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Tips To Create an Exceptional Mobile App On-boarding Experience

According to Appcues, 86% people don’t return to a mobile application after downloading and installing it for the first time. It means if you manage to get 100 people to download your mobile app, chances are, that 86 out of them will never use your app.

As the famous adage goes, “The first impression is the last impression”, it is indeed true for the mobile apps. An exceptional onboarding experience for your app helps you to make a lasting mark on the subconscious minds of your users.

What’s exactly is, mobile app onboarding?

Onboarding as a term, is quite popular within HR teams, as it refers to the process of integrating new employees into the organisation and familiarising them with the function and layout of the company.

That’s exactly what it means, for mobile apps too. The process of integrating new customers into the app ecosystem and familiarising them with the function and layout of the app. It consists of tactics and strategies to make that experience lasting and impressive.

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Here are some tips to create an exceptional mobile app onboarding experience for your users.

Easily accessible

The gateway to explore your app should be easy. Users generally find it unpleasing to input lots of information, just to be able to access an app. Social login is much easier for users and allows them to connect with their social accounts. Most of the successful apps require less information to log in and collect more information during the session.

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Your purpose

There are over 3 million apps currently running on Google Play Store, and over 2 million running on iOS App Store. To stand out among these, your app should provide a significant value to your users and that value proposition should be loud and clear for them. Users don’t like to go through the whole app, just to learn what your app’s all about and how’s it going to help them. The very first screen of your app should reveal the purpose of your app and how the app can provide them with a solution, entertainment or a benefit.

You must answer some of the common questions like, how your app can help simplify their problems. It is also essential to tell your users, how your app is different from those already present in the market, through simple and attractive graphics and animations.

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Learn by doing assistance

Users generally don’t like to go through a user manual to get to the main functionalities of an app, rather, they prefer to learn on their own, by exploring it. Providing them with short instructions, explaining the use and meaning of each icon through tooltips or hints, as they explore your app can be helpful.

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Progress and appreciation

As humans, we like to track our progress and be incentivised on achieving specific milestones. As your users go through the onboarding process, provide them with progress status using carousel dots or horizontal bars at the top so that they can know how far they’ve reached. Once they’re done, appreciate them with a success message, so that they have a sense of accomplishment and feel motivated to use it further.

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Anytime assistance

Don’t leave the users all to themselves after their onboarding. Ask them to get in touch with you anytime when they face problems. Users love to know, that you care for them.

You can provide them with live chat options or chatbots like, Natasha in Hike, who can guide and assist them like a friend if they face any issues or want to know something.

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Vanity Metrics vs Actionable Metrics

Vanity MetricsVanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics. What should be your Focus?

When people track metrics, they often make the same mistake. They post a blog or a product and then they see a spike in traffic. They can’t take their eyes off the analytics. In the process, they start tracking the metrics that don’t matter in the long run. In this post, we will guide you as which parameters are important and which don’t matter that much.

There are two types of metrics. One is vanity metrics, and the other is actionable metrics. You need to know the difference between these two categories of metrics, which statistics matter and which statistics affect the bottom line of your business.

Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics are the numbers or stats that might look good on paper but in reality don’t mean much. Be careful not to spend too much time on tracking statistics and figures that don’t matter much in the long term because you might regret the amount of energy you wasted by trying to maximise irrelevant statistics and numbers. They are the numbers that make us feel good when they go up however they don’t help us in making decisions.

Google focuses too much on vanity metrics. When you go to the visitor's overview section, you are bombarded by vanity metrics. There isn’t even one number on that report that you should care about. It isn’t Google’s fault. Google is only showing us what we want to see, when the users go up, it gives us instant gratification. The trick lies in converting visitors into customers. You should try and grow your business instead of trying to focus on metrics that don’t matter much in the long term. Metrics such as page views, visitors, fans, and followers are a distraction from the real job at hand.

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Actionable Metrics

Statistics that tie into specific and repeatable tasks that you can improve and to the goals of your business. If a metric isn’t actionable, then you should not track it.

Actionable metrics can answer these questions: 1. How do you gain or lose revenue? 2. How do you gain or lose customers? 3. What are the key functions and benefits that people are coming to you for?

Enable ecommerce tracking, define goals and calculate target values so that you have actionable metrics to work with.

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Here are a few of the actionable metrics that you should look into:

Revenue

You need to track where your revenue is coming from. Each time someone pays you, it needs to get tracked. It includes all these metrics: 1. Lifetime Value 2. Total Revenue (Month, Quarter, Annual) 3. Net Profit 4. Average Order Value 5. Number of Transactions 6. Average Length of Subscription (for subscription business models)

Leads and Customers

You need to know where your customers and potentials are coming from. Social media? Google? Paid Traffic? You need to find out. It's not the same as finding out where your customers are located. That is vanity metric. Their clients represent a very small portion of your visitors; they might get lost in the data. Instead of focussing on visitors, you should look at where your customers are coming from. This tells you where you should spend your marketing and advertising dollars.

Conversion Rates

You should track the conversion rates of your traffic sources, primary keywords, and marketing campaigns. Do not try to compete with others in your industry. You should only compete with yourself. Establish an internal benchmark and then beat it. If you move up, then you’re doing a good job. Otherwise, you’re going backward, or your efforts aren’t yielding any results.

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Cohorts

You should know what separates your most profitable customers from those that buy only once and never return. To understand how these groups behave you need to use cohorts. Cohorts separate your customers into groups so that you can find the trends in the data.

Marketing Campaign

Does your marketing campaign yield a profit? If it doesn't then you need to get rid of it. Test new ideas until you make them work. You need to know how much profit your campaign is bringing you.

