Instarama, Author at Instarama Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

How AI & Machine Learning Influence the Growth of Digital Marketing

Today, the world is experiencing some path-breaking advancements in science and technology. Out of all recent developments, Artificial Intelligence has been one of the most trending topics, and it is undoubtedly a great feat. It is believed that AI itself would drive the next industrial revolution.

AI remains influential as it expands its tentacles in almost every sphere of our lives. Whether it is a smart device or a self-driving car, chatbots or voice recognition technology, AI is everywhere today.

When it comes to marketing, everything that AI does is to understand the customer needs better and offer a customized experience based on individual preferences. While science often describes AI as robots with human-like traits, AI keeps on revolutionizing all kinds of industries. It is still in its’ evolving phase, and yet we have achieved the milestones like Google’s AI-based RankBrain search algorithm, IBM’s Watson, and some unexplained phenomenon like Facebook’s AI bots creating their own language.

AI and Digital Marketing started progressing together very recently. Marketers found that AI and Machine Learning in digital marketing can improve customer experiences exponentially, and can save their time and money at the same time. Let us discuss in brief about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to comprehend the roots.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

In simple words, Artificial Intelligence is intelligence exhibited by machines. It empowers machines to think, respond, and perform tasks like humans. It enables the machines to learn from their experiences and improvise outputs for new kinds of inputs.

We can say AI is a way of training computers so that they can do things that humans execute better in the present scenario. More like making the machines self-sufficient with the humans-like decision-making capabilities.

What is Machine Learning?

Machine Learning is the study of computer algorithms that enable machines to learn on their own and perform functions without explicit programming. It is an application and subset of AI that deals with training the systems to learn and perfecting their outputs autonomously based on previous experiences.

How AI can provide a competitive edge to your digital marketing efforts?

According to emarsys, AI can enrich a brand’s overall value by fulfilling customer expectations more seamlessly. Brands can strengthen their revenue streams by investing in the right kind of AI. The impact of AI has enhanced every factor in digital marketing. Let us have a look at some of them below-

Improve user experience
Helps in decision making
Easier search sessions
Data-based Sales forecast
Minimized human errors
Easier analysis of huge data
Analysis of customer persona
Calculated and predicted ROI

AI helps businesses to understand their audiences better. It can analyze a huge mass of data in no time and predict the buying behaviors to influence decisions of the target customers. Besides improved user experience, AI and ML can help businesses devise effective marketing strategies determined by data analysis of individual business cases. With these AI Algorithms, it is easier to increase productivity by automating repetitive tasks.

AI allows swifter decision-making and helps to create better-performing content on websites. With AI-led digital marketing strategies, one can reach out to the right audience with the right kind of value. Ultimately, driving the sales and revenue streams on a positive altitude.

How AI and ML are transforming the face of Digital Marketing?

From Google’s RankBrain to personalized recommendations of Amazon, from Google’s voice search to Apple’s Siri assistant, AI is drastically influencing the face of the current digital landscape.

Due to the data complexity and growing size of businesses, AI maintains a positive ascends in digital marketing. Effective data analysis and the ability to adapt to the inputs, it is something that humans have been doing. However, today, the AI is replacing humans and new marketing trends are entering the sphere. AI-based digital marketing is the new cool and practical way to invest time and resources strategically.

Personalization: You can use AI technology to translate your customers’ needs, requirements, and preferences into personalized experiences. Putting the customers first can be a crucial element for success for any business. If the content marketing strategy and Artificial Intelligence work in sync, it would become so easy to conduct personalized campaigns based on data such as buying behavior, intent, and online searches.

Personalized product recommendations: Many online retail stores and brands use AI technology to track their customers’ preferences, habits, and buying behavior. This helps them to know about their customers’ interests and use the same while promoting the precise products that they actually might want to purchase. With AI-led personalized user experience, it is easier to engage customers in productive activities that increase sales.

For example, Amazon uses AI-powered recommendation engines to personalize product suggestions to its users. It helps the eCommerce giant to scale up sales and boost the overall revenue.

Chatbots: Chatbots can make your website stand apart from the rest. They can chat with your visitors 24×7 without failing. These AI-based virtual assistants can reply to queries, fetch data form CRM, suggest products, make payments, and update order status like humans. In fact, AI bots can respond to the data-driven queries more promptly than humans can.

Likewise, businesses can also enhance their overall process using AI-driven programs in different communication formats. You can add chatbots to your websites, emails, mobile apps, and even text messages. According to an econsultancy report, 57% of customers prefer to live chat to get their queries resolved. Think of the value they might bring by automating your live chat system.

Not just that, the chatbots can reach out to your customers and follow them up like humans. For example, Starbucks is using an AI-based digital marketing strategy to supplement its human employees. The Chabot assistant named Barista helps the customers to order their favorite coffee with minimal human interaction.

Unlike human beings, the bots never lose patience or become tired of working long hours. Subsequently, devising a more enjoyable customer experience. Moreover, the bots can handle multiple customers simultaneously, which turns out to offer higher returns on the investments.

Google AdWords In-market Audiences:

Google In-market audiences use AI and Machine Learning to understand the purchase intent of its users. This process involves analyzing trillions of search activities across millions of websites. According to Google, you can add audience targeting to the Ad groups and reach out to the people based on their interests, habits, behaviors, and interactions with your business.

AI-driven SEO:

Have you ever thought about how some web pages rank better than the others do? This is due to Google’s machine learning algorithm RankBrain. It ranks the websites among millions of others on the internet. Its ranking factors use AI-driven SEO to find valuable and useful content based on a user’s search intent.

AI-driven content:

The machines can write the content effectively as the content creation with AI technology will be faster. For example, there are AI tools that use machine learning to analyze social media insights and recommend actionable posts to make.

Some tools in the market use natural language creation to transforms all your data into readable narratives. You can use the same to customize real-time content updates or adopt flexible content publication.

Brands like Facebook, IBM, Microsoft, Nestle, Caterpillar, etc. use similar AI tools to create great enterprise content. Such unique AI technologies drive real-time industry trends and offer on-demand content assistance.

Naturally, they are not as perfect as humans are so far, but you never know the stuff future might have in its trunk for you.

AI-driven email marketing:

With machine learning, marketers can automate send times and frequency of emails. The same can effectively maximize the engagement and conversions stats for your email campaigns.

With AI, you can gather all actionable insights from different user behaviors and predict the right kind of content to drive conversions. AI will suggest the best time of day and the frequency for engaging the individuals. Ultimately, sending emails more precisely and achieving scalable ROIs.

AI-driven website design and optimization:

As we know, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a powerful aspect of digital marketing. It also helps in driving revenue. AI-based tools can test a large number of page elements and page variations simultaneously far better than the traditional A/B testing tools. The machines will do all the diagnosis and present the final insights. AI provides a more accurate and data-driven optimization for CRO.

AI-driven voice search:

Due to the intense application of AI-powered virtual assistants, voice search is becoming the ultimate phenomenon. It is a convenient option for mobile users indeed. According to TheeDesign, out of the 3.5 billion searches performed on Google every day, almost one-third is voice searches.

The digital marketers need to understand the fact and maneuvering the voice searches along with text-based optimizations.

According to Google, around 70% of the queries that Google Assistant receives consists of natural, conversational language. You need to optimize for voice search queries for your website. It is different from typed keywords requires necessary optimizations to offer direct answers to questions asked by searchers. Create the pages and optimize them accordingly as the questions normally start with who, how, what, where, when, why, etc.

