Tips to Make Delivery Management More Efficient Using Delivery Boy App

Delivery management is the process of transporting a product from one end to another ensuring no damage in the most effective and efficient manner. Often referred to as dispatch or fleet management, the question here comes is How do we get these items transferred from point A to point B? How to overcome the challenges coming on the way during delivery management for eCommerce?

The B2C businesses require a robust delivery system that can handle the order tracking from order pickup to order delivery to provide an excellent customer experience. This role has never been in greater demand as customer expectations continue to grow. Since eCommerce is expanding, the demand for home delivery has been increased, and having a yardstick delivery system is of foremost importance.

What is delivery management?

The delivery management starts after the customer places the order. Whether you are a small B2C business owner or a multi-national brand, delivery management isn’t that simple. The store owner has to take care of the logistics, the order status, delivery boy, vehicle driver, shipping charges for cost efficiency, and last but not least the product condition at the time it reaches the customer’s door.

You can always hire a delivery manager. A delivery, logistics, or dispatch manager is commonly referred to as the person in charge of deliveries. The delivery in charge is also tasked with local delivery and driver operations control. They are also the middle point of communication between warehouses and those making deliveries in smaller businesses. Delivery managers prefer to concentrate on trouble spots, such as overdue orders, in more robust operations where orders are processed programmatically.

There are various software and modules available for delivery management that can help you with the seamless handling of the entire home delivery process. And if you have a PrestaShop or OpenCart store then you are fortunate enough because KnowBand has launched the Delivery Boy app for both the platforms. This will surely lend a helping hand to your home delivery business to successfully manage it.

KnowBand Delivery Boy Mobile App

The eCommerce store owners often struggle with late deliveries or hassled management. The customer who places an order needs the delivery as soon as possible. It is the prime duty of the eCommerce store admin to ensure that the product delivery should be quicker and handy.

We offer a handy delivery boy mobile app and admin panel to simplify both management and user-end delivery. Check them out:

PrestaShop Delivery Boy Mobile App

OpenCart Delivery Boy Mobile App

Make the delivery system more efficient using the delivery boy mobile app

Since we have discussed the challenges and tips to overcome them now it is time to see the solution that is instantly available for your store.  The ready-made delivery boy app to manage the delivery system! This can be

1. Easy configuration and customization:

You can configure the Delivery Boy from the Module Admin panel. The app can be customized for the preferred theme and you can add a logo and your brand name.

2. Create a delivery boy profile:

The registration can be done by adding some personal details of the delivery boy like name, email, profile image, vehicle number, vehicle type, etc.

3. Notify with Automated emails:

Once the Delivery Boy account is set up by the administrator, the Delivery Boy App login credentials are sent via email. You can also enable or disable the Delivery Boy from the admin panel (through store admin).

4. Delivery boy can check orders

The delivery boy can check the orders in his vicinity. Which ones are closer, how many orders are placed, and how many are actually pending?

5. Accept or reject the orders

The delivery boy may accept the delivery order or if the location is not suitable or he is done with the day or in case of any emergency, he can also reject the same with reason.

6. Door Step Delivery:

With a no-touch delivery system, get your orders delivered locally, with easy navigation provided.

7. Push notification:

When the order is placed or is out for delivery, or about the expected date of delivery or when the order is finally delivered, a Push notification should hit the customer device.

and a lot more. Check this informative guide for further details.

Challenges in Delivery Management:

There are various issues faced by eCommerce owners or physical store owners when they provide on-demand home delivery to their customers. The most annoying thing is waiting without knowing the order status. Some of the challenges are discussed here:

  • Incorrect tracking information- Problem finding specific addresses in deliveries. No way to keep track of agents/drivers.
  • Delayed Delivery- Customers do not know the estimated arrival time.
  • Handling delivery refusal by the customer-
  • Lack of proper database of deliveries, agents, and customers
  • Communication with drivers/agents is hard

You might need some software that can handle your deliveries in order to boost your delivery management system. But this program often costs you a lot of money. But in the market, pocket-friendly and better solutions are available. Let’s understand what the applications for distribution management should be able to do.

Tips to improve your delivery operations management

By completing more deliveries with fewer resources (man-hours, equipment, fuel), distribution operations are continuously trying to bring down costs while also ensuring a high level of customer service. Delivery managers frequently use a variety of instruments and techniques to optimize their metrics and scale up their activities.

1. Set your priorities:

A simple way to plan the day is by prioritizing the orders. You may classify those customers or stops that must be served based on the relevance of an order or the stated calendar date by doing this.
By specifying the priority of the order, you let the algorithm know what must be included in the optimization of the path. Or on the flip side, if you run into resource constraints, let orders get moved to another date.

2. Never give commitments that are hard to stick with

Today’s consumers expect accountability and are more concerned with businesses delivering than with pace throughout promised time-windows. If these consumer expectations cannot be met, organizations run the risk of harming their image.
False commitments will drive your customers away. You might have succeeded in achieving your target this time but if you fail to deliver the product on time then you will lose a potential lead and will impact the retention rate.

3. Pick up the orders faster

There are many things you can do to collect orders faster: plan your order list concerning the position of the goods in the warehouse, pick several orders at once (batch picking), consider how long it takes to pick products, consider the best way to handle various sizes of the products to be selected, and investigate whether people or robots are faster to pick them at the warehouse.

4. Incorporate order and vehicle tracking system

Tracking a vehicle with Google map integration is not rocket science anymore. Visibility to vehicle locations in real-time can help dispatchers understand when a driver may be off course, saving valuable resources and avoiding costly delays. Customer support teams also leverage vehicle tracking to tell customers when their delivery is likely to be completed.
Vehicle tracking will let you know if the driver is heading in the right direction on his or her way to their next delivery or not. You can even come to know about the traffic information with real-time tracking and geolocation intelligence.

5. Upgrade your delivery system with technology

Technology combined with AI improves human skills and reduces everyday work. In several different ways, AI can optimize the delivery management: customer service chat-bots, image recognition where AI extracts information from an image, identification of anomalies, quality assurance through image, video, and data tracking, delivery time prediction, fraud detection cameras, delivery robots, and more.

You can reduce the shipping cost with some pro tips discussed in my previous blog post:

6 Simple Ways to Reduce Shipping Cost

Conclusion:

So obviously, inside your online store, it’s always safer to have an integrated shipment tracking system for delivery management. The PrestaShop delivery boy app and OpenCart Delivery Boy App is an integrated eCommerce solution with complete tracking features, including the tracking dashboard given on the backend of the module. So you never need to step out of your PrestaShop store.

What Is Bounce Rate? How to Improve it Quickly?

The only goal of any business is to bring new customers and increase sales with the old ones but some visitors do not make it to the endpoint and leave without buying. In eCommerce, it is called the bounce rate. You might be getting enough clicks but no conversions and many website elements can be responsible for bounce rate.

Imagine a person wants to climb a mountain and planned an 11km long trek but he can’t go because the trek dates aren’t matching his holiday dates and he canceled the plan. The same can happen when a customer visits your website and does not find the product they want to buy.

Simply quoting, if a customer visits your website with an intention but he does not complete the action is termed as bounce rate. Let me give you another example, your website sells cosmetics and the customer requires a product that is organic and chemical-free but you fail to provide such a product because of poor categorization. He will immediately leave the site and may not come back.

If you don’t want your customers to bounce back, you need to provide engaging content, strong and powerful search bar.

Why does the user bounce?

A rising bounce rate is an obvious indication that there are off-putting elements or underlying problems that you need to fix on your web. A bounce is caused by a variety of causes and circumstances.

Although there may be several explanations for the elevated e-commerce bounce rates, a list of the common ones is below:

  1. Page didn’t meet expectations: Visitors didn’t find the data or the product in the appropriate manner that they were looking for.
  2. Long loading time: It takes more time for the page to load.
  3. Poor UI and content management: If the user interface of the website is bad and the content isn’t well managed.
  4. Poor navigation and UX: The landing page’s UI is complicated and difficult to understand by the end-user.
  5. The lack of ‘Call to Action’: For customers, poor navigation will increase the bounce rate.

How to reduce bounce rate?

Firstly, you need to optimize the reason behind the bounce rate on your website, and once you do that you can take necessary actions. Sometimes, the bounce rate can cause you so much revenue which is dangerous for your business. Here are some pro tips that can help you reduce the bounce rate on your website:

1.     Do not use unwanted Pop-ups

Unless it is necessary, do not use pop-ups on the entry page. Try pushing it on the exit page or after the user completes the action. A cause of the bounce rate can be a pop-up window that annoys the visitor. If necessary, you can add a gamified element to the entry page for an email subscription or any discount offer. Spin and win

2.     Translate your site for global users

A multilingual website demonstrates the potential for increased sales. Any language that you add to your website has the potential to increase your sales dramatically. In addition to targeting the local market, it would also draw Internet users from other countries by creating a multilingual website. A multilingual website can reduce the bounce rate for international traffic from 80% to 40%.

