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5 ways to boost retail sales with your mobile app this festive season

In the pre-Diwali sales of 2015, Snapdeal saw its sales grow over three times compared to the previous

year, as per a Your Story report, and sellers on Amazon.in saw growth of about 10 times.

Referring to this pre-Diwali period of about 60 days, Rahul Taneja, then VP at Snapdeal, said, “In under

three months, you do 35 percent of the year’s business. It is a significant season.”

Interestingly, all the leading players (Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, Shopclues) reported at least 70% of

their festival-season traffic from mobile devices.

All of them also claimed a significant percent of webstore visits

and sales from tier-II and tier-III towns.

“While overall visits went up four times from last year, Tier-III

visits went up 10 times and that is almost completely through

mobile devices,” said Radhika Aggarwal of ShopClues.

So what is the take away for retailers and ecommerce businesses in India?

- Pre-Diwali shopping is crucial for online businesses in India. This isn’t restricted strictly to

Diwali—it’s the entire festival season from Navratri to Christmas. As an ecommerce business, if

you want a share of the year’s biggest shopping spends, you need to be prepared for this

season.

- Mobile usage for online shopping is seeing only one trend: increasing growth. The Indian market

still has plenty of room to catch up with the scale of spends prior to and during the holiday

season in the West, and from the findings above, it’s clear that the best way to reach out to this

untapped market is through intuitive mobile apps.

While there are plenty of pure play ecommerce mobile apps, many brick-and-mortar and online retailers

have already opted for mobile app development. But simply expanding inventory prior to the festive

season is not enough; a consumer business needs to be available at the fingertips of its customers.

In this post, we give you tips to use your mobile app to boost sales during the pre-festival shopping, and

reap the benefits of the great Indian shopping mania!

1) Offers, deals, contests for the festive season

Put yourself in the shoes of the customer—what does he usually buy around this time? Decorative items

for the household, new appliances and gadgets, items for gifting, clothes for the festive celebrations…

Now design offers and deals accordingly: discounts on cellphones, product bundling of Pooja thalis and

torans … you get the drift.

Source: India[dot]com

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Contests are great way to draw customers to your app and keep them there.

Case in point: Amazon’s app treasure hunt. Amazon

provides clues that, once solved, will lead the customer to a

product that will be available to him at a throwaway price

like Re1.

Source: Amazon[dot]in

Draw existing as well as new customers with season-specific deals, offers and contests.

2) Traffic management & load handling

If you’re going to attract more customers, you need to be equipped to handle the load. Flipkart’s 2014

Big Billion Day fiasco served as a lesson to many, and it applies to your mobile app too.

By using the load balancer at the server end, you can distribute traffic across servers and keep up app

performance.

3) Deliver a festive User Interface

Get your customers into the festive mood by tweaking your app UI. Banners, graphics, buttons, loader

animation can all be customized to reflect the festive spirit, while retaining brand identity.

It’s the little things that go far in subtly influencing the buyer’s mindset.

4) Location targeting (Geo Fencing) feature of the mobile app

One of the many benefits of reaching out to customers through an app is being able

to reach them at the right time and the right place.

By using location-targeting, you can reach out to customers when they are in the

vicinity through notifications regarding promotions, offers and deals. By reaching

out to them at an opportune moment, there is a very high likelihood of

conversions.

5) Update and clean up

Have you been getting bug reports? Or has any feature been lagging? Now is the time to resolve such

issues and ensure a seamless mobile UX.

For best results, use this opportunity to analyze the rich data you get from bile apps analytics tool: peak

hours, timely push notifications, browsing behavior etc, and modify accordingly.

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So pull up your socks and get ready to execute the orders that come pouring in!

Learn more about our Mobile App development services:

Learn more about the advanced Mobile App features:

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