You can purchase a domain name through your ecommerce platform or purchase it separately from a domain selling service and link it to your platform.
Please note, our support team is happy to guide you on these steps together with hosting services.
5. Choose and Customize a Template
When discussing choosing an ecommerce platform, we touched on the value of having pre-designed templates available. Now that you’ve chosen your platform, you can choose the theme or template you would like to use. This should enable you to get your site up quickly with minimal design work.
Drag-and-drop editors like Page Builders, can make it even easier to get the look and feel you want without coding. This functionality makes it easy and intuitive to build and update a beautiful custom website.
When designing your home page and product pages, there are few questions to consider.
How do you want your store to look?
You may want to have the look and feel of your online store echo that of your physical store, or you may choose to have them both have their own unique identities while still tying into your overall brand.
How do you think your customers will shop?
For an online store, the design isn’t just important for appearance but also impacts how customers find what they need. Think about what categories your customers would likely expect. You can use what you know of your customers in-store shopping behavior to help inform how you design the user experience of your online store.
What features do you need?
Not all templates or themes will have the same features. Does your store need to display photos in a gallery? Will you need videos to showcase your products? You can usually filter templates by just those that meet your feature needs.
6. Determine Your Product Selection
In the interest of time, you likely won’t want to start with the complete inventory of your physical store right away. Instead pick the products that are your highest sellers or that may have the potential to do better in an online environment. Here are some suggestions, which will obviously vary based on your industry:
Hobbyist products.
These are products that support people’s hobbies and interests. People who enjoy collecting these items or using them for their hobbies, will be willing to buy them again and again and will pay more for items they’re particularly excited about.
High margins.
Start with your big ticket items with higher margins when you’re first launching your site. Don’t forget, you will now be paying for shipping and fulfillment costs, so you want to make sure the cost of the items you sell warrants these additional expenses.
Light weight.
Again, since shipping and handling is now a factor, choosing your lighter and easier-to-ship products to start your shop makes economic sense.
Hard-to-find locally.
If you sell products that are specific to your area and might be difficult for non-locals to find in their area, these are great products to feature on your new ecommerce website. You can expand your audience to include customers that didn’t have access to your products before.
Consumable products.
Consumable products require people to buy them again and again, so they also make good products to start with. You can use these products to start building a loyal customer base. If you predominantly sell consumable products on your site, you may even want to consider starting a subscription service, so customers can sign up and receive your products just when they’re about to run out.
7. Select Shipping and Fulfillment Partners
If you already have a brick-and-mortar store, chances are you already have vendors who you order from and have a consistent relationship with. However, with an online store, you now have the added pieces of shipping and fulfillment to get your products into the hands of customers. There are two ways to go about the fulfillment process depending on what works best for you:
Take on the packaging and shipping yourself.
Depending on the volume of shipments you anticipate, you can do the packaging and shipping in-house. If you go this route, you will need to purchase the necessary packaging materials. You can also see if you can negotiate rates with carriers to get cheaper rates, again depending on your expected volume.
Leverage a third-party service.
If you don’t have the resources to manage shipping and fulfillment in-house, another option is to use a third-party service to handle it. The third party would manage the warehouse, pack, and ship online orders directly to your customers on your behalf. You would need to work this into your budget to see if this makes sense for your business.
8. Set Up Payment Gateways
In addition to actually fulfilling your customers’ orders, you need to set up payment gateways so they can pay you. Especially in a time where flexibility and convenience is king, be sure to offer various payment methods (e.g., credit card, debit cards).
Most ecommerce website builders will make it easy to sync with a number of payment gateways such as PayPal, M-Pesa, Visa, Apple Pay and Mastercard. Each of which can handle credit card payments.
Choose the payment providers you think your customers will be most likely to use and connect those to your store. If you have specific business concerns like selling high-risk products or wanting to sell cross-border, you will want to make sure your payment gateways support those needs.
9. Add Products to Your Store
Now that you have a stylish site designed, a fulfillment plan outlined and have chosen which products you plan to sell, you’re ready to add products to your store!
When adding products, you want to make sure your product descriptions are clear and optimized for SEO (search engine optimization). This will make it easier for people to find them when searching online.