3.     Improve Page Loading speed

Getting fast page load time can also improve the crawl rate of your website. The quicker it is possible to load pages, the more Google will index pages at one time. High page speed may also increase the crawl requirement of your website. Many users bounce because of high page loading time. Hence, it is pivotal to reduce page loading time.

4.     Invest in UI and make it attractive and engaging

To improve the bounce rate the better UI and engaging content can be helpful. A successful design inculcates trust and makes it intuitive to navigate. People don’t spend a lot of time on places that they don’t like or find hard to navigate. Make it simple by getting a nice template to start with for your visitors. There’s a great list of pretty customizable themes available on the web for various platforms.

5.     Optimize the landing page and product page

The process of optimizing elements on a website to improve conversions is Landing Page Optimization. Optimization of the landing page is a subset of optimization of conversion rate and involves using methods such as A/B testing to enhance the conversion targets of a given landing page. This will improve the bounce rate several times than any other method.

The next possible strategy to improve the bounce rate is by optimizing the product page. You can include social proofs like review and ratings, clear call to action buttons, product videos, and high-quality images to the product page.

6.     Reduce checkout friction

Checkout friction is the major cause of cart abandonment and a higher bounce rate. It is important to remove frictions from your checkout page to decrease shopping cart abandonment, generate sales, newsletter subscribers, and to improve conversions. Adding multiple payment methods, shipping choices, make unnecessary fields optional, and offering social login and guest checkout can help.

You can use the One Page Checkout Module to overcome these issues. Read this to reduce the checkout page friction which can help you in reducing bounce rate.

7.     Make your website mobile responsive

Mobile visitors have far less patience than desktop visitors. To provide mobile users with a better user experience, ensure that your website has a responsive design. Also, the user base of smartphone users is more than desktop users.

8.     Add Personalisation Element

By presenting the data, personalization can help to enhance conversions. To support a specific product, following a centered strategy that is personalized to their behavior and liking would certainly help them in a successful transaction. The conversion and bounce rate are inversely proportional. If the conversion increases it will automatically diminish the bounce rate.

Final Words:

eCommerce Conversion: One of the easiest ways of improving your bounce rate is to boost your conversions. Someone who converts is automatic will not bounce. This guide will teach you how to use A / B testing to get more conversions on your website and other methods.

Minimize the bounce rate of a website: A very in-depth look at the bounce rate, including ways of using Google Analytics to correct a high bounce rate.

Reduce Cart abandonment: This is again a healthier way to reduce the bounce rate and these pro tips will help you reduce abandoned carts on your web store.

For, eCommerce related projects, contact our team at support@knowband.com or drop a reply here in the comment section.

How to Boost Your Christmas Sales with Giveaways and Viral Contests

The holiday season is at its peak and taking advantage of Christmas sales is not creepy at all. You just need to adapt some savvy marketing tactics like giveaways and viral contests to grow your business this Christmas.

Witty start-ups are taking advantage of the boom of mobile technology and social media to reinvent tired business models while existing brands such as Amazon and ETSY are aiming to target the millennials with wearable technology.

Think again if you think that such creativity is just the realm of nimble start-ups or major brands. It is equally a case of innovation for small businesses and newly launched e-stores, with mobile disruption spreading into the business industry.

This Christmas you can uplift your sales using social media pages by running viral contests and giveaways.

The trend towards Christmas or occasional giveaways and viral contests represent a huge opportunity for small online businesses to grow their very audience right up to the last minute and this will eventually increase your sales.

But only businesses with the right technology in place will be able to take advantage of this.

What is a Giveaway?

A giveaway is an act or an example of giving away something. The giveaway, especially a gift or premium is given with every new subscription to a magazine or a page. People often run them to increase their followers and to increase brand awareness.

You run a contest or give a gift to the person who completes the task. Running a giveaway is always an excellent strategy for someone trying to reach a new audience, engage their followers, generate leads, and drive an effectively infinite array of powerful acts that will help you achieve success and achieve your business goals, no matter what industry you work in.

How do Giveaways and viral contests work?

This Christmas, you can run a giveaway on your social media page like on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. This is how people run giveaways on Instagram. They will ask you to follow some steps like reposting their post in your story, tag a few of your friends and like your posts, etc.

How are you nurturing your viewership?

People do not like to buy from new brands; they prefer buying from personal recommendations.

And how do you get your brand referred to and recommended by people?

This method of discovering and cultivating the traffic into raving fans usually includes:

  • Creating advertisement traffic, content blogging, organic social posting, etc.
  • Capturing the email address for that traffic and retargeting them
  • Bringing up the leads.
  • Eventually, after weeks, converting the person with email or followup

The ‘Prize’ should be worth the efforts

A list of things you need to remember when choosing your contest or giveaway award for Christmas sales is below.

  1. Is it attractive and unique? If they miss out on this once in a lifetime chance, would people be upset?
  2. Are they shareable? A clothing store, for instance, could give away $1,000 store credit or they might do a personal shopping spree. The winner will be fitted, sized and styled and it would be very special. What one do you think is easier to share?
  3. How precious is the prize? If the grand prize was a $5 phone case, you wouldn’t share a contest with your buddies, but you would put in the effort to make the prize a personalized phone case and headsets. It doesn’t have to be a value either you want a high perceived value to be targeted at.

This Christmas, run viral contests with giveaways

Instagram competitions in a short period of time and with little effort will help you maximize your follower count.

Of course, there are other ways to gather more followers, but to raise brand awareness; you want to use every instrument in your arsenal.

Contests on Instagram will also help you gain more engagement.

Compared to standard’ content, posts related to Instagram contests appear to receive around 64x more comments and 3.5x more likes.

Best practices for running Instagram contests and giveaways

You need to be aware of some major best practices before you run your first contest.

Failure to understand these best practices may mean you’re going against Instagram’s guidelines.

It could also lead to lackluster results being generated by your contest, which can equate to a lot of wasted effort.

But what are the best practices like these?

The first is to ensure that a consistent and thorough outline is written for your contest.

When writing your content outline, make sure to cover:

  • Set the RULES
  • The ELIGIBILITY criteria
  • Any LIMITS on who is eligible to join
  • The PRIZE
  • DEADLINE for the contest
  • When the winner is revealed

Doing it this way makes it easier for you to remain on the right side of Instagram’s promotion guidelines. Some of the pretty Giveaway ideas are discussed below:

List of some contest and giveaway ideas to cater more

1. Invite by a tag

Ask your existing followers to tag a friend in the comment section or you can ask them to follow your page.

They can enter the competition and become eligible to win the prize.

This contest format does a fantastic job of expanding the organic scope of your profile.

That’s because they’ll actually get a notification until people are tagged by others.

These individuals will then search your profile and probably become a follower.

Instead of asking people to tag someone randomly, you might recommend that they tag someone they think deserves to win instead.

The winner of the contest for this type of format would be the person who has been tagged, and not the person who left the original comment. Follow us on social media. View our last video and follow the steps.

2. Repost and win

On Instagram, you can run giveaways that enable users to repost the giveaway announcement on their own feed.

Just make sure you have them add a defined hashtag and tag you in the post so that you can track entries.

For Christmas holiday sales, this is a perfect way to attract a wider audience to your brand and competition, build visibility, and kickstart customer relationships.

The downside of this form of the giveaway is that constant reposts can seem spammy, and Instagram does not actually have a native way of reposting images.

3. Like and comment to win

Source: Instagram

The simplest form of giveaway that you can run on Instagram is one that users can join by liking your message, following you on Instagram, and tagging a comment with their friends.

These are all fantastic ways to increase interaction, grow your followers, and introduce your brand to a wider audience, of course.

4. Selfie contest

You ask people to post a picture of themselves with a selfie contest while they use your product, or with the product in the background somewhere.

This contest format is particularly useful for a company because it helps to teach potential customers how to use a product. It’s a great type of content created by users.

Create a distinctive hashtag while writing the description for a selfie contest and then ask people to use this hashtag if they share their images.

By looking for the hashtag on Instagram, you will find the photos people have submitted for this contest.

Select the photo that you feel is best at the end of the contest.

5. Run Challenge Contest

A challenging contest will work wonders if you are in a place where you need to put together a contest in a short period of time.

In this competition format, you only need to come up with a simple challenge for individuals to face, and the individual who solves the challenge wins.

There’s no need for the challenge to be complex. In reality, simpler competitions usually attract more social interaction and involvement.