How should you pick your metrics? Do not look at Google analytics. Start looking at your business.   You should pick only 1-5 metrics that tell you how healthy your business is. This will include things such as revenue, the number of leads, account signups, and lifetime value. You somehow need to figure out how to force your analytics tools to get you as close as possible to these specific metrics. You might have to merge and import data into excel.   You should track the health of your business and not the health of your website. Focus on metrics like:

A/B test results

Newsletter subscribers

Conversion rates

Cohort reports

Funnels

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, we only have a limited amount of time. You shouldn’t waste time looking at metrics that don’t matter. For example:

Pageviews 

Visitors

Time on site

Pages/visit

Use your time wisely and track these metrics:

Revenue

Customers

Conversion Rates

A/B Tests

Funnels

Cohorts

If you want to get the real data, you should go and talk to the customer. Get to know why they bought from you, how did they find out about you. Business is all about building relationships. Therefore you must reach out to customers. You can get a better data by talking to people in 5 minutes rather than looking and analyzing reports for five months.

Looking to develop a business website that gets you qualified leads for your business? Talk to our experts today.

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Best of the Web Development Trends for 2017

When you go back 10 years ago, you will notice how web development has completely changed. Back then, mobile devices were not even existed and now the number of web users via mobile has exceeded the number of web users via desktop. Web development is changing dramatically. Still following old practices will get your business stuck behind the times.

Following latest trends help you to make smarter and concise decisions rather than making unnecessary efforts. We bring you the best of the web development trends for 2017:

Artificial Intelligence

AI technology will highly impact web development especially web design. Websites like Google and Wikipedia are already using AI. Pinterest recently launched a new feature that allows searching visually.

In eCommerce sites, finding the desired product is a challenge and AI will ease it by enabling to process searches in natural language. With AI, automation in web development and web design will go to an all new level. AI will give a new life to the CMS which will process automated content generation and promotion.

Websites will be able to track visitor’s activity in real-time. AI will also help in cases where buyers research a product online before purchasing from a brick-and-mortar store. In short, AI will help in capturing a detailed customer's journey.

Internet of Things

IoT will enable linking smarter objects which were never thought to be linked before. Web developers will be able to create web apps that would communicate with such objects the way never seen before. Mark Zuckerberg completed a project on a system called Jarvis which allows him to control several home appliances and devices.

IoT is moving fast and is expected to view some big and new innovations in future. Startups are regularly investing in IoT projects. It's expected that startups, with not more than 3 years of existence, will bring some big innovations in the IoT world. That day isn’t too far when the internet will be the most prominent tool for our livelihood and responsible for managing our day to day tasks.

Bots and Conversational UI

Bots will make it easier for people to interact with websites. The language understood by websites and human beings are different. Bots and conversational UI will assist in the usual activities carried on a website like shopping, searching useful content and whatever the site offers. Such sites will also offer a quick and real-time support to visitors.

JavaScript For Future

The debate for the best programming language is still on. Javascript provides numerous advanced frameworks and libraries which make it the future of web development. Facebook designed a javascript library “REACT” for building user interfaces. Javascript is also easy to learn and include syntax related to the English language. JavaScript can be used both on the client side and server side. JavaScript is the most used language on Github. It’s used by 92% of sites on the web. More and more developers will look to imply Javascript on their projects.

Rich Typography

The Internet is mostly filled with basic fonts like Open Sans. Other types of fonts including decorative ones will be seen in future. Such typography can be seen integrated with additional effects using images or animation. We can see larger fonts may be more than 14px to be used in 2017.

More Authenticity

The majority of websites are filled with stock photos. Remember a site is meant to fulfill the purpose. In 2017, we will see designers using more of authentic photos in spite of generic images. A business website can use photos of their workplace, employees or provide services rather than some stock photos downloaded from the internet.

Motion UI

Motion UI will be adapted by various websites. Motion UI includes creating custom CSS transitions and animations. Motion UI will be included as long as it’s not affecting simplicity and responsiveness of a website.

Motion UI can be used in several elements with a website like roll down navigation, moving background or page header. For every specific action, motion effect will be there to confirm your action. Different types of page loading effects will be seen with a motion UI.

Long Scrolling Websites

Usually social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and eCommerce sites are long scrolling types. Other types of websites can also become long scrolling. Provide useful content and attractive elements that excite visitors to long scroll down a website for hours.

If you are looking to develop a professional website for your business, you can hire a web development company to help you build a site with integrated privacy policy and all other important features.

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What is an Effective Pricing Strategy for your eCommerce Store

The Internet is full of eCommerce blog posts. Most of them help you strategize how to enhance an eCommerce website and marketing techniques that make it more engaging.

Have you ever thought what strategy do consumers have while making a purchase? Yes, an optimized and a user-friendly website does affect the buying decision. But many simply browse multiple websites and purchase from the one which offers the lowest price.

Many eCommerce owners have struggled badly to identify the pricing strategy that works best for them. They are ready for this struggle because a pricing strategy can either make or break their business.

Before figuring out a pricing strategy, you should know the two basic goals of an effective pricing strategy for your eCommerce store:

Attract Customers 

Discourage Competitors 

Let’s help you decide a pricing strategy that works best for your eCommerce store.

Market Intended Pricing

Market research can help you decide your product pricing.High competition in the eCommerce industry requires you to check the pricing of your competitors. It's not necessary that you must lower your prices to compete effectively. Sometimes the price for a product you are selling is comparatively lower, as compared to your competitors. In such a case, you don’t need to hike your prices.

In a world of automation, you can go for a company that offers automated market research.