Here is some key information to include in your product descriptions:
- Name of item,
- Price,
- Weight and dimensions,
- Variants, such as color and sizes available and
- A clear description of the item.
You will likely also want to include high-resolution photos and videos of your products, so customers are clear on what they’re getting. By providing detailed product descriptions, you will help to limit the number of returns you have to process.
10. Test and Launch Your Online Store
You’re almost ready to go live, but there’s one more crucial step to take. You will need to preview and test all essential functions to make sure everything works as it should.
This should include confirming all of the following on multiple web browsers:
Does your site work correctly?
Preview your site. Do your products, photos and descriptions appear as you want them to? Do all the buttons you click take you to where you want them to go? Does navigating the site seem intuitive?
Does checkout work?
Test all of your payment gateways with test orders. Do they go through? Is the pricing correct? Do any discounts and promotions apply as intended? Do taxes show up correctly when the user enters their location?
Does the site work on mobile?
Make sure your site works on mobile devices and that all features are accessible.
If everything looks good and works as it should, you’re ready to go live and start selling online!
Essential Integrations for Your Ecommerce Website
Think of your ecommerce platform as the home base for your ecommerce website. However, it will likely not be the only part of your tech stack. Making sure all parts of your system integrate with your ecommerce platform will save you headaches in the long run.
1. Payment integrations.
You can choose payment gateways from popular providers that would work for your customers. These are critical integrations that need to work seamlessly with your shopping cart.
In a competitive market with high customer expectations, you’ll need to offer the best possible delivery experience if you want to stand out. Above, you figured out your fulfillment strategy. If you are choosing to go with a third-party system to manage shipping and fulfillment, this needs to integrate with your platform.
3. Analytics integrations.
One of the advantages of having an online store is that you can track customer behavior and see what pages they’re landing on, what they’re buying and where they’re dropping off. This will help you optimize the experience to get more shoppers to convert. Integrating analytics apps into your ecommerce store can help you track and better understand this valuable data.
4. Inventory integrations.
While your ecommerce platform will likely have its own inventory management features, for more complex stores you may want to have a third-party inventory management system as well. Synching your inventory ensures that orders will always be fulfilled, because when an item runs out of stock, the system auto-updates before the next prospect tries to purchase it.
5. Accounting integrations.
Regardless of the scale of your ecommerce business, you’ll need an accounting solution for bookkeeping. This can help you manage payroll, budgeting, cash flow statements, purchase-and-sales charts and profit-and-loss charts. This type of integration is crucial to making sure you keep on your original ecommerce budget.
In the interest of focusing on getting you launched as quickly as possible, we haven’t focused as much on digital marketing; however, once you get your site up and running, you will want to start marketing to get more traffic. This is again an advantage of having an online store — you have a way to reach customers and let them know about new products that might align with their interests. Adding email and marketing integrations to your tech stack can help you with these pursuits.
7. CRM integration.
Once you’ve driven more traffic to your site and started to build out a loyal customer base, you may also want to consider a CRM or customer relationship management integration. A CRM helps you manage relationships with current and potential customers which can ultimately help you both improve conversion rates and customer loyalty/retention to drive increased sales revenue.
8. Customer support integrations.
Customers are more likely to convert and more likely to shop with you again, when you take care of their needs and answer their questions in a timely fashion. Depending on the bandwidth of your team, you might not have the manpower to answer every email or phone call that comes in. Thus another integration to consider are those that provide customer support. This can include live chat or chatbots that can use AI technology to answer common questions and assist customers in real-time.
9. Social integrations.
As you get your site more established, you may also want to expand to other channels like social media platforms. These can be both a good marketing tool for advertising your products and establishing your brand, and also places to sell your products. Many ecommerce platforms allow you to easily integrate across social channels to better manage your inventory in one place.
Final Remarks on How to Create Your Ecommerce Website
Running an ecommerce website can be a complex undertaking, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get one up quickly in a pinch. Hopefully this guide will help you get your business reaching new customers sooner than you ever thought possible. We are here to support you on this journey as you transition to online store. Whether you are starting a fresh or you need a revamp of your existing platform. Do not hesitate to reach out to us.
The Digital Marketing Services
Gentum Media Services offers state of the art Web Design and Development, Web Hosting Services, Digital Marketing, Corporate Branding and Social Media Management. Specific to this article, we are happy to support your business How to Setup Your Email Program.