Image Recognition:

The image and video analysis tool of Amazon known as Amazon Rekognition allows users to identify objects, recognize, and analyze the image. You just provide an image or video to the Rekognition API, it will identify the objects, people, text, scenes, and activities, as well as to detect any inappropriate content.

For example, financial institutions and Airports can leverage AI-enabled technology to simplify the payments and facilitate faster check-ins with a higher level of security.

Conclusion:

AI, being an active technology on the rise, can create wonders in different fields. The speed with which AI is growing across industries would surely trigger a revolution. AI and ML can help in marketing by managing data and retrieving information cost-effectively. Marketers can also make data-driven decisions for better campaign results. Besides that, they can also leverage the predictive analysis to identify their potential customers easily and leverage the purchasing behaviors to acquire higher sales and customer satisfaction.

Instarama All Hands Meeting: September

We usually evaluate successful event collaborations of the past month and look at what’s coming next in the All Hands Meeting. After we set the atmosphere for the meeting, we come to know the updates on our business priorities, goals, and other areas like sales and net retention for the last month.

There’s always something new with the business every month. The business insights and broader vision of the company help us to work in a great environment. The transparency across all the teams in the boardroom might seem awkward, but it creates an open and honest environment of learning for each employee. This inspires us to know more about organizational growth.

Let’s have a glance at the all-hands meeting conducted for the review of September.

People Management:

We celebrate with people and always focus on our employees’ growth. We always motivate them with activities that strengthen team morale. We have considerably enriched the nature of relationships with employees and employers by better understanding them. It’s equally important to recognize those who’ve been with the company for so long, and we value them.

As a token of gratitude for their loyalty and dedication, we have started celebrating our employees’ work anniversaries and reminding everyone of how long they’ve been part of Instarama.

Marketing and Sales Accomplishment:

Adent:

Adent continues to go ahead with the remarkable marketing and sales efforts in September. As business solutions have a direct impact on sales revenue, it is one of our most stable performing products.

Adent has experienced considerable improvement in terms of organic traffic. The direct, referral, Quora, Paid search, and Social traffic had substantial improvements. It has also seen positive developments in the base and customized product sales. The marketing strategies and planning is helping the sales team to highlight the ROI of the product and thus reinforcing the value to our customers.

ShopyGen:

As one of the top-performing products, Shopygen has managed to continue with the success factor, thanks to the hard work and efficient marketing strategies the team. The previously set goals have helped the product to come with stability in the market.

Despite some decline in traffic from multiple sources, Shopygen achieved a noteworthy improvement in terms of sales. The efforts of the post-sales team paid, and we got most of our sales this month on customized products. We hope to improve the sales funnel in terms of base product sales. Optimistically, the marketing team will give their best to improve on the traffic sources as well.

StreamHash:

Streamhash has experienced immense progress in marketing with critical success factors. The major shares of the traffic were held by organic and referral sources, which has increased by 5% and 40% respectively.

The social media, direct, and Quora traffic provided strengths to maintain better efforts. However, we noticed a moderate sales figure in September for streamhash. We are optimistic and have confidence in our sales and marketing team. We will excel and undoubtedly recover the positive figures both in terms of base and customized product sales.

PinLearn:

PinLearn is steering to a furthermost level in the competitive e-learning market. Despite ongoing product developments, the marketing team is continuing with efforts and strategies to get better traffic and brand awareness.

There is no doubt that Pinlearn is one of the most cutting-edge solutions from Instarama. Despite being in the beginning phase, it’s already attracting entrepreneurs from around the globe in a highly competitive e-learning arena. It will see a massive improvement in the future once we are done with some major upgradation to it.

PushMaze:

Pushmaze progressively becomes stable in the market with new techniques and marketing efforts. The organic, direct, referral and social traffic are considerably going good in PushMaze. We are also working with the latest push marketing trends for the upgradation of the product.

This product has the potential to disrupt the push marketing tools market. We are motivated and working continually on excelling in both the marketing and development part.

StartupWhale:

Startupwhale is our blog sharing platform for entrepreneurs and it’s already growing at a swift pace. The entrepreneurs, content curators, and startup businesses are keen to publish quality content on this website.

We would like to thank our esteemed contributors who have been sending us valuable content for publication. With combined efforts from the marketing and content development teams, this blog is going to become a one-stop solution for the startupreneurs.

Feedback and Improvement:

The valuable feedback from the QA team acts as a catalyst for perfect business solutions. The bug-free improvements across all products and adding new features to products give us major support in achieving sales accomplishments.

Although it might seem redundant to do it each month, having these regular checks helps us to identify any shortcomings and makes our products valuable in the market. The QA team always recaps which project has undergone, what’s been released, and what’s coming next.

Targets:

We always try to manage how we performed last month. Thus, we set a target comparing last month’s achievement and boost the performances of every team for the upcoming month. We always aim to improve the value of our products and services for our clients. We pin our hope for the upcoming festive season sale by setting stiff targets. We are well prepared for the upcoming three months festive season with a multi-pronged approach to meet the targets.

Star Performer of the Month: Amit Baskaran

After measuring the performance of all employees, Amit Bhaskaran came out to be the best performer for September.

Achieving product quality is a major challenge for the quality assurance (QA) team. And fortunately, Amit has made it as part of organizational DNA to ensure that quality targets are met. His dedication, punctuality, and taking ownership of projects made him the best performer of the month. His professional approach towards his daily task is truly praiseworthy. His efforts and contributions to numerous projects are crucial for the organization.

Congrats Amit! You deserve the recognition and title.

All hands Meeting – August 2019

When we gather together for the all-hands meeting, we keep things simple. We discuss everything about where the company is headed and analyze our efforts to improve day after day. Last week, we used the opportunity to discuss a variety of affairs worth exploring. This month’s All-hands meet was not just about exploring organizational growth, but we also took the opportunity to announce some significant changes in the company’s policies, which would make working with Instarama a fun experience for employees.

We believe professional growth, but our valued employees also get a work-life balance. That’s where the company’s new leave policy aims at. Here is a glance of the all-hands meeting held on September 12, 2019-

People Management

A company is a composition of every unique talent it nurtures. We not only follow this approach for our current work-force but also while accruing the new talents for the company. Working in this direction, the HR department closed significant positions and acquired talents in both the Marketing and Sales departments. We made collaborations with various consultancies, colleges, and universities. Hopefully, we will be able to close various other positions in the upcoming months as well.

Marketing and Sales Accomplishments

It was the time to analyze the stats and craft a roadmap for the upcoming month. The previous month was a combination of ups and downs. While acknowledging the efforts of the team, we also took the opportunity to learn from the mistakes.

Adent

As usual, Adent was one of our top-performing brands. Thanks to the marketing team, our adult industry business solutions have not only been able to beat the competition but also generate significant sales revenue. Overall, it was a stable recital on the marketing front. We were able to acquire over 50% of the organic traffic from all the targeted markets such as the US and UK. More than 25% of the traffic was from direct sources, which suggests a substantial advancement in brand awareness campaigns. The improvement in the marketing front paid off. The brand was able to maintain a steadily improving stream of revenue continuously for the third month.

ShopyGen

ShopyGen too was a mixed experience but with so many learning curves. While the overall, traffic saw a mild decline, the brand was also able to secure better engagement stats. In short, despite less traffic as compared to the previous month, we were able to check the bounce rates and also get more valid sign-ups. The efforts from the content marketing team, social media marketing, and affiliates paid-off as the referrals traffic saw a noteworthy improvement. The effects of the improved engagement could be easily noticed on the sales figures. After a deep dive in the month before, the sales figures were finally better than the target figures. We hope to improve further as we work on excelling on the marketing front as well this month.