Research Based On Products And Competitors

Conducting pricing research for your entire store and every competitor may seem difficult. You may have to deal with thousands of products each having a large number of competitors. Choose the products that drive you most profit and the competitors that the are the most important.

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Update Prices For The Selected Products And Competitors

After selecting the products and competitors, start listing the prices. Automated price tracking can work here. Also, track if the stock of those products are available or not. In some cases prices changes frequently and you need to keep monitoring it on a daily basis. Using automated price tracking can help you manage the process efficiently.

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Price Tracking To Actionable Reports 

There is no point of collecting data if it can’t be used appropriately. Get your analytics team to create actionable insights from the prices you are collecting. Set up notifications and alerts for any change in the competitor's pricing. You can integrate APIs with your store to create customized functions that match your pricings to the competitors. 

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Market Research Using Conjoint Analysis

Conjoint analysis is the best market research method to determine the pricing for a product. In conjoint analysis, researchers determine what customers compromise and what they gain when paying a price for a product. Both these metrics are compared against each other to get valuable insights. 

In general, we analyse how customers make a buying decision. What matters here is the customer’s expectations from the product. 

We combine market research and customer psychographics here. However, this combination can simplify many eCommerce business problems. After all, meeting user expectations is the most important factor that determines your success.

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You can have a look at some more market analysis methods to develop an effective pricing strategy for your eCommerce store.

Value Based Pricing

It focuses on pricing a product based on the price your customers are willing to pay.

The best thing about this strategy is that customers pay the amount that the product actually deserves. It doesn't consider your competitors, retail price or any other principle except the value that the customer is getting.

Value based pricing can either decrease or increase your profitability. It totally depends on the customers. You can hike the prices if the customers are willing to pay more or you may have to lower the prices if the customers don’t find your offerings worth. 

Here are some tips to implement value-based pricing strategy effectively: 

When applying value-based pricing, you can’t consider everything. Focus on a single segment of a single product or look at a single competitor. 

When calculating the value based pricing for a product, look at the alternatives available in the market. 

Then decide the features that make you unique from your competitors.

The next big thing is to calculate the value that your product is adding, in pricing terms.

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Manufacturer Suggested Retail Pricing

In this case, you have a fixed margin but no say in the final price that is being charged to the customers.

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Discounted Pricing

Who doesn’t love coupons, rebates, rewards and special offers? You can use this strategy if you want to sell a huge stock fast. Don’t run the same offer for too long. This may ruin your brand reputation.

Bundling Products

You must have seen multiple products selling in the same price category in a grocery store. You can bundle multiple related products and offer them at a discount. Bundling is a helpful technique to provide more value to customers while getting more sales at the same time.

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You must measure and analyse the results your eCommerce business is getting from your pricing strategy. You can modify your strategy to get better results over time.

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10 A/B Testing Ideas For Your eCommerce Store

 A good website is a key to your eCommerce business success. A customer who is spending time and money on your site wants a satisfactory experience in exchange. A smarter testing is required to ensure that your website fits every requirement of end users.

E-commerce has grown to a great extent and its future is even brighter. You can avoid failure by proper testing of your eCommerce website.

A/B testing is the best choice you can make for your online store. A/B testing is one of many reasons that has helped many successful e-Commerce businesses raise their empire. A/B testing will bring you more sales and reduce the bounce rate on your website.

In A/B testing, two versions of web pages are tested against each other. Ease of analysis is one big reason why you should go for A/B testing. Moreover, the metrics used in this testing are simple and straightforward. Every element on your web page can be tested for better results.

Here are some A/B testing ideas for your eCommerce store: 

A/B Test For Product Images

Most of your consumers view product images to decide whether to buy or not. How well the product images are optimized and where are they placed is a critical factor taken into consideration.

An A/B test for a site by a company found that larger product images are better than shorter ones.

Along with the images, also pay attention to product description. If consumers didn’t gain adequate information from images, they move towards its description.

If you A/B test two same images against each other, the difference may be too small that can’t even be noticed. I recommend testing two different images like with different size, borders or background. You can also test two completely different images like testing a model with a graph. This will be easy to analyze and help take instant business decisions.

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A/B Test For Live Chat Support

Stats show that when being in the middle of a purchase, live chat can be a need for online shoppers. It ensures that the shopper shows no hesitation before completing the checkout process.

A/B testing two live chat modules can provide some significant insights for your conversions. Don’t just jump to conclusions from these results. These conversions might be a result of some other factor on your site. Also, analyse the behavior of different users towards your eCommerce store.

Live chats are available with different looks and sizes. Place your live chat strategically at the most appropriate place. Customers should not think twice to press the live chat button whenever they require any support.

Live chat generally pops up in two different ways. The visitor may require filing a registration form or it may automatically start. You may think it’s obvious that an automatic live chat will get better responses. But filling a form sometimes becomes important for eCommerce stores. Security may be one reason for this. But the most important reason is gathering user data for future marketing and analytics. Like you may use this data for personalized email campaigns or retarget.

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A/B Test Your Recommended Products

You can recommend products to the visitors on your site based on different criteria.

Featured Products 

Best sellers

New arrivals

Discounted products

Similar items

Complementary products

Recently viewed

Most viewed

Product recommendations

A/B testing can help you decide which one works best on your store.

A product recommended to a visitor can include a title. A recommended product is seen by a visitor mostly due to this title only. Titles like “70% of people who viewed this product also viewed” catches instant attention. You can include such titles in your A/B testing.

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A/B Test Your Search Box

Search box on your website makes it easy for your customers to navigate your site and find their desired product.

Should you place your search box on the left or right? These type of questions are important to answer. Most eCommerce sites prefer to place it at the top centre. A/B testing will work well to decide the place where most people will love to look.