6. Voting contests

You can try posting a series of photos to Instagram and have users vote on their favorite in the comments for a chance to win a small reward if you want to get some quick reviews or just improve interaction. You can get your audience to vote on something specifically relevant to your brands, such as their favorite product or variant, or something more abstract like a desired holiday destination.

Some more Giveaway contest ideas for Christmas Sales:

There are many more contests that can be run over the Instagram platform or any other social media platform to boost sales before Christmas.

You can run a hashtag contest, comment and win a contest, follow and win a contest, post a photo contest by asking them to share a picture on Instagram or Facebook with your product and Instagram holiday hashtag related to your page.

You can even run contests in collaboration.

Collaboration contest increases your customer base because more the organizers more will the participants.

Giveaways can be used to push many useful acts, but there might be none that is quite as powerful as a fan-made content generation. There are many kinds of content that can improve your promotional efforts.

What results you should expect from Giveaways and contests:

Contests are viral and have the potential to generate traffic, leads, and social media followers, as described above. You will have to plan your contests accordingly if you want to accomplish one or more of these goals.

Some examples of contest goals are here:

  • Boost social media followers
  • Increase your website traffic
  • Generate potential leads
  • Grow your email subscribers
  • More clients, more sales

Wrapping up:

Each industry has a peak season of its own. For many e-commerce vendors, Christmas is the busiest time of year, Easter sees a massive increase in chocolate sales, and Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day are popular for florists.

If there is a holiday that suits your product’s increased interest, then running a giveaway is a perfect way to capitalize on the increased interest to attract attention to your product and push action.

You can drop a comment if you have any crazy giveaway ideas or if you have already run a contest on your social media then do let us know how it went.

So, Happy Holidays!

Recommended Read:

Top 10 Important Website Elements You Must Keep an Eye On

Every website design has to be proficient and fully functional and achieving this takes expert guidance. There are several important website elements that you need to consider before designing one. Be it a blogging website, social media, eCommerce, or a portfolio, you need to keep the design eye-catching.

Efficient website design may be the difference between a new conversion and a failed chance, whether the purpose is to raise brand recognition or to sell a product or service. Your website is how consumers learn what your brand is all about. For a website, the last thing you want is to discourage site visitors from being customers.

Below are some important website elements that will help you when considering your next website design.

  1. Choose a domain name and web hosting wisely

The most important website element for your success is to select the correct domain name for your website before the design and development. If you choose the wrong domain name, converting later without damaging your brand and search rankings can be a hassle.

That’s why selecting the right domain name from the start is extremely important!

Don’t get tricked for low price domains but stick with .com and you can use keywords while looking for a domain name. You can take web hosting from a reliable source.

  1. Identify your target audience

Targeting a particular market does not mean that you exclude individuals that do not meet the requirements. Instead, focus marketing enables you to concentrate your marketing budgets and brand message on a particular demographic that is more likely than other markets. This is a way of reaching potential customers and creating a business that is far more accessible, efficient, and effective.

Checkout your competitive companies and brands, analyze your products, and optimize the product designs, make a user persona, and do not forget to consider the physiographic behavior of your target customers. Recognize and understand the demand for the implementation of a better website design element.

  1. Mobile Responsive is the top priority

Around 5.2billion people use mobile phones and out of which 3.5billion use a smartphone. This number itself defines the significance of a mobile-friendly website. Why do we need a mobile-friendly website?

  • A mobile-friendly interface makes a site more available.
  • Improved experience with consumers.
  • A responsive design of websites is cost-effective.
  • A responsive mobile website improves revenues.
  • A mobile-friendly website ranks well in Google search.

  1. Interactive Web design and layout can compel

Rising numbers of UX / UI designers are now adding interactive and dynamic components to their websites, such as hover states, audio or video media, scrolling interactions, and more, in the anticipation that the interactive elements will attract and inspire more audiences to read and engage with the content of the site.

Optimize your landing page and product page content for better user engagement.

  1. Optimize website loading time

Visitors would be confused while waiting for a website to load. Nearly half of web visitors expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and within 3 seconds they might leave a site that is not loaded. It will help load your site faster by optimizing image sizes.

Hence, it is important to optimize your website’s loading time.

  1. Write impressive content

Both great architecture and great content provide a powerful web design. Great content can attract and influence tourists by turning them into customers using persuasive language.

You can write blogs, tell your brand stories to build customer’s loyalty and trust.

Content writing makes it possible for your brand to create coherent pieces of data. Consistency is one of the important factors in deciding your company’s growth and success, especially in brand messaging.

  1. Navigate your visitors with Call to action

Another key element on a website is the call to action, serving as a signpost that lets the user know what to do next. The user may not know the next steps to take to buy a product or sign up for a newsletter without a specific CTA and is likely to leave the web without accomplishing their mission. How CTA can help you optimize the consumer decision-making process is discussed in this blog.

  1. Social Media is the key

Many companies claim that just getting their own website is enough to stand out from their rivals, but the platform would still struggle to attract a significant percentage of the people who use the internet to look for new businesses without a Facebook page to support it.

To increase brand awareness, add social media share links on your blog posts and product page so that the user can share the link. Social media is an important website element to establish a brand’s identity.

Also, you can add your social media platform icons which can redirect the customer to your social media pages.

  1. FAQs and Contact Information Page

FAQs: Companies can clearly not afford to keep clients waiting in this hyper-competitive environment. In addition, products and services are also correlated with queries that occur frequently in the thoughts of users multiple times. Businesses should also ensure that they have a dedicated Frequently Asked Questions page that covers all the basics of their company, website, product(s), and/or service(s).

Contact Information: It is important that your website shows extensive contact details prominently on your website. This is a strong strategy for improving the reputation of the organization.

  1. SEO is an important website element

In the world, about 96% of netizens search on Google when they are looking for something be it a synonym or a service. So, in the first few results of a Google search, all websites buckle down on their SEO to turn up. An important step in developing a website is to establish a responsive website.

The bottom line

Business owners from all sectors can maximize their chances of a successful website project by keeping these ten factors in mind, ensuring their expectations are met and the overall design supports their business objectives.

Interested in getting more tips and tricks for necessary website elements and design ideas? Subscribe to our newsletter for daily updates on eCommerce. For any eCommerce website development assistance, you can write to us at knowband@support.com.

Recommended Reads:

Online Hyperlocal Delivery Business Model | Complete Guide for Food and Grocery Marketplace

The hyperlocal delivery business model is spreading its wings in the food and grocery market. Experts assume that in the coming future, the Grocery home delivery business will expand remarkably, and incorporating the hyperlocal delivery business model is a win-win for all the focuses involved. If you are looking for a solution to start a marketplace for grocery or food delivery business then KnowBand has exactly what you are looking for.

The modules developed for creating a hyperlocal marketplace are very well curated by the technical experts and analyzed by industry specialists to empower local businesses with the online grocery store or a food delivery marketplace. Online grocery shops have high profitability and the majority of people prefer online shopping rather than visiting the stores.

Bring your store on a digital platform and start your home delivery business with Hyperlocal Marketplace Module. For the beginners’ guide, you can refer to this article on on-demand Grocery Marketplace.  To deliver grocery, food, personal care products, or any services you need to make a plan and this article will be a step-by-step guide for launching your online home delivery store or an online marketplace. The hyperlocal delivery business model gives a platform to small businesses; they can become a seller on a marketplace and start selling immediately.

Companies like Amazon, Flipkart, Alibaba, Airbnb, etc, have established their brands in the marketplace industry and it is not easy to compete with these hotshots. Still, you have an opportunity to grow as people are supporting small businesses locally.

Step-by-step guide for a hyperlocal delivery business

Finding difficulty in deciding the right industry?

Don’t worry!

We have a plan.

Step 1- Select the industry you want to work in:

To finalize the industry for your hyperlocal home delivery business, do some market research. ECommerce has a lot of potentials if you do it right. Before establishing your hyperlocal marketplace business talk to industry experts, take help from the consultants or you can conduct surveys nearby.

Make good survey forms including all the necessary questions for the sellers and customers. List the benefits you will have and the sellers can enjoy. This will help you in finalizing your domain for the home delivery business.

Step 2- Decide your niche:

Once, you have decided on the industry, now it is time to determine the niche. The specific area you want to focus on. The hyperlocal delivery model for the food industry starts when you begin to think about the product and service you will deliver. You can choose basic needs products like dairy and bakery items, packaged food from a restaurant, lunch box delivery, essential grocery, or fresh vegetable delivery in local areas.

Here is the list of the top 10 budget-friendly hyperlocal business ideas. I’m sure this will help!