StreamHash

StreamHash was a success story on the marketing front. We could easily notice a positive growth in the overall traffic. As expected, the major shares of the traffic were held by organic and direct sources, which is a good sign. The traffic from referrals and Quora were also significant, which indicates the grown-up brand awareness and people suggesting our eCommerce solutions in their content. To power-up efforts, we also launched multiple email campaigns. As a result, the sales figures were recorded at their highest point in the past 3-4 months. The overall figure was a balanced distribution of sales from the base products as well as several new customizations were closed.

PinLearn

The market for eLearning solutions is a highly competitive arena. Pinlearn is one of our latest additions, which covers everything required to start an online learning business. While it’s still an infant, the product is slowly attracting attention from the entrepreneurs. We could see an overall improvement of over 24% in the traffic from organic, direct, Quora, and top eLearning websites. The product shows a promising future and hopefully, it will be a big success once we are done with some major upgrades we have been working on for the past couple of months.

PushMaze

Being the only self-hosted and open-source push notification tool in the market, PushMaze is one of our most ambitious projects. We have been working day and night to polish the product based on the latest push marketing trends. We are working on a major upgrade, which would hopefully be a major breakthrough for the project. The marketing aimed at generating brand awareness has been going quite well. For now, we have been relying on content and social media marketing, and consequently, there has been an increase of 48% in the traffic from social media as well.

StartupWhale

We have only recently started working full-time on our ambitious blog for entrepreneurs, and it’s already doing well. We have been receiving contributions from several entrepreneurs, content creators, and small businesses. We are working continuously on loading the platform with quality content and a dedicated team is taking care of all the administration, editing, and marketing efforts. We aim to develop this blog into a reliable source of information for businesses, where everyone can benefit from the insights of the experienced professionals. The traffic is continually improving and previous month recorded the highest engagement stats so far.

Feedback and Improvement

Software solutions are all about continuous improvements. We aim to offer bug-free and perfect business solutions and that’s where the feedback from QA team acts as a major support in the cause. The team has been working hard to fix all the bugs and add new features as per the feedback from our current and previous clientele. Working in the same direction the team completed QA, bug fixes, and feature enhancements of the products such as xStreamer V4, xAggregate V3, StreamTube, StreamView, and LiveLearn. Some of the products in the QA’s pipeline for the upcoming months are xScorts, StreamNow, xTalk, and Pushmaze.

Star performer of the Month – Bala Tatwick Vempati

Tatwick is one of the finest talents acquired by our HR department for the team. His contributions are spread across every product and project we work on. He has been working with us for the past couple of months and has proven to be a valuable asset for the organization. His impeccable graphic designs were delivered exceptionally in tight schedules, which helped us achieve our targets without missing the deadlines. He was unquestionably an ideal contender for the performer of the month award. Congratulations Tatwick, you have rightfully earned this recognition. Keep it up.

All Hands Meeting – July 2019

An all-hands meeting is more than a formal gathering with a lot of other things on the desk. It’s an opportunity to ponder about overall development of the employees and appreciate their contributions towards the organization.

At Instarama, we strongly believe that happiness and growth of employees have a direct impact on how we function, and it helps us to determine where we stand in our journey. Staying transparent is the motto of our All-Hands Meetings.

We could see the enthusiasm and energy on each of our employee’s faces. One more month of hard work and commitment was achieved, and it was the time to analyze our efforts. We are determined to take lessons from the past and prepare a much better trail for the upcoming month.

It was a time to go over the key metrics, make some announcements, and also reserve a spot for our customary kudos at the end of the meeting.

People Management:

We improved considerably the nature of talent acquisition and enriched the relationships with employees by better understanding their unique roles. We work with vision and strategy and keep on repeating it to reach a new goal each month. And that’s fairly important in its own right.

Marketing and Sales Accomplishments:

Adent:

The trends in Adent continued to get ahead towards success in the sales and marketing in the monsoon season.
We could clearly notice the improvements in terms of total number of users and new users as well.
The referral, organic, and the traffic from Quora had their fair share in the overall traffic of the website.
Adent could achieve a milestone growth rate in terms of several new sign-ups and inquiries.
The sales from base products showed decent progress, while the majority of the revenue was acquired from customizations.

ShopyGen:

ShopyGen, the e-commerce solution is one of our biggest assets in terms of market competition.
The previous month saw a significant increase across all marketing channels and the marketed countries.
The referral, Quora, direct, and social traffics continued to manage a stable scale in the month of July.
The sales department reported some new achievements in terms of sales from base as well as customized products.

StremHash:

Yet another flagship product, StreamHash continues to grow, thanks to the innovative marketing skills of the StreamHash team.
The website received a considerable boost and increase in traffic from all major channels like referral, organic, direct, and Quora.
It has also managed to grow notably in terms of social media engagements and direct traffic.
In terms of sales, StreamHash was able to acquire a substantial growth as compared with the previous month’s data.
We received fair share of revenue from both the base products and the new customization requests.

PushMaze:

Pushmaze has led the board with the increase of the organic, Quora, direct traffic.
We could see a mild decline in the referral traffic, which we took as a lesson and planned our ways to acquire better numbers from this front as well in the upcoming month.

StartupWhale:

The technopreneurs are providing their ideas in one platform and their ideas feature on this space.
The response is quite good, and with the continuous efforts of the marketing team, we could see a significant improvements in the traffic as well.
We are receiving decent number of guest posts from contributors across various industries. Hopefully, the upcoming month will see a much better engagement from this front.

Feedback and Improvements:

We keep on improving our products based on customer feedback and the inputs from our QA team, which had made it possible for us to stand a par in the market. When we get the feedback from the Q&A team, it really gives us inspiration, self-confidence, and excitement. The team is working day and night on many upcoming products and services. We have several new products and upgrades in the pipeline. We are right on the schedule and hopefully will release several new updates and in the upcoming month.

Target:

The team spirit in both the marketing and sales team is elevating day by day. All the team members share their professional high-points with the colleague sitting next to them or discuss in small meetings to achieve a better target for the next month. The targets have been functioning well since the past quarter, and are becoming even better in the market.

We aim for constant product enhancements and increased quality traffics for all of our products. We planned to strengthen the presence of existing and new customers and engage more with our new line ups. Moreover, the next month data will definitely show even better numbers on all the fronts.

Best Performer of the Month:

After assessing and evaluating the performance on dedication, punctuality, and ownership of the projects, Jeffreena came out to be the best performer for the month of July.

Her distinct efforts, continuous hard work, and contribution to the project are really crucial for the organization. Moreover, it is the performance of precise set of intellectual acts that came with a shape of achievement for her.

Eventually, she has been putting her efforts in the context of marketing vision and also in sales by bringing everyone onto the same page. She always celebrates curiosity and learning more from her fellow teammates. This always motivates the team to go above and beyond to chase those business wins!

Congrats Jeffreena! You deserve this recognition and title.

20 Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read

Have you ever wondered about that one thing common in world’s wealthiest people? Most of them have acclimated themselves in reading books. Books lead us to a new way of thinking and teach us how to become successful in life.

If you aspire to join the level of wealthy entrepreneurs, reading is a priceless skill. To grow a healthy and thriving business, you need to read books just like a regular part of the diet.

It’s been stated that most CEOs read at least three books per month. If you are interested in finding a couple of engaging business books to your must-read list, then the following list will help you.

Here is the list of 20 books that should be on every entrepreneur’s reading list. You can dive into the following books and begin learning new skills or seek some inspiration for your business.