It’s necessary to optimize the text on your CTA buttons. Test which phrase attracts most visitors. Experiment with different designs and colors. Many sites make their search box more highlighting.

Search boxes that include drop down categories are liked more than standard search boxes. If you have any doubt, you can A/B test between the two.

Choose the right service provider to help you develop an eCommerce website, that can help you get a higher conversion rate and more loyalty from your customers.

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A/B Test Your CTA Buttons For Different Shapes

In e-Commerce, CTA Buttons are used at various sections on the website. It can be an add to cart button, confirming the purchase and all the steps in the checkout funnel.

Rectangular or oval and you just name any, eCommerce sites are trying every possible shape for their CTAs. A/B Testing some unusual and irregular shapes is now common. CTAs with icons, plus sign or shopping cart sign are now catching more attention.

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A/B Testing For Single Vs Multiple Checkout Process

The checkout process of your eCommerce site can be subjected to a variety of optimization. The most common debate is regarding the number of steps included in your checkout process.

A single step checkout process simplifies the checkout process and saves the time of your customers. But if you include several fields, then using a single checkout process will look cluttered.

A multiple checkout process, on the other hand, can be used to collect more data. Like you can collect user’s email address in the first step. If the user abandons the process in next steps, then you can contact the user via email.

Don’t just rely on stats collected from different eCommerce sites. A/B Test what works best for your own store.

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A/B Test Your Website Color

The standard color scheme for any eCommerce site is white for the background and black for the text. Our eyes are more attracted to this traditional color scheme. This scheme follows a light background with a darker text.

Colors can be used to communicate emotions, concepts, actions and qualities. You can take advantage of psychology offered by different colors. Experimenting with different color schemes can give you a great opportunity for enhancing user experience.

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A/B Test Your Font Size

Fonts on your website is a major source of presentation on your website. You can choose from bold, underlining or no styling fonts. Also, test which font size works well on your site. Variation with font size has a record of getting more number of clicks. Test what impact did different fonts had on your engagement and clicks.

A/B Test Your Product Filters

With so many products on your store, filtering options are extremely useful when looking for a product. Different sites have their own filtering options such as theme, category or sizes. Experience from each site varies from poor, mediocre to good. Filtering options also vary based on the products and the eCommerce site. Test and decide how you want to optimize the filtering options on your site.

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A/B Test Your Payment Options

Many new payment options are getting discovered. Test for different variations of payment options you want to put on your site. Don’t ask for credit card details on every purchase for your existing customers. Test for guest checkouts and see which payment option works the best.

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If your are looking to build a growing eCommerce business, then choosing a professional eCommerce development company can be helpful. Look for a solutions provider that can help you with innovative services and solutions.

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Tips and Tools to Improve the Conversion Rate on Your eCommerce Website

For an increased conversion rate, your eCommerce website needs optimisation. If the eCommerce website is offering products on great deals, then more purchases will be made on that site. But it’s not the only factor. A site that doesn’t seem to be trustworthy will cause the visitor to click away.nny.

In this article, we will discuss some tools and tips that will surely help to improve the conversion rate on your eCommerce website:

Google Analytics  

E-Commerce requires a lot of data. Insights from analytic tools can contribute to improving the conversion rate for your eCommerce site. Google analytics provide helpful insights about the traffic coming to your website. And if you're using it for only analysing traffic, you are doing injustice to it. Google Analytics offers many more features to improve your conversion rate especially if you have enabled eCommerce tracking in it.

E-commerce websites depend heavily on its promotional campaigns and affiliate partners. They are the primary source of traffic coming to eCommerce sites. Many times customers click on a discount coupon, they didn’t know whether the discount coupon is already applied or they need to implement it at the checkout page.

It may seem like a simple problem, but in the case of successful eCommerce companies like Amazon, enormous revenue risks may be associated. Google Analytics can help in tracking your referring URLs, containing your promotional campaigns. Go to the Reporting TAB in Google Analytics < Click on acquisition < Click on All Referrals.

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Conversions can’t be gained without a goal. In Google Analytics, you can set up the desired goals. To figure out your goals look at the most critical elements on your site that determine your success. Some goal types that can be critical to your business are leads, trial signups, account creations, newsletter signups, white paper downloads, Ebook downloads or checkout completion. Four ways to track goals in Google analytics are URLs, time, pages/visit, events.

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Goal funnels help to see what is happening at each stage of your process. Like, build a goal funnel for your checkout process starting from shopping cart to the payment page. A goal funnel is limited to only ten steps. But you can add more by setting two different goals.

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“59% of online shoppers believe that it is easier to find more interesting products on personalized online retail stores, 53% of online shoppers believe that retailers who personalize the shopping experience provide a valuable service, 45% of online shoppers are more likely to shop on a site that offers personalized recommendations”    (Source)

Customising the shopping experience of your users by dynamic web pages can bring some valuable conversions. Everyone loves when someone remembers your favourite dish or provide something special on your birthdays.

The eCommerce section in Google Analytics provides “ eCommerce product performance reports”. These reports are very useful for getting insights needed to optimise your product pages. To measure product performance, Google Analytics provides insights such as: 

How many times did a visitor view a product or product list?

How many times did a visitor click on the product description page/box?

How many times and when a product was added to the shopping cart?

How many times and when a product was removed from the shopping cart?

What is the number of unique purchases for a product?

How many products were added to the shopping cart per number of times product details was viewed?

How many products were purchased per number of times product details was viewed?    

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Live Chat

Live chat is the best customer service solution for happy customers. The convenience offers by this feature speak everything. Online customers want help mostly when browsing online products to make a purchase. A live chat simplifies the employee task, cutting down many expenses of setting up a customer care team. You can involve a single person to handle multiple conversations simultaneously. With fewer spendings, live chat can improve your sales figure and lower your bounce rate.

