May 2020 - Galaxy Weblinks

Is Hyper-Personalization the key to your E-commerce growth?

Posted on May 28, 2020October 10, 2024 by galaxy-admin

Hello (Inserts your First name),

All of us have received emails/ sms notifications, social media ads, that are sharing offers and discounts on the products that we have been eyeing.

Hyper personalization takes the basic information as the starting point of its research and then gets to know you better with the help of Artificial Intelligence or AI. It collects real time information, identifies patterns, looks for reasons behind actions performed (via feedback) and then serves product recommendations, content and offers based on analysis carried out.

Understanding Hyper-Personalization

Is hyper-personalization a new concept? Not really. Hyper-personalization is like those regular personal conversations you have in your neighborhood Mom and Pop stores. You wouldn’t think of going to another shop for your grocery shopping as you know the owners well and they know your preferences, thereby assisting you in finding your favorites without even asking.

Hyper personalization is aimed at establishing the same relationship with your customers but virtually and on a wider scale. AI and Machine Learning advancements have made hyper personalization a reality now. You can now leverage these technologies to build a customer experience that leaves behind a good imprint in your users’ minds.

Consumers want businesses to understand their needs

Your customers are always in a time crunch, but also have a sizable disposable income to indulge in luxuries. They will certainly appreciate tailor-made recommendations right in their mailbox or while browsing your website. In case you still have doubts, have a look at these numbers –

A study conducted by Accenture said that 41% of US consumers changed their brand preferences because of a lack of personalization and trust.
In the same study, 81% of customers wished that brands put in more effort to understand them better.
Customers now expect brands to understand their dynamic needs and respond as per the insights garnered from the real time data they collect.

Hyper-personalize your ecommerce business

Hyper-personalization revolves around AI, Machine Learning and Deep learning, social media research, surveys, and website analytics. AI and Big data usage are spread across industries. It is used by Netflix, Starbucks, Stitch Fix, Amazon, and many others.

Amazon uses data from every possible place. Be it purchase history, viewing history, saved items, average time spent on search, and shopping cart data. It also features a frequently bought together category for further assistance to customers. All this information is used to personalize the search query and even the homepage for the visitors, via predictive analysis method.

Another example is Stitch Fix. It is an online personal styling venture.

As users sign up, they are asked questions about their styling preferences, which are then matched to the numerous stylists’ profiles on the website.
These stylists then handpick relevant products for the users and the user has to select one product out of the curated range and pay for it.
Feedback is requested from the customers for the products they keep, as well as return, which is then used for future recommendations.

Stitch Fix combines human and data insights to deliver maximum customizations to their customers.

In essence, collecting, combining and analyzing all the data collected will help you in building a hyper personalized experience for all your customers. We recommend that you categorize the data into micro segments. This ensures that the results, preferences and content shown is always relevant to the customers.

Mass marketing and macro segmentation fail because of heavy generalization. For example, as a clothing ecommerce platform, if you are targeting all your female customer base at once, you forget to customize as per the geographic conditions, age group, body structure and even color preferences.

Whereas if you go for micro segmentation, you can send some bright color options to your younger demographic as they are more inclined towards experimentation and are yet to discover the color that suits them vis-a-vis the older demographic.

Leverage social media to find insights into your customer needs and wants; what your competitors are doing, and keep a track of all the trends. This always comes in handy when curating content for emails, blogs, social media accounts and newsletters.

Scope of Hyper-Personalization

Every page, recommendation, content, promotions can be a part of hyper-personalization. You can start by customizing the homepage of your website.

Your search function should take into consideration any keywords used by your visitor, previous queries, buying behavior, etc for saving your customer’s time. The likeliness of conversion increase when you quickly address your customer’s query.

Product recommendations bundled with complementary product offerings are a great way to increase your sales. It’s like when you order a burger and fries at McDonald’s and the cashier asks if you would like to make it a meal with a beverage. Only a few of us can resist such an offer! Add-Ons or similar product offerings under the ‘you may like this as well’ section comes across as thoughtful suggestions and not a pushy sales tactic.

Some takeaways

Send emails at the most optimal time for maximum engagement.
Take the geographic conditions in mind when sending product and service catalogs.
Personalized discounts and offers on the categories that your customer visited the most or has saved it or based on the purchase history will increase your sales conversion rate.

Hyper-personalization is not just an option! It is essential to survive in this harshly competitive online commerce space. Not only will it help you provide a frictionless experience to your customers, but it will also help you build a loyal and strong customer base. Your customers will turn into your brand advocates for all your potential customers.