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill:

This book is one of the bestselling self-help guides of all time. Napoleon says in this book that riches begin with a state of mind. If you want to become rich, change your mindset. You must think yourself rich. The term rich could mean any form of wealth such as money, happiness, healthy relationships, or success in the business, etc. This book offers some deep insight into the ways to become money conscious. It depicts how you can think yourself as a rich person, and control our mindsets to become rich.

When you think rich, you will grow rich. The state of mind has a definitive purpose on your richness. Until you become success conscious, you won’t achieve it. Don’t let your mind think indifferently or become failure conscious. The initial point of all achievement is desire. Set a definitive goal in your mind and go forward.

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie:

You need to influence and deal with people to get success in your business. This book provides you an overview idea of how to make people think like you, how you can win them without any resentment. The ways to like people, techniques in handling them, and giving sincere appreciation are depicted in this book. Let the people indulge in your way of thinking and admire you emphatically.

Creative Confidence by Tom and David Kelly:

The fundamental and core thing in the book is simple. Tom and David make a persuasive case that creativity is innate in all human beings. The difference is some of the people recognize the creativity inside and others don’t. The ultimate goal of the book is to guide and bring out creativity within people. Everyone is creative, but not everyone has the courage to be create. They need guidance when to take action and how to start a project.

Many people don’t dare to be creative and afraid of failure. But failure eventually gives a breakthrough to success. The author says you need to give yourself permission to fail to become successful. The author also depicts the steps for sparking creativity in one chapter “Spark: From Blank Page to Insight,”

The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson:

The ‘Slight Edge’ is a book about new ways of thinking. This book helps to make daily choices and take action by creating multiple outcomes to deliver the lives we desire. It outlines how to apply the daily discipline and consistently use the Slight Edge principles to turn around any aspect of your life. It represents the way of thinking: what we know, how we hold that knowledge, and what we do.

The secret factor is straightforward: Do the small things over and over again until success kicks in. As most of the small things are extremely easy to do, these small things produce massive results after some time. Jeff Olsen also outlined several powerful ideas to help us embark on the road to mastery.

The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris:

Do you feel overwhelmed or overworked? The book by Tim Ferris can surely help you out. You’ll get to know about the lifestyle design, which will eliminate 50 percent of the work and help you in living the life you want.

The book states the step-by-step blueprint to free yourself from the chains of a corporate job, create a business to fulfill your dreams, and live life like a millionaire.

This book is perfect for those who are sure there must be more to life than just living to work. If you’re thinking about starting your business but certainly not sure how to take steps, go for this book.

The Creative Curve by Allen Gannett:

Why some people are considered as genius while others not? What additional insights they have? Or is it because of the creativity? The author offers a model to reverse engineer the creativity so we can potentially reach success.

According to the author, the creative arc is a bell-shaped curve that examines the relationship between preference and familiarity. The more it is exposed, the popular it becomes. When it reaches a peak, the idea overstated and leads become infamous. The crux of the book devises four laws of the creative curve: consumption, imitation, creative communities, and iterations.

One need to be familiar with the chosen field, should learn from successful predecessors, find mentors to guide, and progressively elaborate their ideas to formulate the success.

This is Marketing by Seth Godin:

This book largely aimed at marketers and encourages them to work in different ways. The entrepreneurs can find it helpful as it provides the functional requirements of the business. The book perhaps described as the magnum opus of Seth Godin, and describes how the Internet has transformed media from being colossal.

It helps the people to become who they want to be and knowing about the ideal form of marketing. The book “This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen until You Learn to See” also depicts how a change forces marketers to adopt an approach of identifying their targets’ underlying goals.

The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker:

One of the most popular books “The Effective Executive” by Peter Drucker is the top picks for most of the entrepreneurs. The book will definitely elevate your effectiveness to the top notches. It is one of the best books that can change your life. It illustrates how personal effectiveness (Doing the right things) can be developed through several key practices.

The author explains in the book how efficiency is the primary function of executives. Being efficient is simply doing what is necessary. The key to being efficient for an executive is to apply the efforts and bear the responsibilities.

Business Adventures by John Brooks:

Business Adventures by John Brooks is one of the beloved books of business tycoons like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. The evergreen lessons it contains are being admired by these business magnates.

The book talks about 12 critical moments in American industry. It details the surprising case studies of American business in the past century. You can discover the reasons for all the events described in the book according to your perspective. Perhaps, business adventures teach lessons to the people on how to act. The chapters depict human nature in the context of business, technologies and change in best practices that people never do.

Benjamin Franklin by Walter Isaacson:

When you see a biography of an iconic, historic figure like Benjamin Franklin, it is really worth to get it. Although he was the most sparkling characters of history, there were stark differences.

The book states the account of the activities of Benjamin Franklin from the humble beginnings to a clever and practical person. From the apprentice of a printer to a wise sage and practical philosopher, he got international status and outshined in the world.

Isaacson has specified several things about Benjamin Franklin in a plain and straightforward manner in the book. You’ll see a perceptive analysis on Franklin as a real man with strong emotions and human weaknesses. It focuses on his pro-democratic views and his relationship to modern culture. This book would probably be the best choice for entrepreneurs to know how to look at life in multiple ways.

The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday:

This book helps you undergo the struggles of your life with elegance and resilience by drawing lessons from ancient heroes, former presidents, actors, and athletes. It depicts how their adversity life turned into the pillar of success with the help of their perception and willpower. The whole book is packed full of anecdotes that illustrate the timeless stoical lessons about the greatest men and women who have ever lived.

It tells to focus on the things you can control. Let the other things go and turn every new obstacle into an opportunity for a better and stronger life. This book also depicts the perception, action, and will power.

Connect The Dots by Rashmi Bansal:

The book tells the stories of courage, determination, and inspiration of 20 people who became entrepreneurs without doing an MBA.

The book is one of the most inspiring books the entrepreneurs should read. The different stories of how people have come from nowhere to the scenario. Each of the stories will be amazingly inspirational for the readers.

The book shows that it is not necessary to do an MBA to become an entrepreneur as academic qualifications shouldn’t decide a person’s future. The entrepreneurs need to be ready to tackle during their challenging period.

You Can Win by Shiv Khera:

The book is a self-help book that motivates most of the people and takes things right from their daily life and gives them a positive thrust. The book is mostly for those who pursue a balanced personality and want to move towards the zenith of success with a positive vibe.

It stresses for those who have the desire to succeed and want to live their life in a better manner than they are currently now. The action plan for life has stated in the book with the importance of attitude, motivation, and success. Further, it provides steps to adopt a positive attitude in life.

EntreLeadership by Dave Ramsey:

EntreLeadership is a must-read book for business owners. It shows how Ramsey grew his own company from a card table in the living room to a multimillion company. He depicts all the mistakes he made along his way along with his success.

According to Dave Ramsey, the modern world belongs to neither entrepreneurs nor the leaders. You have to be both. i.e., EntreLeader. A leader has characteristics like discipline, vision, passion, and charisma. While an entrepreneur is driven, determined, creative, and courageous. To handle the entrepreneurial endeavor, a combination of both qualities is necessary.

The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav:

The real strength of a person derives from silence, and praising the virtues of others will reflect through your politeness. The book deserves all the praises and is suitable for the broader audience regardless of cultural or religious background. The key purpose of this book is to explain people to nurture inner power so that they can deal easily with any kind of adversity.

The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen:

The book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” is a business standard that explains the power of interruption. It depicts why market leaders are often failing gradually as the technologies and industries change. Sometimes the disruptive technologies will result in worse product performance in the organization. It also states what incumbents can do to secure their market leadership for a longer period of time.