For adding a live chat feature to your website, you have plenty of options. Some of which are free and some are paid. Choose the one offering a simple interface and gets integrated into your website quickly. Mylivechat is a free option available. It engages your customers in a faster and personal manner.

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Website Testing 

Testing an eCommerce site requires understanding about webs testing tactics and e-Commerce domain. Almost every website has the same site structure. Common elements like homepage, product details, categories and payment page are available on every eCommerce site.

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Different tools can be considered for testing different metrics on your eCommerce website.

Usability tools can be used to improve user experience on the site. There are so many variables that need to be evaluated such as navigation, dimensions, colours, etc.

UserTesting.com is a free online usability testing tool for eCommerce websites. It tells site masters why people leave their site. It’s very easy to use and requires very fewer expenses than any other such tool.

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Performance tools can be used to test the website speed, browser compatibility, and search engine optimisation success. We also need to check that the website didn’t crash in case of a large load on the server.

Jmeter is a free tool for testing an eCommerce site’s performance. Jmeter is entirely designed on Java. It can be very helpful for simulating heavy load on a server.

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Many times a website requires frequent testing. After every change, a test is required. In such cases, automation testing can be a big help. It removes the burden of repeatedly checking a website and separately testing its different elements. But don’t expect any magic from your test automation. It will not deliver as many bugs that a manual testing would. And most importantly don’t automate every task.

BrowserStack is a tool that can automate your testing. It’s supported by every device like a mobile, tablet or a laptop and runs on regular browsers.

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New e-Commerce companies are getting listed in search engines regularly. Healthy SEO is the requirement of every eCommerce site. SEOmoz can help to check the SEO status of your site. It can be used to test crawl errors, broken links, accessibility issues and analyse your rankings, keywords and optimal performance. 

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Email Marketing 

Every eCommerce company uses email newsletter signups. The primary source of remarketing used by eCommerce companies is email. Email marketing has helped many businesses to increase their conversion rate. Many email marketing automation tools are now available that can run email campaigns more efficiently in a quick and easy way.

Mailchimp is the leading email marketing platform available. 15 million small online shops have been converted to big online retailers using MailChimp.

You must build a professional and an engaging eCommerce website for your business. Use the right set of tools to get more engagement. You can take the help of an expert development and consulting company to get better results from your eCommerce store.        

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10 Tips for an Effective eCommerce Shipping Strategy

Running an online business is not easy. Many aspects like implementing a marketing strategy, managing social media and website, managing orders, inventory and much more. But what eCommerce business owners ignore are the steps after the customer had successfully checked in and made a purchase. Yes, I am talking about the shipping strategy. Because shipping directly to customer’s doorsteps is one big reason, why people choose online shopping rather than traditional shopping methods.

Imagine, having ordered your favourite product from a trusted online store and the product arrives one week late. You continuously followed up with the customer care, but nothing worked out. Will your website remain trustworthy for the user? Would you shop from visiting the site again?

I know your answer is a big no because eCommerce is a big market space and you have many choices.

From a business perspective, ignoring a shipping strategy can harm your market reputation and you could easily end up with negative feedback and a poor user experience.

Here are 10 steps for having an effective eCommerce Shipping strategy:

Good Packaging for a Striking Presentation

Noticing its packaging is the first thing that the customers would do.  Unboxing videos are becoming more and more popular. In these videos, your packaging will be displayed to a wider audience when shared on a video sharing site.

A good packaging that goes with your brand is surely recommended.

eCommerce sites should provide premium packaging options for gifting purposes and on special occasions. Some products like those made of glass, or some electronic goods, require safe packaging.

Labelling your packages well, is also very important, but it’s an after process once you have figured out your courier and shipping costs. You can add a personal touch to your packages like a quickly written hand note for your first order. 

Create a Checklist 

One most common mistake in the shipping process is the mismatch of address. Sometimes, the shipping errors can get worse like the wrong product getting shipped etc. A checklist needs to be maintained and revised continuously so that no such error occurs.

Make Use of Data 

Businesses are using insights gathered by data, to create actionable plans. A well-executed shipping strategy aims to deliver a friendly experience for the users.  Supply chain management is using big data and analytics in a big way. Your goal is not only to focus on the first order, but all orders placed by each of the customers. Most of the times, your basic web analytics will work, but at times, advanced big data analytics should be considered whenever required.

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Free Shipping and New Shipping Options

Most E-commerce companies now provide free shipping for their orders. With free shipping, your site will surely get more conversions.

Don’t Ignore Inbound Logistics 

Businesses put a lot of effort in successfully supplying goods to their customers. But to execute that properly, you can’t ignore inbound logistics. Managing the inventory effectively is also an important aspect of shipping the goods in an appropriate and a timely manner.

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Shipping and Order Fulfillment

From receiving an order to successfully shipping that order, there are numerous steps involved and handling them can be quite a task.

An order fulfilment service can be of great help for ensuring that orders are safely picked, packed, shipped, and all the steps in between are completed accurately and on time, irrespective of the customer’s requirements. Fulfilment services can automate all your orders. At the same time, You also need to educate your fulfilment, so that they can execute the shipping process effectively.

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Customer Service

Your customer service team should have a thorough understanding of your entire operations and the shipping process. There is a whole lifecycle associated with eCommerce shipment and customers may need support at any stage. Social media is turning out to be a new and instant channel for communicating with customers, and increased number of online shoppers are expecting to get support on social channels. Adding a live chat option on your eCommerce site can be great for solving customer queries instantly.