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by admin | Dec 3, 2022 | Digital Marketing, news
Free Business Listing Sites in Kenya
Online business listing is one of the best free digital marketing strategy that can significantly boost your online presence. It involves sites that are dedicated to availing information about various businesses by categorizing them. Online business listing sites makes it easy for targeted customers to search for your business when in need of a certain product(s) or service(s). However, an online business listing site can be free or paid for.
Below are our top 10 online business listing websites in Kenya to list your brand and watch it grow online authority.
Google my business listing is free to use tool that not only create a listing for your business on google but also manage your company’s appearance on search engine. When properly optimized, customers can easily discover, learn about, and contact your business.
This one is very popular among Kenyan consumers. They know that they can trust this site to provide respective providers for services or products of their interest. Your business could never go wrong for trusting this listing site.
Going by its already self-explanatory name, this business listing site is equally reliable in matters of business promotion. It doesn’t matter what your business or brand is about, because this site promotes all of them. You will find NGOs, entertainment, health insurance, fashion and beauty companies or businesses, etc.
Is your business or brand about mobile phones and accessories, furniture, computer and electronics and any other business you can think? PigiaMe has you covered as a site where you can list your brand and wait for customers to contact you.
Are you dealing with real estate, automotive and spare parts? If you are also offering services like gym training, house helps, cleaning, music lessons, etc., this site may help you.
For business owners located in Nakuru, Kenya, this site is quite reliable in marketing your brand. Hotels and travel and tourism, real estate, education, energy, events planning, ICT are just some of the few businesses or companies that you can list on this site.
This business listing site can be reliable to several businesses that fall under categories of entertainment and lifestyle, food and drink, building and construction, financial and legal and business services. Computer and internet based businesses can also utilize this site to create awareness of their services.
This is yet another site to list your business. All you need to do is provide your business details such as the name of the product or services you are offering, town or location and contacts. Any other additional information could be helpful too.
Not only does this site help business owners to list their businesses, but it also helps entities looking for potential employees. Should you need qualified employees for any job(s) as a company, use this site to list the vacancies.
Whether you are into hairdressing, real estate brokerage, health, and insurance, motor industry, etc., list your business at kenyaplex.com.
Our Services
Gentum Media Services offers state of the art Web Design and Development, Web Hosting Services, Digital Marketing, Corporate Branding and Social Media Management.
Talk to us today and let us discuss your big project.
by admin | Dec 3, 2022 | Digital Marketing, news, Online Jobs In Kenya
Ecommerce marketing is the practice of driving top-of-funnel traffic to convert into sales and new customers — and there are many ways to go about it.
From focusing on organic traffic and SEO to using Facebook or Google ads to drive targeted traffic, you can mix and match paid strategies with non-paid strategies, all to figure out which marketing mix converts the most people.
However, marketing campaigns are never static. As marketing tactics and marketplace algorithms evolve, so too must your plan to gain the highest return on ad spend and operating costs associated with non-paid growth strategies like SEO.
In a constantly changing and increasingly competitive environment, you need to make a concerted effort to increase sales at your online store. A lack of determination is why revenue goals aren’t met for many businesses. With the U.S. retail ecommerce revenue slated to hit $1.3 trillion by 2025, you don’t want to miss the boat.
How to Build an Ecommerce Marketing Plan
As you’re laying the groundwork for your ecommerce future, go through the following exercises while writing your business plan to ensure that your methods and strategy are well thought out and will stand the test of time.
Executive summary.
An executive summary is critical to an ecommerce marketing plan as it provides a broad overview of the project that is easily disseminated to leaders and decision-makers within your business.
The executive summary should summarize the key points of your strategy, including its overall purpose, desired results and project recommendations.
Goals and objectives.
Make your goals and objectives clear and specific. Once you begin to execute, there’s no shame in amending your goals if they turn out to be too low or too high.
Eventually, your primary focus should be on creating realistic, attainable goals before setting stretch goals to motivate yourself or your team.
Read about Survey jobs in Kenya that pay through Mpesa.
Mission statement and value proposition.
When building an ecommerce marketing plan, you must be able to answer the following basic questions:
- What’s the purpose of this company?