Good to Great by Jim Collins:

The author explains from his experience how to make good companies great. Moreover, Good to Great phase needs systematic stages and essential segments. If we had to describe the key purpose of the book in a single word, then Discipline will be the perfect hotel. You need disciplined people, great thought, and action to be in focused and excellence.

The author says “Good is the Enemy of Great”. Many organizations don’t even try to be great. Instead, they want to be good because it is an easier process. The companies are not determined to be the best in the industry. Thus, it opens the door to competitors. It’s the same with our lives. Few people want to live a great life. This is just because they’re happy with living a good life.

The power of habit by Charles Duhigg:

This book by Charles Duhigg is perfect for those if you are under the delusion that you’re under the control of your life. If you are planning to start a new habit but just can’t stick to it. If you want to go out of a bad habit but keep falling off the wagon. The author demonstrates that habits dictate most of the things that go around us. I believe every entrepreneur should read this book to take control of their life. It explains perfectly the practical strategies and techniques to apply changes on the individual and organizational level.

Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki:

“Rich Dad Poor Dad” is about Robert Kiyosaki and his experience with two of his father one is his real father (poor dad) and other is his best friend’s father (rich dad). He explains both the ways in which they shaped their thoughts about money and investing. He says “You don’t need to earn a high income to be rich”.

The author compares his poor dad to those people who are perpetually running in the Rat Race to need more money in their life but never able to satisfy their dreams for wealth because of financial literacy.

The Greatest Salesman in the World- Og Mandino:

The author says in this book “Never feel shame for trying and failing for he who has never failed is he who has never tried.” The book is dealing with the philosophy of salesmanship and success. The author tells an anecdote of Hafid, a poor camel boy who achieves a life of abundance and became the owner of the most powerful trade empire of his time and was known as the greatest salesman in the world.

There are 10 scrolls that hold the secret of learning and lays the foundation, each containing a key principle each for mastering the art of selling.

All Hands Meeting – June, 2019

Half a year is over. On the midst of the year in June, we finally experienced and convinced that we’ve been working on for weeks dedicatedly. The reflected work of each employee on the pathway of growth is really phenomenal through these days. When you look closer at the overview of two hours of all hands meeting at the boardroom, you’ll start to feel the objective. Let’s dive in to know!!!

We started the meeting with a welcome retreat to new hires and highlight accomplishments of last month followed by demonstrating the values of each employee. With the reinforcement of accountability, identification of the core competency, and articulating the vision, all employees provided their action plans for next month.

Marketing and Sales Accomplishment:

Adent:

The positive aspects continue to go ahead with the remarkable marketing and sales in efforts in Adent.
Adent experienced an enormous improvement in the overall total users which has increased by 18.20%, total new user by 19.05%, total sessions by 14.40%.
The organic, direct, referral, Quora, Paid search, and Socials increased consistently and every channel has achieved improvements.
The sales department has almost reached its target and thus strengthening the value to the customer by providing better support.
Adent has also experienced an increase in substantial development in the base and customized products.

ShopyGen:

ShopyGen always managed to continue with the success factor with great marketing strategies.
The analytics and previously set goals helped the products a lot in the market.
The social media, organic, direct, and referral provided strengths to maintain better efforts.
The Sales team achieved a massive improvement and managed to sell base products thriving in the market. Gentack and Genstore saw significant improvements in terms of sales.

PinLearn:

PinLearn is navigating to a furthermost level in the e-learning market.
The organic visitors were quite equivalent to the last month. The referral traffic improved by 3%.
Despite the product development, the marketing team has considerably managed to continue the efforts. The team worked thoroughly to obtain more strategies to draw traffic from different sources.

StreamHash:

The month of June for StreamHash saw moderate marketing and received a little decline in terms of organic, direct, and referral.
However, we managed to grow notably in terms of paid search and Quora traffic.
In terms of sales, it has managed to sell both base products and customizations on many products.
It has experienced immense progress in marketing with a critical success factor.

PushMaze:

PushMaze is gradually stabilizing in the market with new techniques and marketing efforts.
The organic, direct, and social traffic has improved and doing well in PushMaze.

StartupWhale:

The ultimate goal for Startuphwhale is to feature the startupreneurs and their ideas in one platform.
The marketing team is continuously working to outreach the bloggers.

Feedbacks and Improvements:

Great company culture comes down to only one thing: – Employee. The organization defines the values and mission, but ultimately, it’s up to the team members to follow. And that starts with having a cohesive team in the first place that willing to trade ideas. We believe the feedback from the employees is very essential to connect the vision of the company.

We captivate the reviews and feedbacks from everyone positively. With the ongoing development of projects, the feedback truly helps us to shape small improvements in large aspects. Each team is working with passion on the feasibility studies to make some great difference to our products in the future.

Working on feedback is the most effective way for growth in the ongoing process. To attain a larger goal, we are constantly reviewing the processes and strategies.

The feedbacks of our QA team is equally needed for improvisation. The overview of improvement of June QA report is as follows:

xFans testing and documentation
Pushmaze v2 testing
GenBnb retesting fixed issues
xMagazine testing payment gateway integration
Genstore minor issues
Xstreamer lite testing

Targets:

As we know, June is the month where half a place is filled with rain. Beautiful colors of flowers sparkle as nature gives peace of mind. The targets are also set for the upcoming half year is also sparkle in each and every employee’s mind.

All employees work constantly for continuous product enhancements and to increase quality traffics with a set target and goal with them. Each team is working flawlessly to enhance the growth of the organization. Moreover, the next month will come with a quick revive.

Star Performer of the Month: Nithin

It’s a great way for everyone to publicly recognize each other in all-hands meeting. But it’s very difficult to choose with the team of dedicated professionals working honestly for the company.

The star performer for this month is Nitin. Based on the values and work in the past couple of months, Nitin managed the sales and post-sales necessities of each customer persistently. Nitin has always worked with extensive participation of all team members with enthusiasm.

He worked dedicatedly to reach new heights with innovative strategic tactics in the sales team. His individual efforts and contribution towards all the projects handled by him are crucial. His unparalleled efforts made him the star performer of the month.

We applaud your determination and effort you have demonstrated on the Sales. We are really proud to have you on board and offer our congratulations on your service milestone. Congrats Nitin!!! You truly deserve the recognition.

Peek Inside Instarama’s New Office

Work environment always impacts the employee’s mood, drive, and performance. To feel confident and motivated, the employees need to work in a friendly atmosphere. Thus it will create a productive work environment and give success to the company.

As the employees spend more than one-third of their time in office, and in order to retain the top talent, we fostered the environment that empowers the employees with the right space of work.

The open plan layout of the new office is fantastic. We are setting a new standard for workplace and we believe all the team should work collaborate with a happier, healthier, and more productive work environment.

We’ve been in our new office space in Electronic city phase-1 in Bengaluru for 1 month. We put a lot of thought into the design and its amenities. Let’s take a virtual tour here with this blog.

Old office!!!

While we planned to shift the old office, there is a bit of nostalgia about leaving the old office for everyone. We enjoyed a lot and had good times there. We grew and developed at the creative energy space. We had a fond of memories about the co-working space, the garden, and the surroundings. Well, after all finally we shifted to our fully owned office space. That’s really a great achievement for us.

New Office space!!!

Focused on elegant design, we are creating a delightful experience for our employees. The entrance area is giving a welcoming oasis for the employees and visitors.

The interior rooms feature glass walls which allow the sunlight directly to stream on the workspace.

Our old office had only one meeting room. Now the three meeting rooms have plenty of areas filled with whiteboards and other necessary presentation equipment. These conference halls provide additional space for meeting and discussions.