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Keep your Promises

Right shipments need to be delivered to customers safely, quickly and on time. To win the loyalty of customers, retailers must keep all of their promises. It’s all about the lifetime value of the customers and you will not be able to achieve a higher lifetime value, if you are not able to retain your customers.

Analyze Your Results

You must analyse the impact if the of the changes you make, to your shipping strategy. You can track the changes in the engagement and the conversion rate, on your website. Google Analytics is a helpful tool to analyse the results from your activities over a period of time.

Ask for Feedback

Asking for feedback is one of the best ways for increased improving processes and building credibility. A feedback can be used to detect trends, issues and get insights to optimise your strategy.

You can take the help of your eCommerce website development company to develop the most appropriate shipping strategy for your business. Besides that you must ensure that the same is well executed to ensure the best outcome for your business and your customers.   

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10 Tips To Ensure a User-Friendly eCommerce Checkout Process

People now prefer online stores because of the convenience and benefits they offer. They get better deals than any other traditional stores especially if the deal is directly from an authorised manufacturer. In such a fast changing environment every business is converting into a digital business. A customer directly uses an eCommerce website and hence making the user experience one of the most important factors for its success.

There can be a huge checklist for ensuring a user-friendly eCommerce website. In this article, we will talk about the last stage of the buying process that is the checkout process. An easy to use and fast checkout process can surely enhance the user-experience. I will now discuss ten tips to ensure a user-friendly eCommerce checkout process.

Optimize Product Details

This should be the most important step in your checkout process. Use an appropriate design with the right colour scheme and size. Include a product summary including size, colour, shipping and the customization options available. Confirm if the product is available in the store or not. Moreover, your product description completely depends on your product. Like if your product needs installation, then you can mention the installation process in your guide. Testimonials are great to building trust and add value to your product description.

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Security Assurance

Third party trust logos are common for eCommerce sites nowadays. There are so many trust marks available and deciding which one to use sometimes become difficult. Security certificates, site reviews and safe shopping schemes are mostly used. Checkout process involves sharing critical information like credit card details and users may abandon the process due to security issues.

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Multiple Payment Gateways

Offering multiple payment gateway options is advisable and considered a good business practice. New payment gateways are coming into picture regularly. Some of such options include credit card, debit card, PayPal, purchase orders, money orders, cashier checks and much more. You can ask your customers to further specify the credit card type they are using. eCommerce companies need to adapt with time. While keeping up with the latest trends, you can’t ignore older generation and including alternative payment options is always a good choice. 

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Remove all the Distractions

While checking out, your customers want complete simplification as they may need to verify their information like address, payment details or contact number. Any type of distraction like the navigation bar, search boxes or any advertising banner is not acceptable as they can hinder the checkout process. Your final checkout page should be filtered well for an optimised user experience.

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Ask For Less

A fast checkout process is what the shoppers love. Minimise the number of steps in your checkout process so that customers check out swiftly. One step checkout is preferred by many but the customer must be registered on the website with all the requested details. Always search for better ways that can reduce the required information from the user. You can adopt better ways for formatting and categorising relationship between different fields.

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Go Mobile

Mobile users are growing at a high pace but quite a few purchases are still made on the desktop. Your checkout process should be optimised in a way that the customers can easily checkout on any screen size. When creating a responsive web design, the checkout process should be individually optimised for mobile. Mobile checkout should include minimum form filling to ensure an easy process. You can provide shortcuts like some lookup tools to simplify the process.  

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Ensure Consistency In Pricing

Many times customers notice some change in pricing after clicking the checkout button. These hikes in pricing are due to hidden costs. In the case of any delivery, packing or any other charges, you should clearly specify those charges or add reminders. Lack of transparency is disliked by customers and mostly results in cancellation of the purchase. Your customers will feel cheated and look for alternatives. If you don’t want this to happen, maintain transparency in your checkout process.

Have a Return Policy

There are many users who are still vary of making an online purchase. People are used to do sensory purchases where they can actually feel or touch the product. They are afraid of picking the wrong or duplicate products. An easy return policy has solved this to a great extent. Many successful online stores have a return policy clearly specified at the checkout process. When creating a return policy, your primary focus should be on it’s content. Educate all your employees with your policy to easily assist your customers in case of any support.   

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Modify Orders

It’s human nature to make mistakes. Mistakes like selecting the wrong product, size or colour are common. Sometimes customers change their choice after making the purchase. A user-friendly eCommerce checkout process should contain options to modify your current orders. Order cancellation is included in many eCommerce sites but a modification option is what makes you stand apart. 

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Track and Optimize

Analyse your current checkout process with let's say A/B testing and make changes to whatever elements you feel that can be improved. If you want to conduct a more advanced testing to have a more optimised user experience, then go for qualitative testing.

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You can get an optimised eCommerce website developed with the help of a professional service provider, for better business results.

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Why are feedback surveys important for your website? How to create one for your site.

Every website has some perks and flaws. But if a webmaster will not get what’s wrong with their site, then how will they improve it. Feedback surveys are used to gather insights from the visitors of your site. They help in improving your site and getting more business. A feedback whether positive or negative can benefit any organization of any size or type

Why are feedback surveys necessary? 

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Engagement

A Feedback can be used to increase engagement on your website. Your potential customers will stay for a longer interact with your site and be assured of better services.

Drives Loyal Customers

Most of the times only those customers will provide feedback on your site who are sincerely loyal to your business. This helps you in customer segmentation as well.

Motivate

Positive feedback can motivate and boost the morale of your site managers and employees. All this can help them perform even better and to remain more aligned to improving the customer experience.