- What do you do?
- What don’t you do?
Not all companies need a philanthropic element to the business, but there needs to be a clear mission and value proposition.
Target customers, personas and markets.
Know your audience. If you don’t have a clear understanding of who you’re targeting, what characteristics define them and their location, you’re bound to run inefficient campaigns that waste money targeting low-converting, unqualified individuals.
Make sure to know the following:
- Age ranges.
- Gender breakdown.
- Geographic location.
- Purchasing power.
- Online shopping habits.
Situation analysis.
Make sure to perform a thorough assessment of the company’s current state, your user experience, the competition and the overall marketing plan.
Leave no stone unturned. A better understanding of your current situation will lead to better decision-making and, eventually, better results.
Read about Digital Marketing Opportunities for your business.
Pricing and positioning strategy.
Do your research. Ensure your pricing and positioning provides real value to your target audience and increase customer loyalty. Forcing new products upon your target customers that they deem overpriced is a losing proposition, especially when modern price comparison is effortless.
There will be opportunities for testing and refinement throughout your product’s lifecycle, but by doing a little more work upfront, you’ll be better off in the long run.
Distribution and fulfillment plan.
Even if you’re starting small, you should have a clear understanding of the distribution and order fulfillment requirements that will evolve as you grow.
Whether you are packing and shipping yourself, overseeing a small team, or leveraging a third-party fulfillment shop, you need to know whether your fulfillment processes can meet the demand of your upcoming marketing push.
After you’ve written your plans, make sure to spend time tweaking, refining and evolving them over time.
Executing an Ecommerce Marketing Plan
By this point, you should have a clear understanding of the subtle nuances that define your business.
If you’re a small business, or even an online retailer, this is when you start laying the groundwork for future growth, and if you’re more established, this is how you expedite your growth trajectory:
Read about ecommerce platforms in Kenya.
Determine your sales and lead generation strategy.
Because this is where the one-size-fits-all answers stop, you will need to get creative. The number of ways to market your business is potentially endless.
Even though the enormous list of digital marketing buzzwords can make your head spin, we’ll highlight the strategies and marketing tools that have proven track records of results and some newer strategies to consider.
Imagine a sales funnel graphic that shows your customers’ path from Awareness to Interest to Desire to Action. Each stage in this process should include notes about the specific marketing strategies you’ll employ to usher potential customers through that funnel.
At the top of the funnel, you’ll see ecommerce brand awareness-building strategies that don’t often produce immediate conversions — like posting organic social content or programmatic display ads. At the bottom, you’ll see Google search network advertisements, Instagram retargeting ads and direct email communication.
As a marketer, you’ll want to consider the primary purpose of every campaign strategy you employ and where it fits in your funnel.
Get technology and reporting software.
Before you make a serious marketing push, you must be able to answer the following questions:
- Is the technology I’m currently using to track the effectiveness of my marketing efforts adequate?
- Can it be used to determine whether or not the KPIs I’m seeking to improve are improving?
- Will it help our team accurately determine the ROI of our actions?
As mentioned earlier, the sheer number of marketing channels continues to rise, and the tools you’re using to track that information need to be sufficient.
A few great tools to consider are:
Start with conversions.
Within your lead generation and sales funnel plan, there should be specific bottom of the funnel strategies designed to get customers over the finish line. Roll out these campaigns first to generate sales and build positive momentum.
At the end of the day, conversion rates are amongst the most valuable statistics for an ecommerce business, and understanding them is critical to the long-term success of your business.
Test the waters.
Allocate part of your ecommerce marketing budget to test new strategies. After all, you’ll never know what works well and what doesn’t until you try it.
Depending on your budget, running some simple test cases in smaller markets can provide you with the ammunition you need to justify a budget increase, validate your prior recommendations and/or open the door to an entirely new market opportunity
Refine and expand your ecommerce marketing strategy.
Once you have seen positive momentum, you are ready to refine and expand your ecommerce marketing strategy. By now, you should have a good understanding of what’s working, what needs improvement, and what opportunities exist.
Therefore, refine and ramp up your initial strategies by increasing your budget and scaling up. Here. is where you can get even more creative.