The open office layout provides the employees to retreat if they need solitude to concentrate. It provides a room for focusing on a difficult project.

The team can find an informal meeting space near the game area just adjacent to the cafeteria.

The best thing at our new space is that it enables the whole team to sit together for lunch at the rooftop space.

With easy access to natural light, collaborative spaces, and private meeting rooms, employees can enhance their productivity and satisfaction.

Everyone has their own dedicated space. However, sitting all day at the same place can be exhausting. A change in place can also spark creativity. So the employees can use some versatile spaces according to comfort like bean bags, bar stools, etc.

Hired great team members!!!

As the larger office space gives us plenty of room both for the existing staff and new ones, we have added a few more employees to our team since moving. And yes, we are constantly growing.

We hired the right people in the office to become more successful in the market. The new employees are professional and team players which ultimately impacts the working environment.

Working at a comfortable pace!!!

The ambiance of the new office is clean and attractive with the sun shines into the workplace. The relaxing atmosphere with comfortable furniture provides an extra mile to work. Thus the flexibility to work increases.

The quality workspace design of the office leads to a more productive and less stressful atmosphere.

All of the employees feel comfortable and calm in their physical work settings to produce their best work.

Cafeteria!!!

A cup of coffee is needed for regular working employees to boost energy and to engage in intensive or complicated work. The cafeteria is great for casual chats, good conversations, and sharing new ideas with a cup of coffee or tea.

Fun activities on Friday!!!

Fun makes employees more happy and relaxed. We celebrate once in a month a fun Friday to make the employees more pleasant at the workspace. These happy hours create an entertaining environment among the employees.

Final Thoughts!!!

We are extremely excited about our new office. We look forward to serving the employees with more improved office surroundings.

We’re going to finish the other requirements in the next couple of weeks as there still slight twists needed and major works are there in the pipeline in order to make it a perfect one. It’s a work in progress. Soon we’ll add the things that will surely take on new meaning as we move forward.

And finally, we thank each and every employee for their support through the years. Thank you for joining us on our workspace tour! If you’re in the area, feel free to get in and visit us.

10 Best Mobile App Development Frameworks for 2019

For many entrepreneurs seeking mobile apps for business, all mobile apps are the same. An Android app that runs on Android devices and an iOS app that works on iOS devices.

However, this is not the scene with mobile app developers. They have to deal with the big question first –“Which is the best framework for mobile app development of this particular requirement?”

You might also not know that there are several kinds of Android and iOS mobile apps. Here is a glimpse for your better understanding:

Native Android Apps on Java
Native iOS Apps on Objective-C or Swift
Web apps on HTML5, JavaScript and CSS
Hybrid Apps on HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript

The best category is of the native apps, which are more optimized and stable, but come at a higher cost and take a longer duration for mobile app development. Companies with higher development budget and large requirements use such apps.

On the flip side are the Web apps, which are generally cheaper but come with limited features and scalability as they run on browsers. They typically install a web browser on the device with a particular mobile site bookmarked on it. They offer the same usability and UX that mobile responsive sites provide.

Then come the hybrid apps that run both on Android and iOS phones. They carry most of the pros and cons of both native and web apps as they are built on a hybrid of technologies from both. They are cheaper than Native apps and possess more stability than web apps. However, they are still slower and less optimized than Native apps.

Each of these classifications has its own benefits and cons. They are developed on different frameworks and use varied tech stacks. So which is the best mobile app development framework for your mobile app development project?

We will understand this in deep. In this article, I am going to enlist 10 mobile app development frameworks used by mobile application development companies and developers across the industry. You would be surprised to know the brands that are running the apps developed on these frameworks.

Top Mobile App Development Frameworks in 2019

1. React Native

Inspired by the massive success of ReactJS, it was an in-house project of Facebook made available to the public on GitHub. With over 1,800 contributors and 15 thousand commits, React Native is one of the most admired repositories on GitHub.

If you love JavaScript, there is no better selection than this mobile app development framework to develop your Android as well as iOS Apps. React Native utilizes the same libraries like ReactJS. Also termed as ReactJs for developing app components, it’s hard to question its cross-platform compatibility to build hybrid apps.

While React Native does not give a purely native app, you still can’t point out the developed app is not native, because it uses the same building blocks as Objective-C and Java use for building native iOS and Android apps. It offers an equal UX and speed similar to native apps.

React Native has made is place among many lists of top mobile application development frameworks in 2019. Developed by Facebook, this framework powers the mobile apps of top brands like Instagram, Tesla, Airbnb, Walmart, and many other fortune 500 brands.

2. Ionic

Iconic is an extremely popular and open-source framework for hybrid apps development. It is used by many mobile app development companies to deliver first-class solutions for simple to most complex requirements.

Like ReactJs, Ionic is also capable of developing Native-like user experience and stability. It uses HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript to provide the best development environment to build even the biggest commercial apps. You can also access the Ionic market to download projects and templates developed by other contributors.

Working with the very powerful Angular SDK, you can also use this framework in combination with PhoneGap. If you love JavaScript and Angular, you can build topnotch hybrid apps using the Ionic framework.

3. Xamarin

Xamarin is yet another framework to develop cross-platform mobile apps. It is managed by Microsoft hence, gives access to the C# code-base. Unlike others in the list, it does not use HTML or JavaScript. So if you are not comfortable with JavaScript and still want to develop high-end mobile apps, you can rely on C# used by the framework.

Be advised that C# is as powerful as Objective-C or Java codebase. You would get a similar kind of feasibility and scalability for your apps using Xamarin. It offers one of the quickest ways to develop mobile apps by coding really fast. You get to use the same IDE, API, and language everywhere. The Xamarin Studio IDE is built integrally with Git for easier access to the repositories.

Xamarin is associated with the top brands like IBM, Xoriant, and Microsoft for development support. It is safe to say that Xamarin is one of the best mobile app development frameworks.

4. Adobe phone gap

Based on Apache Cordova, the Adobe-owned mobile app development framework is a cloud-based solution. It’s also open-source, free, and best suited for small to medium-sized hybrid mobile app development.

It uses the teach stack of JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS. If you are comfortable with the JavaScript stack, you can develop any app in a very quick time and with fewer efforts. Not just Android and iOS app development, you can develop apps for other platforms as well such as Windows, Blackberry, Mac OS, Ubuntu, and Firefox OS.

You don’t have to download and install the SDKs locally. All resources are available on the cloud. That means you can develop an iOS app using Phone gap from a non-mac computer as well. That’s cool as you are not limited by your hardware’s restrictions.

5. Flutter

Backed by Google, Flutter is a free and opens source hybrid app development framework. Despite being hybrid, it offers similar UI designing like native apps with Material design and Cupertino style. Flutter is trusted by the top brands and mobile app development companies across the industry.

The programming langue of Flutter is called as Dart. It does not depend on WebView or OEM widgets and uses Skia 2D rendering engine to build the native UI. The development experience is quite a user- friendly as you can test your projects without restarting in case there is an error.

You can embed the Flutter app engine into an app or build a completely new app from scratch. Mobile app developers also compare it with the top-notched React Native framework because of its grown popularity in a short span.

6. Corona SDK

Corona SDK is an open-source mobile application framework. It’s well-known for its user-friendly approach to build 2D mobile application is a lightning fast pace. Using this framework, you can develop the applications for iOS, Android as well as Kindle.

Corona SDK is powered by Lua programming language. If you are fond of developing gaming apps, Corona SDK is one of the best choices for quick development experience. The apps developed here are generally well-optimized in terms of usability and speed.

