As we move into 2019, the ecommerce world will no doubt continue to expand, bringing with it a slew of both challenges and opportunities for your digital business. At cleverbridge, we provide the latest and forthcoming trends, actionable best practices and other key insights to help you position your company for success.
As we look back on 2018, let’s explore the top 10 most-read items from our blog, decided by you, the readers.
1. Losing Money With Your Volume Pricing Model?
In the digital goods world, volume pricing is made all the more compelling because the cost of selling one additional unit is very low compared to physical goods. Producing and selling another license key for a piece of software or another virtual gift in an online community results in very little additional cost. Because of this high profit margin, digital goods companies frequently offer their products in volume. Here, we’ve identified three different volume pricing models for digital goods to help you evaluate your current strategy and make sure it is working for you. Read more.
2. The Difficulty of Being a Merchant of Record
Billing your global online customers is complex. To effectively and securely collect payments, you must, among many other things, open up merchant accounts, put payment gateways in place, manage contracts with global payment service providers, comply with PCI DSS, and abide by global taxation requirements. When you handle all these things on your own, you are acting as your own merchant of record (MoR). There are cases where it’s to your advantage to act as your own merchant of record. But there are also cases where accepting the responsibility of being the merchant of record has many disadvantages. Read more.
3. Customer Service KPIs: Reducing Contact Rates
There are two primary concerns with resolving customer inquiries: speed and quality. You can’t waste your customer’s time, and you must solve their problem. These two concerns are commonly at odds with each other, but there are ways to synthesize speedy and high-quality responses into a world class customer experience that also saves your business money. And it all begins with measuring key performance indicators (KPIs). Read more.
4. 7 Key Differences Between B2C and B2B Ecommerce Models
Much has been said in recent years of the digital business-to-business model (B2B) versus the digital business-to-consumer model (B2C), in terms of scope, customer acquisition and retention, pricing, product variety, and most importantly, profitability. Many companies choose to focus their full efforts on one model or the other, while others attempt to hedge their bets by supporting a hybrid of both. Here, we’ll dive into some of the main differences between the B2B and B2C ecommerce spaces, and the key concepts necessary to support a thriving digital business, regardless of your end user profile. Read more.
5. Five Features of Effective Ecommerce Sites
To keep potential customers on your ecommerce site, it should include features and functionality that consumers now consider essential. Here are five features every effective ecommerce site should have, along with the reasons why they are so critical to converting online customers. Read more.
6. How Artificial Intelligence is Disrupting the SaaS Market
The fervent push from enterprise to software-as-a-service within the last decade has enabled end users to sidestep some of the key hurdles associated with software maintenance and implementation. Chief among them include ease of installation and upgrades, streamlined testing and training, and minimizing an otherwise large upfront cost. As SaaS trends evolve further still, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning have staked their claim among the topics dominating the SaaS conversation, as many analysts peg AI as the next big shift in the market. Read more.
7. Subscription Billing Models Defined
As more companies apply subscriptions to their businesses, they explore different ways to bill their subscribers. But which model is really best to use? And what are the pros and cons of the model you choose? In order to understand the complexity of subscription billing, we must first break it down into its parts. Here, we explore the basic combination of factors that define the various subscription billing models. Read more.
8. Vertical SaaS Segment on the Rise
Rapid growth in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry shows no sign of slowing down, with research firm OpenView Labs forecasting a 21.5 percent increase to $71.2 billion by the end of 2018, and the cloud market overall to hit $187.3 billion. The vertical SaaS segment in particular remains a significant driver of that growth, powered by an influx of digital businesses that focus on a specific industry. Unlike their horizontal counterparts – whose software suites are available to a much broader audience to maximize revenue and support scale – vertical SaaS companies maintain a narrower focus. Read more.
9. 7 SEO Best Practices for Ecommerce Companies in 2018
For any business with a digital presence – especially ecommerce companies that market and sell exclusively online – driving organic traffic to your website remains a constant challenge and a more integral part of the customer conversion process than ever before. Developing a product or solution that has value and fulfills a consumer need is obviously a significant part of the success equation. But how do you reach your audience in the first place? Ensuring your website is optimized for search engines will increase organic, relevant traffic, and ultimately broaden the top of your sales funnel – a key step in the evolving and competitive ecommerce market. Read more.
10. Factors Powering the Move Toward a Subscription Model
“By 2020, all new entrants and 80% of historical vendors will offer subscription-based business models, regardless of where the software resides. What began as a trickle a few years ago has become a stampede of vendors wanting to make a move to a subscription business model.” This statistic from research firm Gartner forecasts the subscription business model as not just an option, but a necessity when considering the acquisition and retention of customers, and ultimately the long-haul growth of your business. Read more.
Learn how cleverbridge can help manage, monetize and optimize your digital business as you continue to grow. We take responsiblity for recurring billing, global payment processing, compliance, customer service, and more. Contact our sales team today.
Kyle Shamorian is the content marketer for cleverbridge. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