Some strategies to consider are:
- Joint Ventures and Partnerships: Complementary brands have found success through partnerships. You can co-create content that exposes both brands to each other’s email lists or bundle a curated holiday gift package across several brands. When the brands align, both brands benefit.
- Increase Average Order Value (AOV): Once you’ve grown into consistent sales, it is time to increase the average order value. Tier your discount codes to incentive larger purchases or offer expedited shipping for orders 50% higher than your current AOV.
- Referrals: Offer current and loyal customers the opportunity to refer a friend and reap the rewards. If your customer experience is a pleasant one, your customer base could become an army of brand advocates.
Conclusion
Crafting a well-thought-out ecommerce marketing plan may seem daunting.
However, the wealth of strategies and channels that can help drive online sales is enormous and continuing to grow. While you may be tempted to go off to the races, intentionality is critical when you first begin developing an ecommerce marketing strategy.
Make sure you have a deep understanding of your product and the demand for your product, and don’t be afraid to make assumptions — so long as you test them.
Ecommerce marketers may feel like kids in a candy ecommerce store, trying to decide which new flavors to try today. As long as you’re organized, detail-oriented and willing to learn, it’s hard to go wrong.
Our Services
Gentum Media Services offers state of the art Web Design and Development, Web Hosting Services, Digital Marketing, Corporate Branding and Social Media Management.
Talk to us today and let us discuss your big project.
by admin | Dec 3, 2022 | Digital Marketing, news
Top 10 eCommerce Advertising Platforms in Kenya: eCommerce advertising platforms are online business listing sites to help ecommerce businesses create awareness for products and services and increase sales. An ecommerce marketing agency can help you identify the best placements with great impressions, click, and leads to sales. To effectively grow your ecommerce business- whether or not you have a physical shop- you need to leverage on the best ecommerce platforms that drive brand awareness and increase sales.
There are tons of eCommerce advertising platforms to list your products and services. We’ve rounded up the best top 10 eCommerce advertising platforms in Kenya in this article.
Jumia is arguably one of the best eCommerce advertising Platforms in Kenya. It records significantly high traffic of about 100,000 visitors per day. Additionally, you can showcase all your products under one roof.
Your business will need to use the following ecommerce advertising techniques to succeed in this marketplace:
- Have an SEO- Ready Ecommerce website.
- Create all-round eCommerce Marketing strategies
- Excellent customer service
- Transparency
2. Jiji Kenya
Jiji allows you to post free ads and sell your goods with sheer simplicity. You can also choose premium services with various ecommerce advertising methods to reach your target audience and make sales. With Jiji, you sell products and services online even without a retail presence. Just like any other ecommerce marketing strategies, use the right keywords for customers to find your products. The ecommerce platform in Kenya has top-notch security protocol to protect you and your buyers.
3. Kilimall
Kilimall came into existence in 2014 and has a following of 1 million Facebook users. On that account, with an effective eCommerce Marketing Strategy you can expect to sell your items without a hassle. Kilimall connects you directly to customers which is a huge plus. Another unique feature about this ecommerce platform in Kenya is that customers pay for goods first before delivery on all items including:
- Electronics
- Clothing
- Beauty products
- Sports and outdoor equipment
4. Masoko
Masoko is an eCommerce advertising website powered by Safaricom. You can showcase all your products, provided they are of high quality. Masoko accepts the following payment methods:
- M-PESA
- Bonga points
- Credit card
One of the best eCommerce Marketing strategies on this platform is to use relevant keywords since customers have to search for goods on the website.
5. Sky Garden
Sky. Garden offers an excellent ecommerce advertising platform in Kenya to reach potential buyers. Your ecommerce business also gets to enjoy shipping options and automated payment. Plus, you can upload videos that display your products in detail. The site comes with secure and flexible payments in the form of M-PESA, visa, and MasterCard.
6. BuyRentKenya
If you have any property you want to sell, BuyRentKenya is the place to be. This eCommerce site requires you to register first before advertising any property. The best part is that BuyRentKenya records about 300,000 users each month.
It also features the following:
- Lead generation
- Integrated CRM
7. Craigslist
Craigslist Kenya provides local classified advertisements for ecommerce business to post about their products and services. The ecommerce platform offers a wide national reach that can significantly increase your company’s online viability.
Craigslist is outstanding especially for small businesses. You can only run ads when you’ve fully registered on the website, promoting products and services for free.