Customer Experience  

The primary purpose of feedback is to convert insights into actionable plans to deliver a better experience to clients. A better customer experience helps in getting new clients and retaining existing ones.

Delivers Tangible Data

Customer feedback is a good way to get data that can be used to improve your website. The data can help you with further decision making for your business and your website.

Improvement

Feedbacks can be used to make improvements in every aspect of your site. A feedback survey on your website helps you to know what’s stopping them from converting on your website.

Know About Your Current Status 

Getting comments can help you know about your strengths and weaknesses. Reviews from your target market help you know where your business stands in the marketplace. It makes you realize the qualities that make you distinct from your competitors. 

How can you create a feedback survey for your site?

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Know the Goal of your Survey

Your survey must have a goal. Analyze and find the objective of your the activity.  You can create a basic or a detailed survey depending on the functionality of your website.

Choose the feedback questions you want to include in the survey

Selecting your feedback issues and designing a feedback survey is one most tricky part than even implementing one. If you choose the questions which are not necessary, it won't fetch you the desired results. We will now discuss some issues you can pick from:

How did you hear about us?

How did you enter our website?

What was your first impression after entering our website? 

What did you not like or stopped you from buying? 

How would you describe us in one word?

Will you recommend us to a friend or colleague? 

Please let us know anything that you think should be included or excluded from our site?

Which options did you consider before choosing us?

From 0 to 10 what score will you give us?

What do you like the most on our website?     

Site Feedback tools 

There are many feedback software available that can make it easy to craft a feedback survey. Choose the best tool which can match and customize as per your business needs. When selecting a feedback tool for your website, analyze how good they are in collecting, interpreting and explaining comments. The device should include unique features that differentiate it. It should contain an easy to use dashboard. Also, examine the pricing and plans offered. Some tools can automate your feedback surveys which can make a task easier and save time.

Timing is crucial

Asking for reviews at the right timing is critical and can provide better outcomes. Usually, feedback surveys get maximum open and click rates on Mondays, Fridays, and Sundays. Moreover, Mondays have the highest response.

Include Yes or No Questions 

Yes/no questions provide a straightforward and exact outcome. These questions are easier to answer, and the feedback is completed quickly, saving a lot of time. 

You can a get a feedback survey integrated on your website with the help of your website services company     

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Why Does your Website Need to be SEO Friendly?

Having a website gives you an additional channel to achieve your business goals. But what’s the point of having one when it can’t even catch the eyes of your potential customers?

This happens because the site you build may not be SEO friendly. When developing a website, you need to make sure that search engine had least possible difficulty in crawling your site.

Businesses spend a lot on marketing, but some efforts on search engine optimisation can be crucial for your business. According to Google search statistics, 40,000 search queries are processed every second, 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. With such a huge audience, businesses can’t afford to avoid to develop an SEO friendly website.

How to draw up an SEO friendly website?

Optimise your Design

An SEO compatible web design can drive more traffic to your site. A stable hierarchy and easy to use navigation can be a base for a good web design. Use a consistent colour throughout your site. Spacings between your elements should be equal and remain consistent. Your web design should be better than your competitors' because web design is an important metric considered by search engines for determining the rankings of your web pages. 

Adding more marketing elements to your web design can be a smart decision. You can include a call to action and social media buttons and necessary plugins.

Original and High-Quality Content

Content plays a vital role in optimising your website for SEO. Your website should contain authentic and high-quality content. This type of material which develops a sense of interest in users gets a high level of engagement. Before putting the content on your website, you need to do a deep research on the subject. Your content should provide the information your visitors are searching. More content is always good, and you should keep uploading and refreshing your content.

Search engines do not always recognise images, graphics, Flash files and Java applets so don’t overuse them if you have some quality content. Simple HTML text based format is best suited for indexing your content on search engines.

Before designing an SEO friendly website, it is necessary to carry a keyword research so that you know which keywords you should target. Placing keywords at right places of your content is crucial for your on page SEO. Also include keywords in your description, tags and metadata as they are displayed on Google results and prioritised for search rankings. Overusing keywords in your content is considered under black hat SEO and can hurt your search rankings.

Internal Link Structure

To index a page of your website, Google first needs to view that page. But how will that page get discovered? Either, the user will directly enter that page from the keywords they used, or the page may be having a link to some other page. Some pages might not be having any connection with the page you enter, and Google will not discover those pages. 

A good internal link structure makes sure that more and more pages get listed in search results and ensures that a visitor gets least possible difficulty in accessing your website. All this contributes to rank your site better in search results.

URL Structure

Users many times find your URL name as keywords in search engines. Your URL structure is critical for SEO perspective. URL address is displayed in search results and can affect site’s visibility. You need to be careful and strategic before choosing a URL. 

Choose a URL under your business niche, or you can use the actual name of your business. You can include a relevant keyword in your URL address. Doing this can work well for your SEO. A shorter URL is better than a long descriptive URL.

Website Testing

Testing your site is a crucial SEO activity. A site needs to be tested for different computers, operating system, browsers and mobile devices. A website working responsively on every platform ranks better on search results. 

After successfully finishing all the tests, you can develop test scenarios and reports used to make some effective SEO decisions. Various tools are available which simplify your website testing process.

Wordpress for SEO

Wordpress was initially released in 2003, and till now it has come a long way since then. Unlike other CMS platforms, Wordpress is best suited for developing an SEO friendly business website. Many sites lying on the top pages of search engines are built on Wordpress. It offers so many plugins which are helpful for optimising your site for SEO and many other functionalities.

 A prominent plugin is Yoast SEO which simplifies quite a few basic SEO needs as you can quickly optimise your title tags and headings or use the content editor of your website to do the same. Optimising your images is now easy using plugins like WP Smush. Wordpress offers open source customization with a variety of themes that can be modified as business requirements.