Step 3- Analyze what fits into your pocket:

Money comes next! Do not tempt the idea and dispose of your savings. Look into your budget and see what you have and how much you have to spend? Market research is important if you are putting your step into the hyperlocal delivery business. In my opinion, food and grocery delivery businesses are the best choices out there because this comes in the essentials and the essentials never go off the market. We already have witnessed the COVID 19 crisis scenario and boom in the hyperlocal grocery marketplace.

Step 4- Time to develop a website

Since you have to start your store online, you will need a website to enlist your products and services. You can either start a grocery, food, or personal care delivery business of your own, or you can create a marketplace web store and provide a platform to other small businesses.

A website can be created in a few simple steps:

Step 5- Attract sellers to your marketplace

Sellers are the most important part of a marketplace. If you are planning to start a food delivery marketplace similar to UberEats then you need to contact multiple restaurants and show them the benefits they can have if they sell on your marketplace. The food delivery marketplaces follow the hyperlocal delivery business model and we know how they are flourishing globally.

Read: How to Attract Sellers on OpenCart Marketplace

Step 6- Built strong customer base

In a marketplace, customers and sellers are interdependent. If you succeed in attracting sellers you will automatically invite a large customer base. Grocery home delivery and food delivery from their favorite food stall is the preference of every person as this gives them convenience and save time.

You can use Social Media to attract the audience by creating pages on different platforms. Read these articles for some of the best ways to attract more customers to a hyperlocal marketplace.

Recommended Reads:

Step 7- Make delivery set-up and tie-up with courier services

The success of an online grocery company depends heavily on how easily you can deliver the goods to the home/office of your client.

This makes it a vital factor in the entire start-up process to set up an effective distribution system.

Most consumers in India prefer delivery on the same day, more so for food and grocery products, and any unreasonable delay in this specific segment is generally frowned upon.

This is also not feasible, however, solely because of a shortage of human capital or the unavailability of vehicles to transport goods.

Deliveries often seem to come at a large cost-to-company, accounting for almost 30-40 % of total company costs. You can reduce shipping costs with some of the pro tips suggested in this article.

Step 8- Develop a Marketing strategy

The marketing strategies for the home delivery business can be a game-changer. You can use various social media platforms, go for email marketing, run campaigns; offer discounts, and a lot more can be done. You can attract sellers and customers by writing blogs and sharing success stories.

Although major online grocery players such as Big Basket and Amazon have the budgets on many media fronts to afford high-profile celebrity campaigns, you don’t have to follow the same path.

Instead, you can choose to market your online grocery store using local avenues that are equally successful, such as;

  • Putting a commercial in the local newspaper
  • Running a campaign on social media.
  • Sending SMS in bulk.
  • Putting up hoardings at famous places in your local area
  • Word of mouth is the best you can do
  • You can also hire food bloggers

Step 9- Allow Buy online In-store pick-up

It is a new trend to follow. Set up your Online Grocery Business with Store Pick-up Facility. This can save you from extra shipping charges and people sometimes prefer this to maintain safety and hygiene. COVID 19 outbreak expanded the market for BOPIS.

Read: Start your online grocery store with buy online and pick in-store functionality.

Step 10- Documentations and legal requirements

Before starting a hyperlocal delivery model for a food business you need to take care of some legal requirements and documentation work.

  • You need to form a legal entity
  • Register your firm or company for taxes
  • Open a business account to handle business transactions
  • Accomplish your licenses and permits as per your country’s policy and take the licenses according to state & local Business requirements
  • Since you are selling food products, follow all the food safety measures and regulations
  • Do vehicle’s registration and hire a licensed driver for transportation

Create a Mobile App:

Considering the numbers, the smartphone consumer base is wide and about 80% of the smartphone users did online shopping through mobile phones in the year 2020.

After the successful launch of your home delivery website, you can create a mobile app as the number of smartphone users is more than the desktop user. Built a grocery store mobile app for eCommerce and you can refer to this article to read the success story of our happy clients.

Read: [Success Story – Goldengrocery] Grocery Mobile App for E-Commerce

Wrapping up:

This article and the attached reads are sufficient to guide you on starting a hyperlocal home delivery business and a food delivery marketplace. The successful food delivery apps like DoorDash, UberEats, Zomato, etc. created a marketplace for small and big restaurants and increased their customer base and sales. Gear up for the new venture! You tell us what you want and let us think.

You can write to us at support@knowband.com or visit our website for further assistance. Our technical experts will guide you and help you throughout the journey.

How to Start Online Clothing Business- Complete Guide

Are you planning to start your own clothing business online? Well, thanks to the innovators and web developers. Now you can start an online merchandising business with minimal cost without any physical brick and mortar store.

Online clothing business is an opportunity if you are looking for a breakthrough idea. Strategic planning, the right approach, and excellent marketing can make you a dominator in the clothing industry.

Finding a good idea to work on is the first step to starting an online clothing business. You’re going to spend a lot of time, probably money, and effort on it, so make sure that you work on something that has real potential to earn you passive income, allow you to leave your job and do it full-time, provide value and use your skills and talents, or else.

You can sell anything like kids’ clothing, designer, vintage, or anything in between. It is now simpler than ever to set up an online clothing store, thanks to the invention of online store builders, such as OpenCart, Shopify, Wix, and PrestaShop, and the best part is you don’t even need to know how to code!

Since you have reached this far imagining about this new clothing business idea, now you require a plan which can help you start your new venture.

Before that starting a clothing business, ask yourself these questions: Are you skilled enough to start this? If you are passionate enough for starting a clothing business? Will you be able to deal with the new situations coming? Is it profitable? If your answers are in favor then you are preceding in the right direction.

1.     Choose the business model

It’s time to choose a business model for your online clothing store business, now that you know your niche and have an idea of the types of items you want to sell. Online clothing and fashion stores fall into the following categories of business models:

  • Retail
  • Wholesaling
  • Manufacturing

After choosing a business model, one has to select the type of clothing they want to sell:

  • Fast Fashion
  • Traditional Fashion
  • Custom Personalised Clothing
  • Designer Apparels

Each business model has its pros and cons and your ultimate aim, budget, and skills should be focused on choosing between them.

2.   Launch your Website:

Starting a clothing business online is a profitable business as 80% of millennials prefer shopping online.

It is important to have your website. It’s the only place you can sell clothes online and it’s where you’re going to develop your brand, get traffic, and implement all your knowledge to earn a profit. Your website will always be there, at the heart of your business, no matter how much your business expands over the years, and how many monetization methods you pursue.

A website consists of a domain name (the name of your clothing store website), a hosting provider (the company that provides the server to support online business), and a content management system such as Shopify, OpenCart, PrestaShop, Magento, etc. The online platform is the program that allows you to build an online store for selling clothes, creating content, and adding the product, email marketing, and much more.

For starting a clothing business you need an attractive name that should be easy to remember. You can hire a website development service provider to create the best to compete in this rapidly evolving world of fashion.

3.    Find your Target audience:

There is a target audience for every company, so make sure to do your research before settling on a niche. The more you understand your clients and what they want, the more are your chances of delivering the goods they want.

It isn’t easy to start an online clothing business but if you know your customer and have studied their consumer behavior then you can make this difficult task an easy one.

Start blogging:

I can’t emphasize enough how important content is to your overall online clothing business strategy.

You need to build content in multiple ways to start the online clothing business flourish. Writing blog posts, comprehensive guides, videos, social media posts, podcasts, courses, etc. can support every potential lead. Repurposing content is simple as once you have published a blog post, you can easily convert it into a series of emails, a free guide for your subscribers to download, several social media posts, and what not!

Conduct Online Surveys:

To know your target audience and to understand their demands you can conduct online surveys with free available Google forms or any other means. Surveying before starting an online clothing business has added benefits. For the starter, this can help you in deciding the type of product you can sell in your store.

4.    Build Your Clothing Brand

What shapes your brand is you and everything you do online. You need to make sure your brand is compatible with all the elements of your online clothing business.

It means:

  • Using the matching colors, photos, products, etc. on your web.
  • To build all types of graphics for your clothing brand, use a free tool, and capture interactive pictures of the clothes you want to sell.
  • Create a logo with a tagline to stand out
  • Writing an awesome page about telling your brand story and what you will be selling on an online clothing store;
  • Be on every platform of social media and get involved. That’s a way to connect, build up your followers and generate brand recognition with your audience and other business owners;
  • Capture professional images and add them to your website and social media pages for your product;
  • Ask them for reviews and display these testimonials on your website once you have some clients and email subscribers.

5.    Register Your Online Business

In your country, how to start an online business? You have built the foundation of your brand when your clothing website is launched and you have started making your first cash. That’s something you’re going to need to remember.

It’s an easy procedure to register an online company, but you need to follow your country’s rules. After making the lawful registration for paying taxes you will receive all the required details like company registration number, VAT number, etc.  Start your online clothing company and register it as per your country’s laws.