8. Alibaba
Alibaba is a well-known marketplace to advertise apparel, electronics, and much more. Your products can get categorized as new arrivals, popular items, or new designs. Although Alibaba is headquartered in China, it’s available worldwide.
This eCommerce site has two advantages, which are:
- Effective target.
- Increased sales due to many users on the platform.
9. PigiaMe
PigiaMe allowes you to create free online advertising depending on what you intend to sell. Besides that, premium ads are available to grow your ecommerce business. PigiaMe allows you to advertise both products and services, regardless of your location. If you have trouble customizing your ads, work with an eCommerce digital marketing agency in Kenya.
10. Jambo Shop
Jambo Shop can propel your ecommerce business to a higher level, thanks to many customers on the platform. You can set up your account using your store name and email. This site also offers reliable 24/7 support if you have any issues. Jambo Shop is an ideal place to promote your brand via mobile or desktop.
Final Thoughts
The above ecommerce platforms are helpful when you need to grow your online reach and make more profits. If placing ads seems daunting, Partner with the best eCommerce advertising agency get customized digital marketing solutions for your brand.
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by admin | Oct 28, 2022 | Digital Marketing
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by admin | Sep 25, 2022 | Digital Marketing, news
Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change: It’s no wonder that innovation is so difficult for established firms. They employ highly capable people—and then set them to work within processes and business models that doom them to failure. But there are ways out of this dilemma. By Clayton M. Christensen and Michael Overdorf
These are scary times for managers in big companies. Even before the Internet and globalization, their track record for dealing with major, disruptive change was not good. Out of hundreds of department stores, for example, only one—Dayton Hudson—became a leader in discount retailing. Not one of the minicomputer companies succeeded in the personal computer business. Medical and business schools are struggling—and failing—to change their curricula fast enough to train the types of doctors and managers their markets need. The list could go on.
It’s not that managers in big companies can’t see disruptive changes coming. Usually they can. Nor do they lack resources to confront them. Most big companies have talented managers and specialists, strong product portfolios, first-rate technological know-how, and deep pockets. What managers lack is a habit of thinking about their organization’s capabilities as carefully as they think about individual people’s capabilities.
One of the hallmarks of a great manager is the ability to identify the right person for the right job and to train employees to succeed at the jobs they’re given. But unfortunately, most managers assume that if each person working on a project is well matched to the job, then the organization in which they work will be, too. Often that is not the case. One could put two sets of identically capable people to work in different organizations, and what they accomplished would be significantly different. That’s because organizations themselves—independent of the people and other resources in them—have capabilities. To succeed consistently, good managers need to be skilled not just in assessing people but also in assessing the abilities and disabilities of their organization as a whole.
This article offers managers a framework to help them understand what their organizations are capable of accomplishing. It will show them how their company’s disabilities become more sharply defined even as its core capabilities grow. It will give them a way to recognize different kinds of change and make appropriate organizational responses to the opportunities that arise from each. And it will offer some bottom-line advice that runs counter to much that’s assumed in our can-do business culture: if an organization faces major change—a disruptive innovation, perhaps—the worst possible approach may be to make drastic adjustments to the existing organization. In trying to transform an enterprise, managers can destroy the very capabilities that sustain it.
Before rushing into the breach, managers must understand precisely what types of change the existing organization is capable and incapable of handling. To help them do that, we’ll first take a systematic look at how to recognize a company’s core capabilities on an organizational level and then examine how those capabilities migrate as companies grow and mature.
Where Capabilities Reside In Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change
Our research suggests that three factors affect what an organization can and cannot do: its resources, its processes, and its values. When thinking about what sorts of innovations their organization will be able to embrace, managers need to assess how each of these factors might affect their organization’s capacity to change.
Resources.
When they ask the question, “What can this company do?” the place most managers look for the answer is in its resources—both the tangible ones like people, equipment, technologies, and cash, and the less tangible ones like product designs, information, brands, and relationships with suppliers, distributors, and customers. Without doubt, access to abundant, high-quality resources increases an organization’s chances of coping with change. But resource analysis doesn’t come close to telling the whole story.
Processes.
