[CRO] 10 ways how this Indian e-commerce can increase their product sales
As I mentioned in the last growth study, I’m yet to come across such a case study focusing on products. That’s what led me to begin this writing-and-research journey which began with Walnut, and now I have taken up another great company and product to work on.
For the purpose of this study, I took a product which released not too long ago but has already taken the market by storm with its use case and popularity. I’m talking about PayTM, more specifically PayTM Mall.
Even though they are doing amazingly well at growing this platform, I thought I’d pick out some tricks which I have up my sleeve and see if it could work for them.
I was going to write a demo and some stats about PayTM but then I realized that who in this country and on this earth doesn’t know the company today? So, without further ado, let’s get right to it.
1. Fear of Missing Out: On the product page, Paytm is already doing a great job telling people how many products are remaining, which creates a feeling of FOMO. Adding to that, if Paytm can show you how many people are actually viewing this product it will create a tremendous impact. Consider a situation where you have one product available and the number of people viewing that product is 500. Chances of you getting the product now is 1/500 and this can create a tremendous FOMO which will influence that person to buy the product, ultimately driving more sales for PayTM.
2. Herd Mentality: Have you ever imagined yourself in a situation where you have a choice to go to 2 places and you don’t know about both. Which one will you choose? You will choose the place which has the maximum crowd. Why is it so? Because people don’t want to make fool of themselves. They might think that if so many people are already there, the place must be good — without even knowing about the other place. If PayTM can display how many people actually bought the product, the customer gains tremendous confidence which can make him buy the product quickly. There is an awesome tool called Proof which might help.
3. Price comparision: As a human tendency, people always search for a product on different E-commerce sites before buying the product. PayTM can create a button where users can check the price on the competitor’s website. This might create both positive and negative effects. If the price is low on the other site, the user will feel compelled to go to the competitor and buy the product. But if the price is low people will stay on the website and quickly buy the product instead of searching for it on competitor’s website. It’s a tough bet but might trigger results in the form of surprising conversion figures.
4. Recommend to a Friend: People are more likely to purchase something if it’s recommended to them by someone they know and trust. Whenever we meet with friends, we talk about the new things we bought or things we are looking for. But how does PayTM come into this? Let’s assume that you are on an E-commerce site looking for something or just browsing around and found the product which is needed by someone. There should be a button called ‘Recommend to a Friend’ for those people who wants to share the product with their friends. Some may say, but why do you need a button when you can share the link? Well, because ‘Recommend to a Friend’ creates a strong trigger which might create the feel-good effect for the sharer.
5. The Principle of Liking: As customers, we tend to make a decision on what to buy based on what we hear from our peers or someone whom we consider to be a mentor or influencer in this regard. We call this the Principle of Liking. In PayTM’s scenario, this can be used to their advantage to increase the conversion on the product page. For this tactic to work, we would need the user to connect their Facebook account to display the number of his/her friends who already bought the product somewhere near the main Buy button. This will create a sense of trust before buying the product and might increase the conversion rate.
But, this can be challenging to achieve as most people aren’t comfortable with publicly sharing information about what they buy.
6. Gamification in Coupons: PayTM could implement gamification in their current coupons available. People like to use things that they have earned. This psychologically makes your coupon codes seem more valuable than if it was already made available to them. PayTM could implement some gamification with Vyper to make such interactive pop-ups.
7. Exit Intent Pop Up: When you log on to PayTM’s website to shop, there are times when you might not find anything of interest or maybe you’re just not looking to buy anything at the moment. A lot of the websites display a pop up when the visitor moves the cursor to another tab or begins to type in something else in the address bar. Growth hackers call this ‘Exit Intent Pop Ups’. PayTM could use this technique to prevent visitors from leaving their site too soon. The intention could be to draw them back into making a purchase or to retain them for a longer time, to ultimately increase their search rank. ‘SUMO’ is great online tool that could be used for this purpose.
This link below will you give some great examples of the Exit Intent Pop Ups used by big names in various markets.
https://maxtraffic.com/blog/13-simple-and-surprisingly-effective-exit-pop-up-examples/
8. Subscribe Option for Frequently Used Products: Not too long ago, PayTM began to offer groceries and daily goods for purchase on their platform, competing with players like BigBasket in the market. The thing with groceries and daily consumables is that the purchase of certain items repeats quite often. For instance, I love milk and I tend to order a bottle every morning. Things like washing powder, spices, veggies etc. are items that would be purchased repeatedly in a month or so. PayTM could take advantage of this and provide the customer with the option to subscribe to that particular good or package (as PayTM offers combo packages with discounted prices). Once selected by the customer, that item shall be delivered automatically to the address listed at the frequency specified. Amazon has gained heavily in the U.S by offering this facility to its shoppers. This is ultimately making the task of shopping easier for the buyer and inducing brand loyalty to PayTM.