6.    Design Your Products:

Let’s look at the things in more detail that go into creating a product.

You have to choose any available service provider companies as your fulfillment service to design a product. Assume that you have created your online shop. You all know what it takes for fashion lovers to find something pleasant to wear, so imagine what it’s like to design it. Lots of things to take into consideration:

  • The creator of the designs cannot just imagine but are capable of making it a reality.
  • The survey which you have conducted before setting up your online clothing store will now help you as you know what your target audience like.
  • It is needful to keep an eye on the quality of the product you are going to sell. The cut and material of the garment is something you need to take care of. The fabric you will be using, its stretch and fit, all are important factors to start selling clothes online.
  • For the final result, from A to Z-the fit, the color, the design, you have to be sure about everything. You have to develop a product which makes them buy it. Otherwise, selling isn’t worth it. Before going live, be sure to order a copy.

Read: 8 Things that make a Perfect Mobile Product Page

7.    Master the Marketing and Sales Funnel

Getting your store up and running is the first step, but you will need to market your clothing store to make sure that you start (and continue) selling clothes online.

We highly recommend you marketing your online clothing shop over social media. This is a free and simple way to get out into the world with your brand name.

You can simply allow your customers to like your company on Facebook or follow you on Twitter with share and win schemes, which means they can keep up with all brand promotions, industry news that you can share, and any upcoming deals.

Affiliate and referral programs can help you with spreading brand awareness. It is the sneakiest way of bringing new potential customers. Another marketing tool is email marketing. You can send follow-up emails, promotional emails using apps, email marketing tools, and plugins to your customers who have visited your online clothing store before.

Your online clothing store will be making big bucks in no time at all with these easy, powerful, and inexpensive marketing methods.

It’s time to track success.

Conclusion:

When you start your online clothing store, you’ll need to find the middle ground between your quality standards, manufacturing costs, and making a profit.

Almost nobody is born with the full stack of expertise to start and run a successful business, so make the effort to learn about the pieces that you don’t know as much about, whether that’s how to connect in the fashion world, or how to build a growth-oriented business plan.

Be ambitious, understand your brand, and keep your set-up costs down! Good luck!

Recommended Reads:

Advanced Booking and Rental System for Online Bookings, Rentals, and Reservation Services

There are huge opportunities for hospitality businesses. Advanced booking and rental system for car rental, hotel booking, and other appointments and reservation-related businesses are gaining momentum. At present, the travel and tourism business is again getting its pace and it has been reopened in many places.

from the report, Iceland has recorded higher than expected footfall on the very first day that the country reopened the business. If you are into travel and tourism then you know how important it is to have a well-curated booking and rental software that can manage all your reservations and appointments with ease.

Be it a hotel business in a tourist place or your city or a car rental business, it needs a system that can handle your appointments and bring more customers with pre-booking services.

Why should you have an online booking and rental system?

An online booking system streamlines the booking process for you and your clients by automating tasks such as collecting customer information, updating records of bookings, payment, scheduling, and plenty of others. It helps to keep consumers on your website without flipping between multiple sites and services. Incorporating an online booking and rental system on уоur website іѕ а muѕt:

  • To manage bookings hassle-free
  • Interactive UI and attractive product and services display images
  • No extra commissions to be given to the mediator
  • It increases your bookings in a large number and chances of getting continuous orders
  • Dynamic Pricing Rule for different dates and times can be applied on occasions and holidays.
  • Versatile approach as it is compatible with the mobile app, multilingual support, etc.

Read: Why should you have an Online Booking System?

What all a merchant can do with Booking and Rental System?

1.   Book an Appointment:

Everyone hates waiting in a queue only to book a slot for a haircut or a massage. A choice for fixing appointments may also be offered by the online store merchants who are running a salon, is a dentist, or a therapist. Online users can schedule appointments and check the location on the product page. Dynamic pricing is an alluring feature.

Steps to follow for booking an appointment:

  1. Add the service to the cart- For example a dental clinic booking service
  2. Input the date and time on which you want to see the doctor.
  3. Confirm the Google Map location
  4. Finally, Book the service

All the information displayed on the front-end is controlled by the admin panel of the extension.

Read: Take your Salon Business Online with our Online Booking System Module

2.   Book a Hotel:

Customers prefer to pre-booking a hotel room to avoid a last-minute rush. Hotel booking has become easy and simple with Booking and rental system extension. Bring your hotel on the online platform to increase the bookings and give customers an enhanced UX.

Customer can book a hotel in simple steps:

  1. Select the hotel in which he wants to book a room
  2. Choose the room from the list of available rooms and it will display the category, type of room, and price.
  3. A pop will appear after selecting the room where the customer has to enter check-in time and check-out time
  4. Add the number of rooms
  5. Re-check the room’s information like the number of guests allowed, facilities, etc.
  6. Finally, Book your room for a happy stay.

The hotel details, availability, facilities, and other required information can be added and handled from the admin panel of the online booking and rental system module.

Read: 10 Best Practices for a Hotel Booking Website

3.   Rental System- daily, hourly, weekly rentals:

If you are planning to start a rental business this holiday season or looking for car rental software for PrestaShop or OpenCart store then Online Booking and Rental System Plugin by Knowband is the best choice. You can provide daily, weekly, and even hourly rental services in your store.

The backend of the Online Booking and Rental System module is easy to configure.

User has to follow these quick steps to rent a product or service:

  1. If you want to rent a car then select the preferred car from the product list
  2. Add check-in and check-out time
  3. Book your ride on a button tap. Enjoy!

How do Booking and Rental System work?

The booking and rental system can be handled by anyone. If you don’t know how to code then don’t worry! It does not need technical or coding expertise to start this service. It is easy to install and configure and also improves the UI of your website effortlessly.

  • Highly functional module: Booking and Rental service extension is a featured rich module that enables an online booking/reservation feature to be introduced by the online store retailer.
  • Online users can easily schedule an appointment, book a hotel, and get an hourly/daily rent for any product.
  • incorporate various items: The Booking and Rental System is highly configurable and enables the online store merchant to incorporate various items of various types, such as daily rental items, hourly rental products, products of appointment form, and types of hotel booking.
  • Google map and Location: On booking and rental pages, the online merchant can integrate Google map and display location.
  • Date slots and time slots: Dynamic price according to the date slots and date-time slots can be viewed by online users.
  • Online reservation eliminates extra time spent and allows the customer to pre-book a hotel, reserve an appointment, or rent a car effortlessly.

Benefits of providing booking and rental services

This enables you to gather useful data about your visitors

A booking system keeps track of booking and the information associated with it. When booking, the details customers provide is a valuable resource that an online booking app offers. You will get a better view of your clients, use reports to see what the most money contributes to proposals and provide insights into the cash flow in real-time.

It increases your productivity as an organization

More traffic to your booking engine flows directly from your website with a single click, more often. You get more bookings. Research indicates that to educate customer decisions, most visitors would look at the property website. You increase the likelihood when they’re ready to book; they’ll do it directly with your website if you give them a simple way for them to book right on.

It makes the administrative process easier for you and your employees.

Online booking systems are well curated to save extra time and efforts of your employees that they usually spend on email communications and phone calls before booking a hotel or renting a car. The extension like booking and rental services do this tedious, time taking job for you quickly.

The user experience is directly enhanced by this

A person who wishes to book a flight or a car for an early morning trip and a last-minute hotel booking all are possible if you are providing online booking and rental services on your website. The 24/7 support system enhances the customer journey and improves customer retention.

Conclusion:

So, I have shared all the needful information about how a booking and rental system works? What services you can offer? And how customers and sellers will be benefitted from booking and rental systems? If you want to start your booking services or rental services then go for the right software.

Knowband boast of the best in the industry plugins for eCommerce systems. To know more about this extension you can refer to the user manual of the online booking and rental system for PrestaShop and OpenCart websites. Ask yourself about the requirements and see if your needs are met by the module our team has designed. A free demo for the admin panel and front end will allow you to experience the complete sets of benefits of the module.

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OpenCart Website Development Services for eCommerce

OpenCart is undoubtedly one of the world’s most dominant Open Source eCommerce platforms. When it comes to the features that the platform serves its customers, eCommerce marketers are very happy to be a part of the OpenCart family. If you want to stand out in the competitive world, then OpenCart website development requires professional advice and expert guidance, along with robust tools and throughout the assistance.

Knowband’s technical squad is constantly working to add advanced features and custom functionalities to your eCommerce website so you can provide a better customer experience and work effectively. Whether you have an existing OpenCart store or are looking forward to jumping on the bandwagon, we are ready to put you at the forefront of the eCommerce domain.

Some of the most demanding OpenCart website development services for eCommerce are discussed below, which maximize the value of your OpenCart store and take the revenue to the next level.