The second factor that affects what a company can and cannot do is its processes. By processes, we mean the patterns of interaction, coordination, communication, and decision making employees use to transform resources into products and services of greater worth. Such examples as the processes that govern product development, manufacturing, and budgeting come immediately to mind. Some processes are formal, in the sense that they are explicitly defined and documented. Others are informal: they are routines or ways of working that evolve over time. The former tend to be more visible, the latter less visible.
One of the dilemmas of management is that processes, by their very nature, are set up so that employees perform tasks in a consistent way, time after time. They are meant not to change or, if they must change, to change through tightly controlled procedures. When people use a process to do the task it was designed for, it is likely to perform efficiently. But when the same process is used to tackle a very different task, it is likely to perform sluggishly. Companies focused on developing and winning FDA approval for new drug compounds, for example, often prove inept at developing and winning approval for medical devices because the second task entails very different ways of working. In fact, a process that creates the capability to execute one task concurrently defines disabilities in executing other tasks.1
The most important capabilities and concurrent disabilities aren’t necessarily embodied in the most visible processes, like logistics, development, manufacturing, or customer service. In fact, they are more likely to be in the less visible, background processes that support decisions about where to invest resources—those that define how market research is habitually done, how such analysis is translated into financial projections, how plans and budgets are negotiated internally, and so on. It is in those processes that many organizations’ most serious disabilities in coping with change reside.
Values.
The third factor that affects what an organization can and cannot do is its values. Sometimes the phrase “corporate values” carries an ethical connotation: one thinks of the principles that ensure patient well-being for Johnson & Johnson or that guide decisions about employee safety at Alcoa. But within our framework, “values” has a broader meaning. We define an organization’s values as the standards by which employees set priorities that enable them to judge whether an order is attractive or unattractive, whether a customer is more important or less important, whether an idea for a new product is attractive or marginal, and so on. Prioritization decisions are made by employees at every level. Among salespeople, they consist of on-the-spot, day-to-day decisions about which products to push with customers and which to de-emphasize. At the executive tiers, they often take the form of decisions to invest, or not, in new products, services, and processes.
The larger and more complex a company becomes, the more important it is for senior managers to train employees throughout the organization to make independent decisions about priorities that are consistent with the strategic direction and the business model of the company. A key metric of good management, in fact, is whether such clear, consistent values have permeated the organization.
But consistent, broadly understood values also define what an organization cannot do. A company’s values reflect its cost structure or its business model because those define the rules its employees must follow for the company to prosper. If, for example, a company’s overhead costs require it to achieve gross profit margins of 40%, then a value or decision rule will have evolved that encourages middle managers to kill ideas that promise gross margins below 40%. Such an organization would be incapable of commercializing projects targeting low-margin markets—such as those in e-commerce—even though another organization’s values, driven by a very different cost structure, might facilitate the success of the same project.
Different companies, of course, embody different values. But we want to focus on two sets of values in particular that tend to evolve in most companies in very predictable ways. The inexorable evolution of these two values is what makes companies progressively less capable of addressing disruptive change successfully.
As in the previous example, the first value dictates the way the company judges acceptable gross margins. As companies add features and functions to their products and services, trying to capture more attractive customers in premium tiers of their markets, they often add overhead cost. As a result, gross margins that were once attractive become unattractive. For instance, Toyota entered the North American market with the Corona model, which targeted the lower end of the market. As that segment became crowded with look-alike models from Honda, Mazda, and Nissan, competition drove down profit margins. To improve its margins, Toyota then developed more sophisticated cars targeted at higher tiers. The process of developing cars like the Camry and the Lexus added costs to Toyota’s operation. It subsequently decided to exit the lower end of the market; the margins had become unacceptable because the company’s cost structure, and consequently its values, had changed.
In a departure from that pattern, Toyota recently introduced the Echo model, hoping to rejoin the entry-level tier with a $10,000 car. It is one thing for Toyota’s senior management to decide to launch this new model. It’s another for the many people in the Toyota system—including its dealers—to agree that selling more cars at lower margins is a better way to boost profits and equity values than selling more Camrys, Avalons, and Lexuses. Only time will tell whether Toyota can manage this down-market move. To be successful with the Echo, Toyota’s management will have to swim against a very strong current—the current of its own corporate values.
