You may know some of the pre-corona statistics and forecasting observing the growth of eCommerce in Egypt and the Middle East. We at MitchDesigns are witnessing the online eCommerce market during the Covid-19 in Egypt.
Things are changing so fast, I honestly thought that the eCommerce transformation would take 2 to 3 years to be normal behavior in our country, and we already aligned our B2B plans with this prediction.
Our mission is to maintain a set of the top successful eCommerce platforms in Egypt. Hopefully, one day, one of them will be so valuable, and the giant Amazon will acquire it as they did with Souq in March 2017.
We witness 3X to 5X higher sales with our current eCommerce clients in fashion, food, gift, and beauty industries. Our agency's website now receives 4X more inquires than usual, with brands looking to create a simple online shop or dive deeper into the eCommerce business.
I want to summaries the top points I usually discuss with our existing brands daily, and with the new clients.
1- Are the products viable for eCommerce?
Every product could technically and, in theory, sold online, but not all products are viable for eCommerce. What is that even mean?
For example, food, electronics, beauty, fashion, light furniture, and even groceries (Group A) are natural to stock, sell online, and deliver in Egyptian cities. While Group B, like flowers, jewelry, glass, art, large furniture, these kinds of products requires customer experience reform and more attention to the fulfillment process, which leads to a slower conversion rate than Group A.
Group A. Easier to stock and fulfill. While Group B is harder to present on a web page and ship it safely, and usually, the products are more expensive than Group A.
2- The Price Point
Can your potential customers afford to buy your products occasionally? If we advertise for the value of your products to your audience, will most of them engage and buy without overthinking the price?
It's essential to study and research the best price point of our audience for each industry and practice multiple tests and surveys. The customers' feedback is allowing us to optimize our strategies and targeting tactics
3- Promotions
What are we going to offer our customers to engage and consider our products?
Here is a list of examples:
- Great Value
- Promise
- Urgency
- Sale price
- Promo codes
- Product Bundles
- Buy A, Get B
- Buy A & B and Get X
- ree Shipping
- Free Gift
- Free Trial
- Loyalty Points
And tons of other promotion features in the eCommerce world.
A promotion helps your customer to consider a new experience, or motivate a call to action, or remind people to do a repeated activity. Offers need to work in order and fit together. Otherwise, there will be a huge mess.
4- Customer Experience
We usually ask these questions to ourselves and with our clients:
- Is it easy to purchase online?
- Can the user figure it out intuitively and explore the products on the website or app?
- Is it a pleasure to engage with the brand online?
- Can the customer up-sell more items to his cart?
- When will the customer repurchase again from our platform?
- How can we re-target our audiences and customers?
- How can we educate them off-site to engage with us?
- How can we convert a cold audience to learn more and engage with our brand?
- How can we turn a hot audience to visit our website/app?
Answers can be subjective and based on assumptions; that's why we love to do many A/B tests on different variations of customer experiences to measure the results and take intelligent actions.
5- Digital Marketing
We usually ask the following questions to understand the big picture of eCommerce, and how will we acquire online customers.
- What are the most suitable digital channels for marketing and advertising (Organic search, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Emails, Notifications, Display Banners, referrals, SMS, etc.)
- How much are you going to invest per day to invite people to visit your online shopping store and to add to the cart and eventually to checkout?
- What could be our cost per new customer acquisition?
- What could be our cost per conversion?
- What could be the number of LTV customers?
- What is our content strategy in the existence of an eCommerce platform?
An online shopping store without reliable digital marketing tactics will lead to unstable business, with low performance.
With the latest statistics there are more than 50 million Internet users in Egypt. One of the benefits the COVID did that it transformed many of these millions into online buyers, and the rest is enormous potential.
When you put the spotlight on these points, you will understand the importance of the digital transformation of your regular or in-store retail business to a professional eCommerce business.
At MitchDesigns, we recognize the eCommerce growth in Egypt during the COVID-19 and consider it is an excellent chance for retail and in-store companies. We sped up our plans and positioned our company to be an eCommerce agency based in Egypt, focusing on serving unique retail brands.
