How E-commerce Platforms Can Prepare for Festivities

When expert players like Flipkart and Amazon are all set to give a tough competition to each other, there are also small players, who are trying to launch sales and offers for the very first time.

Recently Zomato, the online food order and delivery app, announced a campaign “No Cooking Sunday”, where it was offering 50% discounts on delivery across several cities in the country. The campaign was a part of strategy to hit the 1 million daily order mark but due to technical outage, the campaign failed miserably.

Zomato not only faced the wrath of angry customers but also lost many of its loyal customers because the app could not handle bulk ordering.

Here are the lessons learnt from Zomato, on how e-commerce platforms prepare for the festivities:

Plan the Strategy:

To run any campaign or sales or offers without prior strategy and without a well thought out plan. A well-planned strategy will help you analyse, work on your weak points and will help you identify your strong points.

Running an e-commerce platform means you are virtually connected with your customers. Take the past data and feedbacks, to figure out what your customers expect from you and how you can work on the suggestions given by the customers.

"Our team has been engaged in the preparation of this sale for the past 3 months where they have partnered with top brands, meticulously planned and scaled operations while building logistics to give users the best shopping experience and best offers on a wide range of products," said Amit Sinha, Chief Operating Officer, Paytm Mall.

Draw Your Limitations:

Once you know your strategy, draw your limitations, which all area you want to target, which age group you want to target, how much business are you expecting, are you able to reach out to all the customers, are you targeting, and every minute detail of pick up, delivery, seller and packaging should be well thought out.

Do not get greedy, when you see you have exceeded your expectations in terms of business. Often e-commerce platforms, run frequent campaigns out of greed, and such campaigns fail because you lose your credibility.

Be Prepared:

If everything goes well be prepared to accept the profits with both arms, however, if things turn out unexpectedly, be prepared to embrace defeat.

By preparing it means:

• Warm up your market with social media campaigns
• Advertise about the offers, sales, you are offering
• Tie up with Celebrities to endorse your campaigns
• Keep up the hype with relevant tags