The second value relates to how big a business opportunity has to be before it can be interesting. Because a company’s stock price represents the discounted present value of its projected earnings stream, most managers feel compelled not just to maintain growth but to maintain a constant rate of growth. For a $40 million company to grow 25%, for instance, it needs to find $10 million in new business the next year. But a $40 billion company needs to find $10 billion in new business the next year to grow at that same rate. It follows that an opportunity that excites a small company isn’t big enough to be interesting to a large company. One of the bittersweet results of success, in fact, is that as companies become large, they lose the ability to enter small, emerging markets. This disability is not caused by a change in the resources within the companies—their resources typically are vast. Rather, it’s caused by an evolution in values.
The problem is magnified when companies suddenly become much bigger through mergers or acquisitions. Executives and Wall Street financiers who engineer megamergers between already-huge pharmaceutical companies, for example, need to take this effect into account. Although their merged research organizations might have more resources to throw at new product development, their commercial organizations will probably have lost their appetites for all but the biggest blockbuster drugs. This constitutes a very real disability in managing innovation. The same problem crops up in high-tech industries as well. In many ways, Hewlett-Packard’s recent decision to split itself into two companies is rooted in its recognition of this problem.
The Migration of Capabilities
In the start-up stages of an organization, much of what gets done is attributable to resources—people, in particular. The addition or departure of a few key people can profoundly influence its success. Over time, however, the locus of the organization’s capabilities shifts toward its processes and values. As people address recurrent tasks, processes become defined. And as the business model takes shape and it becomes clear which types of business need to be accorded highest priority, values coalesce. In fact, one reason that many soaring young companies flame out after an IPO based on a single hot product is that their initial success is grounded in resources—often the founding engineers—and they fail to develop processes that can create a sequence of hot products.
Avid Technology, a producer of digital-editing systems for television, is an apt case in point. Avid’s well-received technology removed tedium from the video-editing process. On the back of its star product, Avid’s stock rose from $16 a share at its 1993 IPO to $49 in mid-1995. However, the strains of being a one-trick pony soon emerged as Avid faced a saturated market, rising inventories and receivables, increased competition, and shareholder lawsuits. Customers loved the product, but Avid’s lack of effective processes for consistently developing new products and for controlling quality, delivery, and service ultimately tripped the company and sent its stock back down.
By contrast, at highly successful firms such as McKinsey & Company, the processes and values have become so powerful that it almost doesn’t matter which people get assigned to which project teams. Hundreds of MBAs join the firm every year, and almost as many leave. But the company is able to crank out high-quality work year after year because its core capabilities are rooted in its processes and values rather than in its resources.
When a company’s processes and values are being formed in its early and middle years, the founder typically has a profound impact. The founder usually has strong opinions about how employees should do their work and what the organization’s priorities need to be. If the founder’s judgments are flawed, of course, the company will likely fail. But if they’re sound, employees will experience for themselves the validity of the founder’s problem-solving and decision-making methods. Thus processes become defined. Likewise, if the company becomes financially successful by allocating resources according to criteria that reflect the founder’s priorities, the company’s values coalesce around those criteria.
Meeting the Challenge of Disruptive Change
As successful companies mature, employees gradually come to assume that the processes and priorities they’ve used so successfully so often are the right way to do their work. Once that happens and employees begin to follow processes and decide priorities by assumption rather than by conscious choice, those processes and values come to constitute the organization’s culture.2 As companies grow from a few employees to hundreds and thousands of them, the challenge of getting all employees to agree on what needs to be done and how can be daunting for even the best managers. Culture is a powerful management tool in those situations. It enables employees to act autonomously but causes them to act consistently.
Hence, the factors that define an organization’s capabilities and disabilities evolve over time—they start in resources; then move to visible, articulated processes and values; and migrate finally to culture. As long as the organization continues to face the same sorts of problems that its processes and values were designed to address, managing the organization can be straightforward. But because those factors also define what an organization cannot do, they constitute disabilities when the problems facing the company change fundamentally. When the organization’s capabilities reside primarily in its people, changing capabilities to address the new problems is relatively simple. But when the capabilities have come to reside in processes and values, and especially when they have become embedded in culture, change can be extraordinarily difficult. (See the sidebar “Digital’s Dilemma.”) More at Harvard Business Review Column.
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