In addition to Gaming apps, the SDK can also be used for general apps development. Speedier development of stable and optimized mobile apps is the USP of this framework. You can use the SDK both on Windows and Mac OS X computers.

7. JQuery Mobile

This HTML5 framework made it our list for its unmatched support for cross-platform devices. A single app developed on this framework can run on all supported devices such as Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows, Kindle, Nook, and MeeGo.

I have seen Jquery in almost every list for best mobile app development frameworks. It’s comprehensible considering jQuery is already a popular technology and everyone knows how to code. Following the aspects of write-less and Do more, jQuery gives the simplicity of development like none other frameworks.

8. Intel XDK

Personally, I find Intel XDK more futuristic than others. It is a cross-platform framework like others in the list. However, the development becomes so easy with available plugins. The best thing is you can develop a single app and make it responsive to across all kinds of devices.

It’s not just JavaScript but Node.js. If you are aware of how powerful node.js is, you would know this is the right framework to develop even the biggest of the apps. Moreover, you can make your apps more futuristic with IoT support.

The real-time previewing is the USP that allows you to see the changes as you make them. You can achieve most of the implementation using a simple drag and drop alone. In addition to development, Intel XDK makes debugging, testing and emulation quite smooth.

9. Mobile Angular UI

Similar to Intel XDK Mobile Angular UI is well-equipped to develop highly responsive mobile apps. Using Bootstrap and Angular you can turn your hybrid mobile a great success. The perfect combination of Bootstrap, Agular, and HTM5 is all you need to build scalable applications.

Additionally, the Bootstrap syntax makes it so easy to convert any web app into a mobile app. You can use an array of pre-added components to make your app as smooth as possible such as sidebars, Navigation bars, various overlays, and Scrollable areas, etc.

10. Native Script

Native Script is an open-source mobile app development framework. You can create native mobile apps using tech like JavaScript, Angular, and TypeScript. Similar to Flutter it offers a flexible development experience for Android as well as OS app using a single code base.

The Frame is well supported by the community and you get access to a speedier development using the plugins developed by the community. Using Agular you can also share the codes between the web and mobile apps, making a perfect hybrid app for your cause.

To conclude

We at Instarama offer mobile apps development services for all sorts of platforms and operating systems. We are also the mobile application development company for purely native applications on Android as well as iOS platforms. Our team holds years of experience in development across all the frameworks mentioned above. If you are thinking about developing a mobile app, we can serve you according to the bests of your requirements.

Top Features to Look Before Choosing an eCommerce Solution

E-Commerce is a colossal arena with gigantic arrays of business models. Today, eCommerce sites have become an inseparable part of our daily lives and somehow we tend to interact with them on a regular basis. From buying grocery supplies, picking up the latest fashions wares, booking an Uber, planning a holiday trip to calling an AC mechanic at home, everything is available online on the eCommerce sites.

According to Statista, more than 1.66 billion customers worldwide did online shopping of some kind from various eCommerce sites in 2017. They expect this number would only increase in the future and finally cross the $2.14 billion mark by the year 2021.

Well, that was in 2017, but now is 2019. Do you think eCommerce sites are the same as they were a few years back? Experts have anticipated this huge growth on the metrics combined with online sales, which includes a boundless differentiation in the eCommerce products and services types we would be seeing in the days to come.

We are not limited to physical products anymore

The eCommerce market today is not just about selling physical products anymore. It has evolved to accommodate an array of services and nobilities as well. You will get the point by checking out the following types of eCommerce sites we see in our daily lives these days. Today, we have an eCommerce site for anything we want to purchase or avail-

Branded inventory based sites (Nike, Reebok)
Marketplace product-based sites (Amazon, Alibaba, Walmart, Etsy)
Digital products sites (Steam, Origin, Kindle, Apple iBooks, PrestaShop Add-ons)
Service marketplace sites (Task rabbit, urban Clap, Thumbtack, Freelancer, Upwork )
Ride-sharing sites (Uber, Ola, Lyft)
C2C products sites (eBay )
C2C Home rentals site (Nest away )
Home sharing sites (Airbnb)
Affiliate eCommerce sites (TheWireCutter -Amazon Affiliate)
Drop shipping sites (Alibaba, Obrelo, Salehoo)
E-Learning marketplace sites (Udemy, Coursera)

E-commerce market has grown drastically. With ever-growing market and new entrants joining the sphere, eCommerce has become a tough but a huge market for rulling. However, it doesn’t mean it has nothing for the new entrepreneurs.

Beat the heat with a perfect strategy

Despite this cut-throat competition, the online market is still a partially grown sphere. It still has a lot more in its trunk for the new entrepreneurs. There are unlimited business ideas, which when applied strategically can make you a success story in no time.

Amazon, Alibaba, Walmart, Etsy, etc. have been ruling the eCommerce space for a long time. However, still, businesses like Uber, Thumbtack, Freelancer, Upwork, and Airbnb, came and grabbed a huge share of the market. It happened because they knew they had to do something different. Instead of competing with what Amazon is offering, they offered what it’s not attempting. As a result, they are no less successful than the other eCommerce giants today.

You need a flawless eCommerce software

Call them eCommerce software, eCommerce platforms, eCommerce CMS, or eCommerce solutions, these are all different names for the same stuff. A software solution to start your eCommerce business. A software solution for your eCommerce website development.

E-Commerce platforms are one of the multiple ways to develop an eCommerce site in a quick time. Unlike the old days, you don’t have to go through the eCommerce website development from scratch anymore. There are various pre-developed eCommerce platforms in the market which allow you to-

Use a ready-made eCommerce website
Avoid development from scratch
Pick up from a pre-developed platform
Customize the platform on a requirement
Finish website development in a quicker time

How to choose a worthy eCommerce platform?

E-Commerce platforms are twin-edged swords. An efficient software can make you a ruler in the market with an average business idea, but a wrong choice will only lead to a free-fall even with a perfect business plan.

However, you shouldn’t expect your site to be perfect at the beginning itself. An average eCommerce site goes through a series of evolutions to become a competent touchpoint. The market does expect you to adopt eCommerce software as per the latest standards. Today, the best eCommerce solution means a competent eCommerce software that lets you tackle the competition.

What makes a competent eCommerce solution?

The top eCommerce platforms in the market have gained the title not because they have everything or they are perfect. They are popular because of a precise blend of multiple factors that make a software contemporary. Following are the factors that you too should consider while choosing from the best eCommerce solutions in the market.

1. Pricing and payment model

E-Commerce platforms are sold by software companies in different models. There are popular and top eCommerce platforms in each model you are comfortable with. So the first aspect to consider is the software delivery model suitable to your budget and requirements. The two of the popular model are SaaS and Open-source models.

Facts about SaaS-based eCommerce platforms:

Also called as hosted solutions
Include monthly license fee
Come without source code access
Include other miscellaneous fees
Generally, come with a low upfront cost
Limited Scalability & dependent on vendors
No code customizability
You don’t own the software
Quickest website deployment
No hassles of website maintenance
Highly secured by the cloud servers

Facts about Open-source code platforms:

Also called as self-hosted/eCommerce CMS
Access to the source code
One time buying cost/ no monthly fee
Generally, a large upfront cost of buying
You can own the software for good
A higher degree of customizability
A greater degree of store scalability
Generally slower deployment speed
Full control and responsibility of the website

Both the delivery models provide the best eCommerce solutions with their own set of pros and cons. The self-hosted model is the oldest model, which has been in practice from the beginning. However, the need for SaaS model appeared to reduce the hassles of website deployment, hosting, and maintenance from the entrepreneurs. The software is delivered as a service and source code access is revoked. On this cost, the SaaS vendors let you enjoy hassle-free management and focus more on business development.

