How mobility solutions are acting as a springboard for eTailers

India will be the world’s second largest smartphone market. With a population of just over 1.2 billion, India has nearly as many people as China. Yet, unlike China, India’s smartphone penetration is still extremely low. More than 900 million Indians have a mobile subscription, but only about 110-120 million have a smartphone, according to most estimates.

However, that number does not act as a deterrent, since India’s GDP is expected to grow at 7.5% as per a study done by a leading industry body and Yes Bank which has stated that the consumer spending in India is expected to quadruple to US$ 4.2 trillion by 2017.

With such a massive growth it’s no wonder that in Investment in the mobile e-retail in India is entering a high, so much so that there are rumored decisions by few online retailers to go mobile only.

The solutions 

The Mobile e-retailer system will replace the three key areas of their trade, viz, Sourcing, Market place & Delivery with state of art mobility solutions such as:

Mobile Sourcing solutions

Mobile Sourcing can streamline RFx-to-award cycles and achieve best-value agreements whenever an e-retailer sources from a large list of suppliers. e-retailers can quickly identify, evaluate and qualify new suppliers and drive competition for business with auctions.

A unified sourcing and procurement platform native to cloud, mobile and touch technologies will speed up agreements and ensure new product/ supplier additions is done in a matter of days rather than weeks or months. You can engineer systems to work with SAP or any ERP system. No burdensome hardware, software or integration costs. No costly training delays or expenses.

Mobile Marketplace solutions

Mobile shoppers are very demanding and impatient. As many as 57 per cent users won’t recommend and 40 per cent will turn to a competitor if they have a bad shopping experience on mobile.

Critical factors to keep in mind are:

Fast page loads: No more than four seconds for a page to load, conversion rate goes down by seven per cent for every second delay in page load time

Touch: Friendly interface to better exploit the smartphones of today

Dedicated mobile sites and apps: To ensure best Web-rooming and ability to browse products on various parameters

Native capabilities on various Mobile OS platforms like iOS, Android, Windows and Mobile: To have ability to integrate seamlessly with some of the smartphone’s features like Click-to-Call, Camera for Barcode scan, GPS for localized search and more

Mobile marketing: Analyzing customer activity on the app, retailers can send targeted push notifications, in-app notifications and email with product recommendations.

Mobile Delivery systems

Mobile sales and route delivery solutions address direct delivery issues and extend your route accounting capabilities to the field. It not only helps your company integrate selling, marketing and delivery efforts across the organization, but also improves your customer’s ability to merchandise and sell your products profitability. This is important in a large country like India, where each state and locality presents challenges to provide a uniform consumer experience.

These solutions can provides full inventory and expense control at the point of delivery, tracking merchandise from the point it is loaded onto the delivery vehicle through to delivery and payment(if any) to the customer. Tracking the activities of the people servicing the route ensures your customer service level agreements are met, and provides up-to-date information to handle any exceptions.

Accurate and fast mobile invoicing calculates product discounts, promotions policies, and returns. Handling exceptions to the pricing processes and compliance to policies reduces write-offs and improves retailer relationships. You can track the delivery truck/ 2 wheeler using GPS, capture electronic signatures, apart from providing historical data for sales, returns, deliveries, and orders to your customers on demand.

In conclusion, enterprise mobile-based solutions will create new markets for those bold enough to enter it, or will disrupt existing models in the US$ 4.2 trillion consumer market in India!