Feel free to contact our experts who will assist you in building a better customer experience for your ecommerce venture.

About the Author

Vinod Khajja is an Ecommerce expert at Galaxy. He is a firm believer of AI and it’s possibilities with Ecommerce. As a Senior Project Manager he has multiple ecommerce successes under his belt.

Offshore UX | An option or need of the hour?

Posted on May 26, 2020October 10, 2024 by galaxy-admin

The world of business is changing dramatically. Real-time data and advanced analytics tools allow companies to adapt their strategy instantaneously and, as the COVID-19 outbreak showed, technology now also allows us to communicate instantly with workers no matter where they are located.

As businesses all over the world had to rapidly adapt their technology stacks to a remote work environment, many are considering whether to allow employees to work at home post-pandemic. But there’s another option available to business owners who have suddenly found that managing workers remotely isn’t as bad as they had imagined — offshore contractors.

While many job roles have been contracted out for a while now, some have always remained in the realm of on-premise talent. One of those roles is the UX designer. In this post, we’ll talk about why it makes sense for your business to hire offshore contractors to handle your next UX design.

UX design has become a requirement

With the increase of technology in our daily lives comes increasing demands from consumers. Interfaces must be able to compete with the increasing standards. More products will begin to need UX designs. Being a market leader in your space, or even just staying afloat, will require it.

Even if you haven’t needed a UX designer in the past, there’s a good chance you will in the future. With that in mind, let’s talk about why offshore UX is a good business decision for your current or future UX designer needs.

Local talent can be hard to find

Because of the demand for UX designers, it can be hard to find local talent that is also available for full-time work. This is especially true if you want to hire top talent, which will command a higher price and be harder to keep on staff without some other company coming along with a better offer.

Thankfully, some of the same skills you look for in a full-time employee are what you’d look for in a remote employee. For both, you want someone who is a self-starter and will get the work done on time and on spec with minimal oversight on your part. As top UX designers realize they can make more working for themselves and taking on multiple jobs at multiple firms throughout the year, it becomes easier to find a qualified person for the job without having to commit full year’s salary.

The economics of developing nations

In nations where costs are low, the highest-paid professions may pay little more than you would pay a UX designer. This means that UX designers in those nations can price themselves very competitively compared to western nations and still live a very comfortable life relative to their peers.

Of course, you’ll have to put some effort into finding the right candidate when you look outside English-speaking countries. Residents of most countries learn English as a second language, but you want to make sure that they speak it well enough that no language barriers exist. With offshoring, you’ll save money and provide someone with a better income than they could get in their economy alone.

Technology breaks down boundaries

Because it is such a visual art, there was a time in the past when doing UX work remotely would have been extremely difficult. This may be why there is still a reluctance on the part of many to embrace outsourced UX designers.

We now have technology that allows us to video conference and share our screens easily. There are cloud-based solutions, such as Miro and Invision, that allow for collaboration on even the most advanced projects so you’ll be able to give feedback to designers in a professional manner and ensure that nothing gets lost in the translation.

Combine that with the fact that all but the poorest of countries have access to high-speed internet, it is now possible to engage in real-time feedback even for visual projects like UI and UX. The boundaries that once stood in the way of taking UX design off-premise have now been torn down by technological advances.

Offshoring is flexible

If you’re a large business, you already have a design department with competent directors and senior designers. In that case, it will be the additional workers that take the vision of the senior members and help implement it that would make prime candidates for offshore workers.

For small businesses, it is impossible to hire a full-time staff to do your design work. Offshoring makes finding someone for a one-off job even more affordable.

Conclusion

For most companies, hiring designers local is the way it’s always been done. With the coronavirus pandemic teaching us that remote work is not only possible but very practical, it may be a good time to consider the more affordable option. Now that we know situations can arise to force us into our homes, it would be a good time to take what we’ve learned from the outbreak and use that to experiment with new, cost-effective, and disaster-resistant forms of business.

5 reasons why you should migrate to Magento 2?

Posted on May 18, 2020October 10, 2024 by galaxy-admin

It’s high time for users to finally migrate, you cannot defer Magento 2 upgrade until the last minute. As it’s not a one-click-upgrade, Magento 1 users need to understand why this migration is crucial for their business.

Magento 2 is offering much more intuitive functionalities and benefits in comparison to Magento 1. But before the advantages, let’s understand where we’re coming from when we say ‘migrate now’.

Why sticking with Magento 1.x is not a good idea?

After June 2020 there will be no official support for Magento merchants or developers. This means there’ll be no more technical assistance, no more security patches, and ultimately, no more Magento 1.x as a viable platform.