9. Upsell: Upselling is when the seller encourages the customer to spend more than they had originally intended. For the purpose of this article, this is by recommending a higher priced alternative to the item the visitor is currently considering.
This is a very common method of growing sales and the business as a whole. PayTM fails to tap into this trick to build their sales. The image below is a great example of upselling done by PayTM’s competitor Flipkart where once a product is clicked on to view, the site shows similar products to the buyer to trigger more sales and longer time spent on the site.
A study of Predictive Intent’s eCommerce customer base has shown that displaying slightly higher priced options than those in your visitors’ immediate view drives an average of over 4% of sales, 20x more than the standard ‘recommended products’ option found on most eCommerce sites.
PayTM Mall, being a shopping site as well, with similar products as that of Flipkart, could do the same and more with its other products.
10. Cross-Selling: A cross-sell is when you present the customer with additional offers that are related to (but not an upgraded version of) the product they’re purchasing. When buying a television, for example, a wall-mounted version and set top box are logical cross-sell offers.
Here is the perfect example of the cross-selling technique implemented by PayTM’s competitor, Amazon.
Bundle sales are when two or more products that complement each other can be added to the cart from the product page or checkout. This is also a popular cross sell technique used by many E-commerce site.
To signify the importance of these two tricks, I did some research and found that in 2006, Amazon reported that 35% of their revenue came from their cross sells and upselling efforts.
Conversion Rate Optimizations
Reviews are missing: As I mentioned under ‘Herd mentality’, people go with the popular option. They like to be part of the trend. Besides this reason, it is also a sense of trust that’s developed in their minds when so many buy and like a particular product. Hence, having reviews of the products on the platform will create a sense of trust and security while buying the product and induce more frequent sales. It also creates more engagement on the site when existing users comment on the purchase, the item, service etc. It can also give a lot of feedback on the service of delivery of a brand’s product. This is how Flipkart is doing this.
Buy button is not above-the-fold: For a website, the fold is basically the first viewable display without having to scroll down for more. Currently PayTM’s
above the fold looks like the image below:
PayTM’s product display doesn’t have the most important call-to-action of the page i.e. the Buy button. I certainly think that adding/implementing this button could generate tons of money for PayTM. PayTM’s competitor Flipkart and Amazon have a Buy button above-the-fold.
Most Frequently Asked Questions are Missing on the Product Page: Imagine a situation where you like the product and are planning to buy it, but have questions which are not given in the product description. What do you do next? Either you leave the page because there is not enough information given or Google it and never come back to the original website. To avoid this, many E-commerce companies nowadays are providing most frequently asked questions by customers where sellers or customers can answer those questions. Currently it is not there in PayTM, but if implemented, that might hugely shoot up the conversion rate. The image below is the perfect example of how Amazon is doing this:
Fix product Image: Every piece of information cannot be fitted on one screen, and most of the time, reviews and ratings would be available after scrolling. Due to this, you may have to scroll down to check reviews, and then scroll up to check the product out, thereby creating friction.
How can this friction be avoided?
This is very well handled by PayTM’s Indian competitor Flipkart. If you scroll, the product image will be fixed on the left side and all the other details about the product, pricing, reviews, and frequently asked questions would be on the right.
Check out the product page of one of their products:
https://goo.gl/rpLXsw
Conclusion
E-commerce has transformed the way business is done in India. The Indian E-commerce market is expected to grow to US$ 200 billion by 2026 from US$ 38.5 billion as of 2017. The value of E-commerce market is expected to cross US$ 50 billion by 2018.
Much growth of the industry has been triggered by increasing internet and smartphone penetration. The ongoing digital transformation in the country is expected to increase India’s total internet user base to 829 million by 2021 (59 per cent of total population), from 373 million (28 per cent of population) in 2016, while total number of networked devices in the country are expected to grow to 2 billion by 2021, from 1.4 billion in 2016.
This stats state how fast E-commerce is growing and PayTM should look into some of the techniques mentioned in this blog to increase their E-commerce, as it is still way behind its rivals, Flipkart and Amazon.
By any means, if this blogs reaches Vijay Shekhar Sharma (Founder of PayTM), I would love to meet you personally (big fan of yours). :)
Cheers!