Chapter 1: We create feature-rich eCommerce websites on OpenCart

What is the major goal of an eCommerce website? Drive more traffic, improved conversion, and happy customers, this will automatically improve your sales and add money to your pocket. What features an OpenCart website requires when you are a start-up or looking forward to starting your online business on the OpenCart platform.

eCommerce Website Customization

KnowBand is an eCommerce service provider creating solutions for various platforms for a decade. You will get custom solutions for OpenCart website development and design to implement on the eCommerce store.

To improve sales on your store we offer custom themes and templates, integrate order management and multiple payment gateways, and consistently building websites for eCommerce that are tailored to your needs and tailored to your imagination.

Mobile-Friendly Interface

The most alluring feature of OpenCart website development is that the store will be gadget friendly. It will be manageable from all possible devices like laptops, tabs, or the mobile phone.

Reports stated that the number of mobile shoppers has increased tremendously in the last few years. When you can have better choices then why settle for less? Make your store gadget friendly today.

Every website needs Dynamic UI/UX

User interface and user experience are the two most pivotal elements of a website design. The user interface designers have to develop the best UI that includes efficient screen layout, call to action buttons, the text they read, sliders, images, and every single micro-interaction the user gonna make on your OpenCart website.

User experience is determined by how easy or difficult it is to communicate with the elements of the user interface generated by the UI designers. So, we have professionals who can develop your OpenCart store with the most dynamic layout to achieve the best UX.

Custom Shopping Cart Development: Product, category, and inventory management

A virtual cart allows customers to add or remove products from it while shopping on your eCommerce store. A curated shopping cart includes product pages, category navigation, and checkout pages where the customer can enter their payment details to complete the transaction.

OpenCart website development for an eCommerce also includes the development of an admin panel for store management and order processing. Category, product, and inventory management are the other necessary features of a Shopping cart. The best shopping will be the one with analytics and matrices, tools for customizing your store, and marketing to customers.

Website Security and Payment

A robust security information network is to be employed to manage user information. The website security adds trust to your brand when a customer visits your website. The SSL certificate ensures that the website is secured.

Online payment is the cornerstone of the growth of e-commerce, an important phase in completing the internet transaction, and also the bottleneck of the development of the domestic network application. In order to sustain their business flow, any company or company operating the company on the internet must have an online payment system.

The protection of online payments is becoming one of the most important problems. Protecting consumers from internet attacks and cyber fraud is becoming very critical and one of the most important tasks for business owners to gain their trust. Trust badges and antivirus protection badge provides confidence to the customer who never shopped before on your store.

Incorporation of social media

The OpenCart website development services embrace social media integration in your eCommerce store. To attract the larger pool, you need to dive into the platforms user follows. Social media is the most powerful platform source for marketing and creating your brand identity.

We give you scalability to expand your presence in social media that allows customers to share your product and latest purchase on various platforms with their friends and followers.

Read: Boost your Social Media Presence with these Tips

eCommerce Platform Migration

It happens very often that the services and functionality you are receiving from your current eCommerce platform are not satisfactory. Do you know that platform migration is possible and this can be done without any data loss? The process carried out by experts and the OpenCart platform is one of the best eCommerce platforms for migration. The service provider migrates your store to a new platform and makes sure to deliver perfection.

If you own a website and you want to set up for an eCommerce then you don’t have to develop a new one. You can just use an existing platform and link it to your website.

Chapter 2: OpenCart Website Development Services that Can Convert

We know website development requirements for an eCommerce. To simplify complex issues to build completely integrated, scalable, usable, and high-conversion websites, we use market-leading tools and technologies and they look fantastic too!

Bounce rate and cart abandonment have caused due to many reasons but by converting customers, the two can be reduced. In this technologically advanced world when everything is upgrading every moment and technology is evolving every second, OpenCart Website Development companies have to produce products that cope up with the demand.

Build an eCommerce Mobile Application

The mobile users have been increased in the last few years and it is going up by leaps and bound. So, to maintain your position in the competitive world of online business, you need to have a robust mobile application.

The graph below from Statista is showing the number of smartphone users from 2016 to 2021(expected).

Knowband has the most dynamic, technologically updated Mobile App Plugin for the OpenCart store that gives a seamless shopping experience to users. Our OpenCart Website Development team delivers custom made mobile apps for eCommerce businesses.

Read: OpenCart Mobile App Builder- Transform your OpenCart Store into an Android Mobile App

PWA Development

The progressive mobile app or PWA transform online eCommerce website into OpenCart PWA Mobile App & offer a convenient shopping experience to mobile shoppers. It can be configured by the manager and the admin can give new look and feel to the store accordingly. It has functionalities that help you promote your brand and add a personalized experience to increase customer engagement. The other features which make it the best is the manager can add text and dynamic images, change colors and themes, show related products to cross-sell and upsell, and much more.

You can connect your PWA with WhatsApp messenger and give 24/7 customer support to your visitors. The customer support system is effective when we talk about conversion.

Scalable Solutions:

The OpenCart website will be scalable and you can expand it any time or add as many plugins as you want to. We create websites that can solve all your problems and leave you with a wide customer base and lots of sales.

Plugin and Module Development services

To manage the online business, you can add several OpenCart extensions that can help you in improved conversion, increasing brand awareness, user experience, and also in reducing cart abandonment and bounce rate. You can visit our website if you are looking for something to manage your returns or if you are having trouble getting email subscribers. Our plugins are easy to install and configure.

Create Marketplace

Since we are talking about scalability, I must mention the marketplace and its demand. The pandemic has changed the way of shopping and affected the business industry consequently now every business is trying to make their presence online on digital platforms.

Not every small business can afford a website so you can provide a marketplace platform for them. With the help of OpenCart Marketplace Plugin, it is effortless to convert your eCommerce single vendor store into a multi-vendor marketplace.

Resources to refer for OpenCart Marketplace:

Marketplace integration

Integration of the marketplace for eCommerce goods will include things such as product listing, order management, drop-shipping, and management of invoices. Connecting product details and inventory to markets in real-time is important, wherever they are, for seamless consumer interactions with your goods.

The marketplace integration module provides sellers with the following benefits:

  • Integrate your store with Etsy, eBay, Walmart, Newegg, Jet, and other marketplaces
  • Effortless product listing process with the functionality of bulk uploading
  • Mapping the attributes and categories of the store with the respective attributes and categories of the marketplace
  • The efficient control of the inventory of items
  • Efficient control of orders in the market place

Develop an eCommerce website to enhance the customer journey

Customers through all platforms are now expecting customized and satisfying experiences. For today’s customers, communicating with your business through any device or method that is most convenient is crucial. This is where plugins like custom personalized product design streamline consumer experiences and incorporate them.

On the OpenCart store, you can offer the following functionalities that directly impact the customer journey.

Best OpenCart Extensions to add post-pandemic

  • Start Booking and Rental Services

You can build and manage multiple booking services, whether it is an appointment, car/bike rental, or a hotel booking, using the OpenCart Booking and Rental system. It helps your clients to book an online service from anywhere at any time.

Reason to offer this:

  • Enhances the online booking experience of your customer
  • You can manage your bookings comfortably
  • You can provide a 24×7 booking facility

Resources to Refer:

  • Buy Online and Pickup Services

You can offer BOPIS services on your OpenCart store using KnowBand’s Store Locator Module. The physical store location will be shown by Goggle Map integration and customer can select that for order pickup. The customer can choose the date and time for pickup.

Why offer BOPIS?

  • Saves shipping cost and no extra shipping charges for customer
  • Customers like quicker services
  • Increases in-store sales
  • Promotes cross-selling and up-selling

Refer to this article to know how to click and to collect can win customers and grow sales.

  • Preferred Delivery Time

The OpenCart Preferred Delivery Time Extension enables your customers on the checkout page to select the desired delivery date and time.

Reason to offer this:

The average delivery time is typically 3-4 days or even more and this bothers the customer since they are not positive about the exact date and time of arrival consequently they have to make their order pick up arrangements. So, preferred delivery time allows them to set a date and time for order delivery which ultimately enhances customer experience.

Read: OpenCart Preferred Delivery Time Extension

Chapter 5: Why KnowBand when there are many others?

KnowBand will be happy to help you run a fast, secure, and user-friendly store with Opencart extensions.  OpenCart eCommerce websites are built by our team of talented developers for customers from various business verticals.

  • Experts do the planning
  • Design and Development by experienced professionals
  • Custom website designs delivered on time
  • Post Deployment Assistance: Support and Maintenance

Drop a comment below or reach out to us at support@knowband.com for OpenCart Website Development services or any custom changes on your existing platform.