Any technical issues with your website, as mentioned below, could have a huge impact on your revenue and brand image.

Security vulnerabilities

After the cut-off date, any sites that missed out on a migration would be vulnerable to security breaches and hacks. E-commerce sites that are still on unsupported versions of Magento will be exposed to hackers equipped with backdoor exploits.

This means you will be putting your customers’ data at risk. And without protection of their payment details and security updates, your checkout may no longer be secure.

Quality fixes

Magento will no longer be rolling out quality fixes for Magento Open Source (Community) or certain versions of Magento Commerce (Enterprise). Users with Magento 1.x will not get any further improvements to existing core features, and will find it difficult to make their site more user-friendly with broken features.

And with no more feature upgrades to Magento 1 means low customer retention, as it will be difficult for you to keep up with the services offered by your competitors.

3rd party extension

Magento’s security patches and quality fixes only cover the core platform and not any extensions, bespoke modifications or enhancements.

In this case, you’ll need maintenance support to improve extensions and prevent them from getting defunct as they won’t be compatible with any new patches released to the core platform.

Magento 2 has several advantages over its predecessor

You must think about migration if you are looking towards a smooth customer shopping experience with your existing ecommerce website. Here are our 5 reasons to migrate to Magento 2:

1. Improved Performance

Load speeds on the first version were slow. The possibilities of working with dynamic databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL has allowed better processing of caching, re-indexing and queries.

Magento 2 sites will run on average 20% faster than the sites based on the previous version. Pages will load in half the time as it has full-page caching. Whereas with an efficient indexing system, transactions become faster and easier to process.

Thus, faster site speed will encourage more sales and increase website search engine optimization.

2. Mobile Friendly

As we know that online shoppers perform more than 50% of online transactions on mobile devices, a responsive web shop is a must.

Magento 2 makes mobile commerce a priority as Magento 1 sites did not deliver optimum performance on mobile devices. Customers can take their mobile performance even further with the release of PWA (Progressive Web Application) Studio in Magento 2.3.

3. Smooth and Simple Checkout Process

Even though the Magento 1 checkout was a single page process, it was cumbersome.

Now Magento 2 offers a simple 2 step checkout process and the Instant Purchase feature. Existing customers can use their email address to check-out faster using their saved information like using previously-stored payment and shipping information to skip checkout steps altogether, taking them to a confirmation purchase page.

This increases conversions and reduces abandoned cart rates.

4. Better Admin Interface

This is a non-technical user’s dream! The admin user interface has been touted as the most problematic elements of Magento 1 for its confusing layouts and being intimidating to first timers. That problem was solved in Magento 2.

Magento 2 offers a user-friendly and clean experience where even the most non-technical users can add new product listings and find tools with ease. The admin dashboard enables you to find crucial business information about your e-store in one single place, leaving no room for confusing navigation.

The new version is easy to navigate and use which means that your customer will get to pages or products they desire faster.

5. Improved Security

A lot of attention has gone into the security of the online platform in the wake of increased data breaches.

Magento 2 also offers robust desktop protection due to major changes in the source folder structure. Ther number of root folders has been reduced to five by Magento 2 which in the previous version of the platform was containing nine root folders.

Moreover, the mask folder has also been deleted from the root folder. This new structure means that the code cannot be stolen or stolen directly from the root, making Magento 2 more secure than Magento 1.

The Next Big Step Towards Migration

Customers reported they benefited from Magento Commerce 2’s comprehensive security standards, native B2B functionality, multi-site capabilities, and easy-to-use content development functionality.

Their reasoning for choosing Magento was based on how it can be customized to meet their specific needs. You can certainly find your why in the above mentioned reasons to not delay the upgrade any further.

We recommend you to take a systematic migration approach or get a team of Magento experts onboard to help you with the migration with zero down time.

About Galaxy Weblinks

We have a team of Magento experts that will assess your eCommerce website and help you stay up-to-date when it comes to security, performance, and stability. Contact us for a free consultation!

WordPress 5.4 ‘Adderley’ | New features and improvements

Posted on May 8, 2020October 11, 2024 by galaxy-admin

The recently released WordPress 5.4 ‘Adderley’ update has got a lot to look forward to! Since this highly popular CMS ditched its classic editor for blocks, the updates that followed were more or less about the editor. This incremental update brings some changes in Gutenberg along with accessibility improvements, site health check mechanisms, and numerous other enhancements.

Before we dive deeper into the update’s details, here is a quick list of reasons for anyone who is deferring any updates for a later date.

Why should you upgrade to 5.4?

