The pandemic caused by Covid-19 boosted electronic commerce around the world. Mexico was not the exception. As in any business, there are certain steps that it is advisable to follow to get closer to success. About these recommendations, I spoke with Aldo Zerecero, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at VTEX, a business platform for digital commerce.
VTEX was founded in the year 2000 in Brazil; its clients include Carrefour, Colgate, Motorola and Whirlpool. For his part, Zerecero has extensive experience in sales, within technology companies.
“We earn hours of life buying online”
Aldo Zerecero.
— What are the previous steps that you recommend to an entrepreneur who wants to launch an e-commerce site?
From my point of view and the experience we have had…
1. The first thing is to find a market niche to attack
2. Understand the subject of technology, know what is required for a certain company. It is not only about hiring an electronic commerce platform.
3. In addition to technology, have your own organizational chart, a team of people specialized in digital commerce and logistics
4. Prepare with the P & L financially (income statement).
These would be the main points to be able to start a digital commerce business professionally.
In the wake of the pandemic, small and large companies began to compete for online space. And they realized that it was not easy to migrate to the digital world if they did not previously have an internet presence.
Marketplaces were the first step for many small and medium-sized companies that wanted to enter the world of online sales. For example, they started selling on social media marketplaces like Facebook and Instagram. Later they migrated to much more robust marketplaces such as Amazon or Mercado Libre. This allowed them to begin to feel and measure interactions in their business model, in the type of product they sold and understand the ecosystem around the act of selling online. It is not only about putting a product and a web page, but how you generate traffic.
— Once e-commerce is on the air, what aspects should the entrepreneur pay more attention to?
The type of product that you will sell or the market niche that you are going to attack, should not be very saturated.
I share important data:
9 out of 10 Internet users bought through the internet during 2021. This means that people are adopting e-commerce in a significant way as another means of purchase
The Latin American internet sales market grew 37% between 2020 and 2021 versus 28% worldwide. This tells us about the potential of the region. Mexico, according to the Mexican Association of Online Sales (AMVO) is one of the top 5 in the world in growth of e-commerce in retail (retail sales). The rest of the places are occupied by India, Brazil, Russia and Argentina.
For people who do not know the subject of digital marketing or digital commerce very well, I will transfer them to what we know: the shopping center. A shopping center is a market place; The traffic that you generate and that passes in front of your store will determine how many possibilities you have to sell the product. The showcase you place with your products is what will determine whether or not people are interested in entering your store. Through digital marketing you attract traffic and better SEO and SEM positioning to your platform (site). In other words, how do you effectively advertise your website or product and improve your conversion rates?
On the other hand, the information about the product. People often believe that just by putting their product online, the sales will drop by themselves. Today the digital consumer is much more rigorous in his way of deciding. You must have good quality photographs, sufficient data, descriptions and make sure that all the possible doubts that a person may have are resolved. All this allows the client to make the best decision.
After that the payment options that you can give them. If you only receive cash, you limit your market. If you offer credit, debit, “buy now pay later” you increase the chances of converting the person who entered your store into a customer.
Finally, if you offer different delivery methods, you also improve the customer experience and therefore conversions.
The way in which the product is paid (for example in fortnights) and delivered is also important.
— How should we combat “dropping cart”?
That has a lot to do with the experience that the brand provides to the end user. Those kinds of frictions can be mitigated through technology. Using artificial intelligence (AI), tracking is given from the search. If you don’t know how to write a brand or you made a mistake in some text and no product is thrown at you, you get discouraged, it can be a sticking point in the shopping experience.
Then, through the AI in the search engine of the web page, it allows to recognize characters, errors and relevance of the type of products that you want to sell. Based on this, the conversion rate increases.
Once you are close to the purchase itself, with the product added to the cart, the possible friction that may exist when paying must be eliminated as much as possible. This can also be done with technology. Firstly, by making available to the customer the largest number of payment options (payment gateways).
Another technology applicable to payments is smart checkout, which without the need to be registered on a website, the buyer can enter as a guest and make the purchase. It is also essential to ensure that the customer’s bank details are encrypted throughout the purchase cycle to prevent fraud.
— For what type of product or service is it advisable to have an internet sales site?
E-commerce is here to stay, it is a matter of convenience. If the product has sufficient demand in the Mexican market and it is convenient to buy it through the internet, it will have a niche within digital commerce. People are hungry for new proposals, new types of innovative service. We have already broken the barrier of fear of transacting online.
Among VTEX’s clients we have retailers, food, pet food, perfumes, fashion, electronics, cell phones, food supplements. For example, pharmacies in the last two years have experienced a growth of more than 80% in their internet traffic and sales.