Share your project details and requirements here and our team will contact you by the earliest. These services are also available for Magento, PrestaShop, and, Shopify platform.

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Add Gamification to give Holiday Season Flair to your Ecommerce Website Design

The coronavirus pandemic is forcing eCommerce businesses to rethink the store’s UI, design, and make some sparking development for the upcoming events and activities in the holiday haul. In short, make room for the shoppers who strictly maintain distance and avoid public places for the holiday celebration.

Adapting to restricted travel, increased online shopping, and families not getting together as normal means mapping tactics and navigating campaigns where they are: at home. It means spending more on digital platforms. Your eCommerce store needs a makeover before the Black Friday sale and you being a holidaymaker can plan its design well in advance.

Holiday prep includes website decoration, applying attractive colorful themes, banners with greetings, and promotional coupons that can drive them crazy. To convert window shoppers, fun elements like a gamified fortune wheel popup will work. You can even sell custom products on your store with unique designs, personalized gift ideas, or offer gift cards to indecisive buyers who want to give something to their loved ones.

In this article I will be focusing on two modules: The Spin and Win Fortune Wheel and The Store Decoration Module that can give your boring eCommerce website pages a striking look and impactful design.

1.     Add Fun Element!

To compete, eCommerce businesses do everything to stand out from the crowd.  There are options to design the store without taking the developer’s help. So, you can make impactful adjustments and changes in the pages even if you are a code freezer. Add some pocket-friendly playful modules to your online store and give a customer-centric design to it.

A Gamification popup during holidays will not only increase customer engagement but also delivers an amazing shopping experience.

Games are always attractive and proven to be the best for customer engagement. An entry popup with a gamified interface like Spin and Win can straight away gives a better customer experience to the visitors.

The Spin and Win module can be used as an entry pop-up, exit pop-up, and email subscription module. The user can also add custom text or a greeting to it during the holiday sale.

Read this to know more about Spin and win.

Click here to read client reviews on how it is changing the customer shopping experience.

The module is available for popular eCommerce platforms like PrestaShop, OpenCart, and Magento.

If you have developed a mobile app with KnowBand’s mobile app builder plugin, then adding Spin and Win to your website is a win-win. The two modules are highly compatible!

2.     Style your store with colors and themes

Colors add life to boring stuff!

An attractive website design with a colorful event-inspired entry popup can attract more customers to your store.

The fortune wheel (Spin and Win) has several themes for different occasions like Black Friday, Christmas, New year, and many more.

The themes have several alluring features that change the look and feel colors, and design. Also, it can be scheduled for the occasion in advance.

You can always play with colors in your store. Add colorful banners, change the button colors and use different modules and addons to make it look more attractive.

3.     Add decoration effects on store

The holiday season has feelings and emotions attached to it and people connect to brands with ‘heart & soul’ elements behind the façade. Adding holiday vibes to your website can give them a feeling of attachment.

You can add Christmas decoration effects, snow effects on the landing page or any of the other pages of the website with the Decoration Effect Module developed for the holiday season.

Decorate the eCommerce store by dropping colorful text, symbols from the admin settings, such as snowflakes, flowers, stars, etc.

Never miss a chance during the holiday season as this quarter brings a lot of opportunities in eCommerce.

4.     Ideas to set up header and footer for holidays

Be it any festival or occasion, you can set images, GIFs on the header, and footer of your website pages. Like for Christmas, you can either add a x-mas tree, decoration elements with bows and bells to the header, and something more attractive to the footer.

The Website Decoration effect module has several templates or you can upload customized images to it. Also, random elements can be displayed on your website that will add more festivity to their appearance and design.

The holiday season gives you many opportunities, so why not take advantage and grab as many customers as you can?

5. Run Exciting Deals on PrestaShop Store

In the coming holiday season, combining an impactful landing page full of deals and discounts with tagging and content sharing can prove to be a very useful strategy. Sales, discounts, and deals are game-changers when it comes to online shopping. You can always show a promotional coupon bar on the footer of the landing page or other pages using the versatile Website Decoration effects module without hampering the website design.

And, the Spin and Win Module allows users to grab exciting deals when they through their luck on it. The fortune wheel displays discount coupons, codes, or text messages on the slices. It is completely configurable in an easy manner and is one of our best sellers. You even get more email subscribers by offering deals and discounts through the lucky wheel. This provides a delightful customer experience and improved the website design with its attractive look and feel.

Mix it up!

Both these modules have exceptional features and functionality that surely can add a lot to your website’s design and decoration section during the holiday season. You can add either one of these or both the modules on your store for running deals, adding effects and animations to your eCommerce store.

With-passing day, the holiday season is closing in rapidly. People are not going to settle for an unintuitive, obnoxious online store design with the zillion choices they have out there. This season, optimize your site for your customers and see the results coming in!

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PrestaShop Website Development Services- PrestaShop Partner Agency

Looking for PrestaShop development services and custom solutions for your website? A feature-rich website design is what every store owner looks for. PrestaShop is an Open Source platform for eCommerce but developing a feature-rich website with exclusive UI/UX is not easy. KnowBand being a PrestaShop Gold Partner Agency provide the ultimate eCommerce solution for the PrestaShop platform.

Your website is the first element of your business that visitors notice. It features your brand identity. In addition, its design, templates, graphics, and content tell a lot about your brand and its story. If someone wants to contact you, they will call you or send an email to you. In the same manner, if they want to know your brand, they will visit your website.

Why PrestaShop for your eCommerce Website?

E-commerce is and has been for a long time, a major domain. Although many internet users once viewed e-commerce sites with scepticism, it has now become as popular as email checking. You might have given a thought on why, what, how, and whom to choose?  Such as, Why develop an eCommerce website when you can sell your products from a physical store? Is PrestaShop the right platform to develop an eCommerce website?  And is it necessary to hire a PrestaShop Development Agency?

Looking back on the rise of online sales and then looking ahead to the future of this industry is fascinating. The overall percentage of e-commerce retail sales has definitely risen in the last few months, accounting for 16% of US sales in the second quarter of 2020, as these charts from Statista reveal.

Brining your physical store on the internet into a digitally-driven world will certainly be a win-win scenario.

Choosing PrestaShop for your website will be a great decision. It is an open-source platform. I hope you know how Open Source Platform works. On PrestaShop, you can choose a free theme, add several free and paid addons, and customize to provide the best shopping experience to your customers.

You can avail yourself of efficient PrestaShop development and customization services for the e-commerce store to create solutions that meet your requirements.

Why Choose Knowband for PrestaShop Development Services?

To understand your company requirements, a highly trained & skilled techno-sales and business analyst team will assist you. KnowBand is a PrestaShop Gold Partner Agency with Super Hero Seller Ranking. Many of the modules have crossed 1000 downloads on PrestaShop Addon Store.

Our PrestaShop One Page Checkout addon crossed 10K downloads on the Addon store and 12K on the official KnowBand store.  Furthermore, marketplace solutions, AMP, Abandoned Cart email addon, product return manager, Mobile App Builder are some of the top ones among the 80+ available modules.

We go for a prompt & proactive strategy with flexible model development. Our squad who handles PrestaShop website development are highly talented and assure you to deliver quality method-checked and proven solutions on time. We guarantee you solid after-sales assistance with returns on your investment.

PrestaShop Home Page Design and Development

1.    eCommerce Website Customization

Your website’s Home Page creates the first impression! You might need an eCommerce website with several features that are not included in free themes. A customized website on the PrestaShop platform created by expert developers can boost your sales. For example, adding features like a gamification tool to engage customers will add more value to your business.

Being a PreatsShop Developer company, we help you choose your theme and modules that match your store’s vibe and customer’s choice. Let us help you customize the store according to your business requirements. From landing page to checkout page, we will discuss and work on every minute detail to deliver you the best possible PrestaShop store.

2.    Dynamic UI/UX for PrestaShop store

The user interface and user experience are important elements of a website. KnowBAnd experts and developers spend enough time coming up with the best ideas to stand out from the competition.

We assure you that your PrestaShop store’s UX/UI has a far-reaching impact on its ability to convert and engage customers. We assure to produce a store that has convincing UI and UX with our domain knowledge and expertise.

Recommended Read:

5 Key Elements for a Perfect eCommerce UI Design

3.    Customized shopping cart development

The ‘Add to Cart’ button is the most important element of an eCommerce store and this requires creativity. If you want your visitors to convert, a shopping cart is a must-add for your website.

An attractive shopping cart design needs all necessary information and colorful product images represented neatly to increase customer engagement. We can design and develop a handy shopping cart for your PrestaShop store to encourage impulse buying. Many required and interesting features can be added to your custom-designed shopping cart.

A cart should work as a salesperson in your store. For instance, if a customer clicks on the ‘Add to Cart’ button, a layer should appear immediately showing product details like features, warranty, cleaning instructions, recommended accessories, etc.

