How your Small Business Can Compete with Online Giants

By Dlx Admin | Office, Seat Leasing | 0 Comments

Small and medium-sized business can sometimes feel swallowed by larger companies. How can a local diner compete against chain restaurant that moves in across the street? How can small shops draw in customers who find convenience in online purchases?

As online retail giants transform the shipping experience and consumer expectations—even in an age where convenience dominates the customer market—a small and medium-sized business can also win customers by borrowing from the retail giant playbook and adopt the new rules. Their brand can acclimate to the new business environment with technology and automation and by meeting customer demands for high-quality service.

Here are ways you can take to your office space Philippines and come out on top in the digital age.

1. Price every product with purpose

One of the most important business decisions every entrepreneur make is pricing their products. Setting a price that is too high or too low will make or break your business growth because it affects the cash flow and might cause problems for your sales.

If you are starting a business, be careful about pricing your products. When you set your prices, ensure that the price and sales levels you set will allow your business to be profitable. You must also have to take note of where your product or service stands when compared with your competition.

Some companies are still using pricing strategies from five to ten years ago and they find it difficult to compete with their competitors who have embraced modern technology. This is due in large part to the outdated techniques that many small and medium businesses use to set prices-relying on, for example, historical data and gut feel. Science and data have been delivering far superior results, particularly when dealing with several hundred thousand products but some companies neglect it and retain on using historical data and gut feel which makes them difficult to compete and rise on the top.

One example of modern pricing strategy that the big online retailers use is dynamic pricing, which allows businesses to adjust product prices based on demand. When season changes, prices automatically rise and fall. The key to successful dynamic pricing is speed. But, to use this method, businesses have to rely on technology, science, and data, creating a perfect harmony of data-driven decision making and automation.

Empower your business to use data to make better-informed decisions, reduce the amount of time spent in calculating pricing, and make your pricing more accurate by automating your pricing strategy. This is because modern automation tools can analyze a variety of data points, such as customer preferences and trends, overall product preferences and patterns and seasonality, which were often overlooked and is difficult to obtain before but with automation, it would be easily accessible.

2. Offer a wider range of products

A business that offers a wider range of products always win.  Make your business that offers a wide range of quality products and services that meet the needs of global customers operating in diverse and demanding markets. If you are running a small business, it is a smart move for you to have each design of your product a different size, style, color, and model. Why? Because costumer nowadays expect options, and if you want every customer that visits and leaves your store to bought something from you then you should be thinking ahead and predict what customers like to buy.

Retail giants have set the bar high by offering customers an endless quantity of products in each category they sell. To succeed in expanding product availability, small businesses need to select additional products based on the trends according to their customers. Make use of customer data as a guide. Offering a broad selection also requires a mechanism to store, track and manage large lists of products and their descriptions. Depending on the industry, it may be more effective for small business to not stock new products at all. Business owners can instead work closely with a handful of drop-ship suppliers to provide a wider array of products from other suppliers with lower overhead. And by automating the process, managing multiple warehouses and vendors as well as the movement of data between them will be handled with ease. On top of that, your company will get the best of both world-class selections of desirable products in all shapes, colors and sizes, and a fulfillment process that works.

3. Don’t overlook the return process

Be more agile with information and communication to gain their loyalty and also to make them happier. Show consistent customer experience across all channels: websites, social media, storefronts in online marketplaces and any other channel your company sells or markets through. A customer expects the same high-quality service in every transaction with your company, regardless of channel, including the return experience. 

If you are having trouble in extending consistency of customer experience to their return process. Get an idea from the digital retail empires that have been built on free and automated returns. Most orders from major online retailers there include a prepaid and return mailing slip. They can help you or any form of business in creating a uniform experience throughout the customer journey.

4. Anticipate customer needs

In running a business, it is important to be more agile and anticipate customer needs. And to be able to understand the factors that drive customer satisfaction. For example, shipping. Online retailers have taught consumers to expect free “express” delivery on many of their orders, but for small businesses, they don’t have to deliver that same experience in order to satisfy customers. In fact, customers are more interested in free shipping than fast shipping, and big businesses are already taking advantage of this technique.

Mostly of large online retailers now offer “free two-day shipping” instead of “free two-day delivery.” If the item is out of stock or back-ordered, it can take up to four or five delivery. But because the shipping is free, their customers won’t get mad.

Post-sale communication is one of the technique to consider in making customers happy. The way you deliver communication is part of predicting your customer’s needs. Improve your sales talk skills and think about your possible post-sale customer communication process. The more agile you are with communication and information, your customers will be happier and more loyal. If you quickly set the precedent that your business is one that anticipates needs and supports customers, then you can achieve agility.

5. Reach customers globally

Global is now the new local. In order to compete in today’s digital era. An entrepreneur must look beyond local and regional markets to grow their businesses. Until now, only large companies were able to sell globally due to the limited access to newer technology and the resources required to expand abroad. However, big thanks to advancements in technology, there are low barriers to expand abroad making possible for small to mid-sized business to enter after opening up new access to global markets. Every business should consider operating across multiple channels to have global reach.

The first step for businesses to take in entering the global market should be an international business plan, one that involves thorough research or identifies international markets worth pursuing. The Department of Commerce and International Trade Administration are just two of the great places to discover market opportunity.  With these resources, small businesses can identify locations where you can take advantage of cultural knowledge, local product interest, language capabilities, and available infrastructure to support your business.

To capitalize on foreign markets, small businesses must also enable their operations to support multiple currencies, languages and tax regimes. Business systems that worked for local or regional sales might not be up to the task. Before expanding abroad, a business owner should examine their structure, IT systems, and policies to prevent unforeseen issues.

6. Enable seamless operation with partner companies

To make your small business be more like a retail giant and be able to compete in the marketplace, you can turn to network vendors, suppliers, manufacturers and distributors that combine forces to compete in the marketplace. A seamless operation to your network is required though. But with automation and with the help of technology this is possible to happen. By making your daily transactions and operations from verifying orders to processing, ordering, and reordering, receiving and sending payments to be automated, everything can happen.

There are a lot of opportunities and strategies for small businesses to utilize that could help them compete against retail giants or become even more successful. Take this advice at your office space Philippines, embrace it like your own, and adapt it in your own business, someday your company might surpass your competitors and rise to the top and win in the digital age.