While the Self-hosted model is still preferred by the entrepreneurs with the technical background. They know they would get an uncompromised control over their site if they can afford to maintain the site by their own. The source code access opens doors to unlimited customizability and options to scale the software on a requirement. Entrepreneurs get complete ownership of a custom eCommerce platform with the self-hosted delivery model.

2. Third-party integration

Be it any model, you should not overlook the possibilities to integrate plugins, extension, and popular APIs on your platform. The affinity to further integrations allows your platform to incorporate popular features without developing them from scratch.

For example, if you need great analytics for your site, it’s better to integrate Google Analytics than developing the same of your own. Furthermore, you will need multiple payment gateways on your site. If you choose to develop your own payment processor, you deviate from your primary business activity. Hence, integrating a PayPal or Stripe API is a better solution.

The eCommerce website needs to integrate several other APIs and modules to become competent. It’s always advised to ensure it is capable of integrating at least the popular third-party solutions. Examples of a few popular integrations are as follows:

Accounting tools
ERP tools
Email Marketing tools
Push notification tools
Payment Gateways
Analytic tools
Web service for mobile apps
Inventory management tools
Social media integrations
Live chat APIs
Ticket Management APIs etc.

3. SEO friendly architecture

E-commerce and SEO go hand in hand. You cannot survive long with just paid Ads. At some point in time, would need people to find your store organically via search engines. For this, you need to grab a higher rank on the popular SERPs like Google and Bing.

Ensure your platform provides enough features and options to optimize your web store for the search engines. Here are a few of the important aspects that make an eCommerce platform SEO friendly:

SEO friendly URLs
Integrated CMS
Meta tags
Meta Descriptions
Image Captions
Product descriptions
Structured Sitemap
Support for SEO tools etc.

4. Mobile friendly UI and UX

Mobile friendliness is not just an aspect for SEO but also a crucial factor that optimizes the conversion rates. About 60% of the product searches are done on mobile and tablet devices. In such a situation, you do not want to offer a broken Mobile UI to your customers.

You need an eCommerce platform that offers the best mobile responsiveness to the end-users. The users must be given a similar level of UX on mobile like your desktop site. For example, they should be able to browse the site without any design issue and the UI should be designed to let them make a purchase without any difficulty.

For example, this mobile responsive Genstore product page looks great in this mobile view. It offers the same ease of shopping in the mobile view too:

If it wasn’t mobile responsive, the site would have been presented to the mobile users like below. This view is difficult to be used on a small screen where users will struggle to even tap on a button:

5. Scalability of the platform

We all aim to grow our business in the future. Not knowing the consequences, sometimes you choose a good looking platform that works best for the startup period. However, as the website grows, more products get listed, and more people start coming to your site, you start facing the scalability issues.

Now you are ready to pay for more server space and CDN services to make your site fast, but this does not help. Since the tech stack of your eCommerce platform is not competent to handle the higher load, you cannot scale your site by third-party implementations.

That’s why it’s important to consider the tech stack of your platform before investing in it. Keep your future plans into consideration and choose a platform capable of handling heavy loads. For example, the LAMP stack-based PHP sites generally perform best for the small and medium-sized businesses. However, the giant websites like Amazon, eBay, and Flipkart, etc. depend on MEAN stack-based Node js eCommerce development.

Node js is a perfect technology to develop highly scalable solutions because of its non-blocking I/O model. It purely JavaScript on both the front and the server side. As a result, it gives minimal stress to the server and processes the requests faster. You can check the Demo of our Genstore Node js eCommerce platform by yourself to experience the difference.

6. Security of the website

It’s undoubtedly the most important aspect of any eCommerce business. A lot of customer data, payment information, and monetary transactions make eCommerce sites favorite targets of hackers.

You do not want any loopholes in your site. For this, ensure that the platform is compliant to all the security standards. For example-

It is using PCI-DSS compliant payment solutions
It is capable of holding SSL certificates
The developers have followed the standard code practice
Vendors are releasing security patches regularly

Website security becomes your sole responsibility when choosing self-hosted eCommerce platforms. You might want to relax a bit in this regard if you choose a SaaS platform. However, you still need to stay cautious if the SaaS vendor is managing the security properly on their end.

7. Customizability of the base-code

Customizability of an eCommerce platform is a relative term in both the types of eCommerce platforms. For SaaS platforms, customizability is all about the availability of a large number of extra modules and Add-ons from the vendor. You cannot expect to get the ode access and modify it to add new features or remove a feature. Though platforms like Shopify allow authorized developers to add modules, it is still API based not the source code based.

However, the self-hosted side of the eCommerce platforms gives unlimited customizability as you can access the source code. For example, Magento, PrestaShop, and OpenCart are some popular self-hosted eCommerce platforms. They allow third-party developers to customize the platform with their modules and extensions. Similarly, Genstore also offers code access, which you can modify to add as many new features or revamp the UI itself.

So, comprehend the relativity of customizability first before choosing a platform for your cause.

Checklist: Top features to look in an eCommerce platform

Following are some important features that every eCommerce site should offer to the business owners. The best eCommerce solutions might offer these features by default or through customization in the base code. Many ready-made platforms also allow third-party modules to support such features.

Store Management System
1. Multi-shop system
2. Set site offline/online
Product Management System
1. Direct Product Upload
2. CSV Product Upload
3. Enable/Disable products
Analytics Management System
1. Sells analytics
2. Payments Analytics
3. Product Analytics
4. Traffic Analytics
Return Management System
1. Return request
2. Set return rules
3. Generate return invoice
4. Approve/disapprove a request
Shipping Management System
1. Add new shipping options
2. Map shipping options to products
3. Set shipping option rules
Discount Management System
1. Create coupon codes
2. Set coupon rules
3. Set a flat discount
4. Set percentage discount
5. Set a special price for a limited time
Payment Gateway Management
1. Add new payment methods
2. Enable/disable payment methods
3. Map payments methods to products
Content Management System
1. Add new pages
2. Manage site pages
3. Manage blogs
Review and Rating Management
1. Write review
2. Give ratting
3. Approve/disapprove reviews
4. Map reviews to product pages
Marketing Management System
1. Email marketing
2. Affiliate Marketing
3. Abandoned cart Management
4. Back-in-Stock alerts
5. Push Notifications
6. Exit Pop-up
Customer Support Management
1. Email support
2. Ticket Management System
3. Live Chat
4. Integrated Chatbot
Marketplace Management System (if choosing the marketplace model of business)
1. Seller Management
2. Seller review Management
3. Seller-Admin support system
4. Marketplace Monetization
  1. Subscription management
  2. Commission Management

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Beyond Features

Lastly, I would recommend choosing a platform from a vendor that offers the best customer support. E-commerce is a risky business and you might lose millions in just a few minutes. If anything goes wrong, you want your vendor to offer the quickest technical support. So never overlook the support quality before selecting the best eCommerce platform for your business. I might consider a platform with few inbuilt features and good customizability, but not a platform with bad customer support. You can add new features later on, but you cannot replenish what’s lost due to a sudden crash or technical error.

All Hands Meeting Highlights [April 2019]

As we know the spring is the season of activity and growth, our team members, managers, and senior leadership emphasized positive feedback and recognition on the ‘All Hands Meeting’ of April.

The days are getting warmer as summer comes and we are moving towards the objective of business review meeting to discuss individual and team scorecards and growth towards a specific goal.

The purpose of the meeting is to reinforce the accountability and the action plans for the next month, identify the core competency, recognizing and celebrating success. This time two newcomers presented their first presentation through articulating the organizational vision.