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There is a continuous and unstoppable advancement happening in technology and every other field. New features and updates are being added to existing technologies. Popular Times is one such breakthrough technology from Google.

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Each passing day, the use of cell phones is increasing. People are becoming highly dependent on their smartphones for their daily tasks. Take a moment and try to imagine yourself – how hard it becomes for you when you lose, or you happen to forget your phone at home..that is the degree of dependency people have on smartphones.

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How to Develop Faster, More Scalable Mobile apps

The number of smartphone owners is growing at a very fast rate increasing the popularity of mobile apps.

Nowadays mobile apps are becoming even more popular than browser websites. Mobile users spend 86% of the time on mobile apps and just 14% the of time on mobile websites.There are various reasons to consider why mobile apps are necessary and development choice for any business to succeed. Some of the top factors are highlighted here-

Easier to use

Affordable

Latest and evolving technology

Fast loading

Better functionality

Brand presence

Highly efficient

Source of revenue

Ability to work offline

Better user experience

Instant utility

The unstoppable increase in the interest for mobile apps had resulted in an overcrowded marketplace.To stand out amongst this competition, it has become mandatory for your app to be more scalable and faster than others. Nothing could be better than on-demand scalability for your applications.

Know your purpose, mission and audience

Firstly you must clearly define the purpose and mission of your mobile application. Maybe you need a business app or you have a great business idea you want to work on ,work accordingly to your purpose and mission of your app.Decide how you want to interact with your mobile user and know your audience.Mobile applications are of various types with different functionalities. Knowing your application thoroughly is important for carrying out further processes.

Enterprise applications are gaining huge popularity nowadays as it makes it easier for enterprises to build a relation with their customers and employees.

Also decide what type of mobile app works best for you-native, hybrid or web apps.The native apps are ones which are developed for a specific platform which maybe Apple iOS,Google android,Windows phone or even Blackberry OS. Hybrid apps are build using a combination of web technologies and can be installed on a device but can only run via a web browser.

Create a wireframe for your future apps

You must be having some blurred picture of your ideas and features in your mind. Create a wireframe to have a clearer picture of your ideas and features.There are plenty of  wireframe tools available which you can consider. Each of them is worth exploring to check it fits your requirements.These tools help you to expand your initial ideas, build structure and functionality and Eventually, you will be able to design and develop the prototypes for your app and build interactions between them. Creating a wireframe will also help you save some money. You can also engage design experts for your app development process.

Choosing the best available technology

When the web and the mobile world was evolving,HTML was everything and the only available technology. As the time passed, new technologies started to evolve and it became a need for mobile app developers to have a strong command on technologies like Java,Swift,Objective C,and some basic HTML,CSS and C++.Choosing the best and appropriate technology for your project is very important if you want a faster, scalable app.

You can also consider using some no code or low code mobile programming tools which makes it easier and faster to develop mobile apps.

Use mobile cloud computing

Mobile cloud computing is one of the significant technology trends we have observed in the past few years. It is a combination of cloud computing, mobile computing and wireless networks and has become crucial if you want your mobile app to have faster access and quick scalability. The cloud is more safe and secure,cost effective and helps boost productivity of your application.Whenever a user accesses your app, the computation is performed on a remote server and information is retrieved from the cloud which is then displayed on your mobile device.

Many businesses including IT, real estate, surveying, insurance, hospitality and education have benefited from the cloud. It facilitates better security, backup and recovery.

Provide offline data access and remote sync

Mobile users want their mobile apps to provide them information and functionalities whenever and wherever they want. But mobile data connections are often unavailable, unreliable, too expensive and sometimes encounter such problems at times when we need them the most.

Hence it becomes essential to provide access offline from any remote location.

Testing and QA

Quality assurance is a vital aspect in the mobile development process.With more than 4,000 types of devices for android alone,testing quality assurance is not an easy task and doing it manually seems to be overwhelming.

Automating your testing and QA will be a good decision. It will provide better ROI, running tests, 24/7, reusability, saves money and allows to run tests on a large volume of mobile devices. In the end you will get a better quality mobile application.

Measure your app performance

Big data, Business Intelligence and Analytics are promoting mobile app development at a fast rate. Mobile device analytics provides you a more deep insight of how your apps are performing,what features are being used the most and where improvements are needed. When you understand the performance of your app and how your audience is getting engaged with your app, you can improve your app with far better features and user experience. Google provides mobile analytics insight service under the new google analytics and google analytics 360.

Clean and simple apps

If you add a lot of stuff on a single page of your mobile app, then your audience will have problem in accessing your app. Keep in mind that less is more and providing instant utility to your users will be a good option. Make sure to use lot of space,big fonts and not too much functionality on a single page. It will help your app to be faster and more scalable and provide a better user experience. Also try to keep your development process simple

Provide maintenance and support

Make sure that your developer is ready to provide you with round the clock support and maintenance as your app may need continuous support,development,enhancements,upgrades, error tracking and debugging

. Are you looking for mobile apps that are faster, ,more scalable and help  you compete better. You can get in touch we our expert teams at Enterprise Monkey to help you develop apps that are user friendly and give you a constant revenue stream.

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Enterprise Mobility would help you transform your business and help it evolve for future growth.

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Most of the small & medium companies think that an enterprise app is required by large companies they didn't need it so, here is an answer why you should have a business app for your business

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Dynamic business environment is entrepreneurship fatigue. You wear many hats as a business owner, and while this is the best part of being one.

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e-commerce business, having a good website is the most valuable tool for success. here is an updated checklist for e-commerce website development.