While incremental updates might not seem that urgent, here are some compelling reasons that will urge you to think otherwise:

A continuous upgrade helps address security loopholes and ensure that your website is protected against possible security breaches.
Like other updates, WordPress updates are also focussed on continuous performance improvements of your website.
Updates help your website become more user friendly and accessible, thereby creating a better user experience.

Let’s take a closer look at the new features and enhancements in this update.

Changes in the Gutenberg Editor

Social Icon buttons

You can now add more than 30+ social platform icons to all your posts and website pages. It includes Reddit, Medium, Facebook, Linkedin, and more. This will eventually help you increase engagement across all your social media platforms.

Gutenberg’s got a performance upgrade as well

There is a 14% reduction in the loading time of the editor as compared to 5.3 update.

More color options

There is now a gradient background option available for columns, cover, and buttons. This new color customization option goes a long way in making your website’s layout more engaging and visually appealing.

Additionally, you are no longer restricted to a single color of the text in paragraphs. You can add inline text color within your paragraphs.

Buttons block

You can now get multiple blocks on a single page. This means multiple CTA in a single block, thus letting your user decide which option to go for. Plus, you can play with button style, text font, and the background colors.

Full screen mode

Gutenberg editor now opens in full screen mode by default. You can switch the mode in the top right menu and go in, ‘editor settings’, and uncheck the ‘fullscreen mode’ option.

The community has a mixed reaction towards this addition, especially for beginners. A notable issue is that when the full screen mode is activated, the top bar and admin panels are removed. This makes the navigation a task for the new users.

TikTok embed block

This update now has embed blocks for TikTok videos, similar to adding Youtube videos.

Featured image

You now have the drag and drop option to add featured images to your blog instead of manually selecting the image. The size and alignments can also be adjusted in the gallery block.

Other notable changes

New welcome model

The new welcome model provides a tour of the Gutenberg editor. Tips are no longer present and in its place, there is a slideshow with necessary explanations of blocks and official documentation reference. And the good thing is that this welcome guide can be seen as and when needed via the top right corner menu.

Accessibility improvement

On the accessibility front, keyboard navigation in media modal and privacy policy’s readability is improved. You also have the option to change the image title in the image block itself.

Health checks enhancements

There is a new widget on your site’s admin dashboard. This displays your website’s overall health and gives you a warning on possible issues. In case you want detailed reports, there is a CTA button that will provide the required information and possible remedy for the issues.

Incremental updates are just as important as version upgrades because the exploits don’t stop unless you do the essential regular maintenance.

About Galaxy Weblinks

We have a team of WordPress experts that will assess your WordPress website and help you be at the top of your game when it comes to security, performance, and stability. Contact us for a free

Galaxy Weblinks Acquires Biz Solutions 365; Expands Its Position in the Microsoft Technologies

Posted on May 6, 2020October 11, 2024 by galaxy-admin

Galaxy Weblinks, a leading technology consulting firm, acquired Biz Solutions 365, last month. The much expected announcement came amid the news of partial lift of lockdown in India. Biz Solution 365, was previously a technology backend partner for Kalmstrom. Since their recent split, Biz Solutions 365 was looking for new partnership when the offer came in from Galaxy Weblinks about 4 months ago.

Galaxy Weblinks is a technology consulting firm that helps companies accelerate their ability to innovate, grow, and deliver better digital products and services. It specializes in software development services across the entire product development lifecycle; strategy, design, engineering, QA, training & support.

They have now acquired Biz Solutions 365 that had a niche market for SharePoint plugins and expertise in cross-platform applications within other Microsoft Technologies including Outlook, Azure and Office 365. According to market sources, Business Productivity Tools (including SharePoint) make up ~30% of Microsoft Business Division’s revenue, resulting in an exclusive need for plugins and service experts.

With this acquisition, Galaxy Weblinks has diversified into SharePoint development and its plugins. The company has absorbed most employees that were working for Biz Solutions 365 into its fold to be able to take on the larger projects. The organization structure, says Anand Damani, the CEO of Galaxy Weblinks will remain the same and there will be no changes in the roles of the top officials as well.

This acquisition has brings a new adventure for Biz Solutions 365. It brings in 10+ years of SharePoint experience and expertise to the table. Galaxy Weblinks has an established team in Java and PHP and welcomes this expertise. It is indeed a win-win for both companies. Since the lockdown, all employees will continue to work from home and the on-boarding will also be virtual.

Sources are pretty tight-lipped regarding the amount of settlement and this information has not been made public. According to Varun Bihani, the Managing Partner, more acquisitions are planned over the next few years, to further enhance its sales and revenues.