Our PrestaShop development team will make the design convincing and easy for customers to complete their purchase.

Recommended Read:

Why is a shopping cart a must-add for your website?

4.    PrestaShop Development Solution for Inventory Management

Finding difficulty in managing your stocks and inventory? It gets frustrating when you cannot manage the stock, orders, and deliverables. To handle the inventory, well-designed software is necessary.

We provide inventory management solutions for the PrestaShop platform. The management teams will receive stock notifications via a mobile networking system to save their time and effort.

The inventory management system of an eCommerce website can have several features matching the client’s requirements and we will give you what you need.

5. PrestaShopPlugin and Module Development

Powerful plugins for your eCommerce store can always be advantageous to your store. You must have the right module for the move, whether it is a payment, delivery, or some other e-commerce feature that you need to incorporate in your online store.

We specialize in the contextual production of the modules for the PrestaShop platform for a decade. Some of our plugins are best sellers. Adding them will indeed improve user experience, customer satisfaction, boost sales and conversions, and also helps in customer retention.

Plugins available for a better customer journey are discussed in the following articles:

6.    eCommerce Platform Migration

Are you not satisfied with your current eCommerce website platform? Not all platforms match your expectations and you might want to switch your store to another platform.

The migration of a platform impacts the business on a great scale and we have witnessed this change when we shifted our client’s website to another platform. The results are outstanding! The conversion rate has been increased tremendously.

For your current e-commerce shop, we provide stable and simple migration from any eCommerce platform or upgrade to the new version. The platform migration is a tedious process but we will do it for you without any data loss in a glitch-free manner.

7.     PWA- Progressive Web App for PrestaShop store

A Progressive Web Application for the eCommerce website on PrestaShop offers a potent web application to mobile shoppers. The web app converts the store into a mobile-friendly interface when a shopper opens the website on a web server. This is cool! You don’t need to depend on Google or Apple play stores.

PWA will have several features for your PrestaShop store to engage your visitors on mobile devices. What are you waiting for? Do add this amazing custom solution to your store contributes to steal the attention of your potential customer.

8. PrestaShop Mobile App Development Services

We have robust mobile app development solutions that provide dynamic UI and UX. The mobile app can be customized according to your requirements. We have served many eCommerce companies and designed a custom mobile app. Despite this, before hiring us for your next big project, have a look at the portfolio of Mobile Apps developed by KnowBand.

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9. Integrate PrestaShop store to Popular marketplaces like Etsy and eBay

Multi-channeling is one of the best ways for a broad range of online shoppers to reach out. One such platform that can help online sellers expand their reach is the online marketplace. Thus with evolving technology and changing customer behavior, selling products through these popular channels is essential for all sellers.

There are various rules for product listing and inventory management in different marketplaces. KnowBand offers a range of marketplace integration for the Prestashop platforms to assist sellers in the easy listing and inventory management process. The marketplace integration module provides sellers with the following benefits:

  • Effortless product listing and bulk uploading
  • Mapping the attributes and categories of the store with the respective attributes and categories of the marketplace.
  • Effective inventory management
  • Effective order management

The best integration plugins are available for eBay, Etsy, and Walmart marketplaces.

Recommended Resources:

10. Create Your Marketplace on the PrestaShop platform

It is always good to keep up with the trend. Isn’t it? So, now you have an online business succeeding through a website with all the custom solutions added to it. What else you can do? These days marketplaces are one step ahead of the eCommerce businesses. Speaking of an online eCommerce website, it is always an option if you have never sold online, besides this, marketplaces have a ton of benefits over them.

Either you can sell on a marketplace or you can convert your PrestaShop eCommerce website into a fully functional platform for the sellers out there. We provide complete web marketplace development solutions for the PrestaShop platform with custom functionalities. A multi-seller marketplace will have a proficient admin panel along with a front-end seller dashboard. The store manager can sell their own products and take a commission from the sellers on every successful order.

KnowBand provided PrestaShop Development Services for this Italian store. Have a look!

You can even start a Hyperlocal Marketplace that has two additional features: geolocation and time. Also, deliver a product or service in a nearby location that too in a given time. This is how a hyperlocal marketplace works.  Want to know more about it? We have a list of blogs that you can refer to and think about it!

Resources to refer for a marketplace:

11. Online Payment Services on PrestaShop store

Payment is one spot where customers abandoned their carts. Besides this, there are two ways payment affects the conversion: Limited payment gateways and Security issues.

·         Offer multiple payment methods

Having several payment options opens the doors for more companies to do business with and may lead to more long-term clients. It’s critical for merchants to provide a variety of payments while considering the customer experience.

Offering multiple payment methods makes it more reliable for the customers because they often feel intimidated while sharing credit card or debit card details. Hence, we make sure that the PrestaShop eCommerce website should not only has enough payment options for your customers but also the store owner can add more with ease whenever required.

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Best eCommerce Payment Gateways For UAE (United Arab Emirates)

·          Safe and secured payment gateways

As the Internet is full of hoaxes, something that is put online cannot be easily trusted. Particularly, if you are a new brand that has only been heard by very few people, customers are bound to have trust issues.

When we plan a checkout page, safe and secure payment is always our priority since it is the prime element for an eCommerce website. We give customers a checkout experience equally important as to the design and development part. Planning the checkout page can be crucial and it might require a significant amount of time and effort. As a result, most of the cart abandonments are observed due to poor checkout page experience.

Hence, designing a convertible checkout page is of foremost importance. With our expert technical team, we assure you to provide the best checkout experience to users.

The three important trust badges will be incorporated on the website:

  1. Website security,
  2. Payment Security badge, and
  3. Anti-virus trust badge.

Give a read to our blog post why is a trust or security badge necessary for an eCommerce.

Meet the trends with Innovative Solutions

Custom Services for PrestaShop Development

12. Embrace social media

Social media has become an important part of our life. People turn rapidly to their smartphones to take every single action. E-commerce and social media are joining one another to embrace the brand identity. Also, eCommerce companies are using Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for marketing and personal branding.

If you are ignoring social media presence on your PrestaShop website, it’s time to optimize it. Let us help you add social media logos to your PrestaShop store. In addition, link your account with the world’s fastest-growing platforms.

13. Micro-interactions for security

Since it is of prime importance that your site is secured and user-friendly, with increasing sales, the most challenging part is to tackle eCommerce privacy and security issues. Micro-interactions for security may steal your customer’s attention. Applying this drives the designers and developers nuts.

For an eCommerce website on the PrestaShop store, you have to ensure your customers that their data will be secured and not used for any unauthorized activity. It will be guarded with our secured authentication process. Microinteractions inform users if all requirements are fulfilled about their username and password. Further, adding inline validation saves users from extra work.

The websites will be SSL certified. Prestashop One Page Checkout is the most secured, GDPR compliant plugin for the final process of a purchase. We can add custom elements to your website to meet the security requirements.

Recommended Resources:

14. Custom PWA for PrestaShop

Progressive Web Applications (PWA), simply work much better than your typical mobile website. You can easily convert your eCommerce website into PrestaShop PWA Mobile App. Subsequently allow mobile users to add PWA and give them a hassle-free shopping experience.

It completely ends your Google Play Store or Apple App store dependency. It allows the store manager to connect with customers via Zendesk and WhatsApp chat. Isn’t it amazing that you can convert your eCommerce store into a mobile-friendly application with just in few clicks?

Resources to refer for PWA services:

15. PrestaShop Development Solutions for Home Delivery and Hyperlocal Services

Home delivery and hyperlocal services are the most in-demand services of this decade. If you are looking for a PrestaShop development company for your hyperlocal or home delivery start-up, you are at the right place. Knowland’s Hyperlocal Marketplace and Mobile App combo is the best module solution. Additionally, consider using the delivery boy app, booking, and rental system addon and store locator for best outcomes. Our modules can be customized against nominal fees if you want additional features.

Resources to refer for Hyperlocal delivery solutions:

Support and Maintenance

Our skilled team is always available to extend effective ongoing maintenance and round-the-clock support services for your eCommerce shop. We make sure that it is indeed operational, with prompt resolution of bugs and performance problems, so that it always provides the best customer experience.

Discuss your project with our experts: Talk to us!

Visit the KnowBand store to explore more or you can drop a comment below if you find this article helpful.

Finally, to create a website you need to decide the platform on which you would like to develop your eCommerce store. Several platforms are offering free or paid themes for creating a website. For eCommerce, we provide website development services for PrestaShop, Magento, OpenCart, and Shopify platforms. PrestaShop Superhero Seller badge, Gold Partner Agency, and module’s success clearly explain and how our services can help you develop an eCommerce store.

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