9 Ecommerce Solutions to Gift Your Store for a Very Merry 2022

Melissa Megginson Axtell, Director of Community Marketing

Dec 16th 2021

It’s the most wonderful time of the year – for your ecommerce store.

It’s the most wonderful (and exhausting) time of the year for retailers. The holiday season is in full swing, as customers are stocking up on gifts for their loved ones. Here at Okendo we wish you a very profitable ‘golden quarter’ — but we have a question for you too. Who’s buying for you, the merchant?

It’s the season of giving, so we’ve put together a gift guide with a difference. Read on for some self-gifting advice for ecommerce retailers – packed with ideas for practical solutions that will make your life easier, and your store more productive in 2022.

Gifts to Make Your Life as a Merchant Easier

Running an ecommerce business is no mean feat. Managing all of the moving parts that make for a successful online store is a juggling act.

Chosen correctly, third-party solutions help improve your effectiveness, efficiency and workflow as a merchant. Time saved via integrated apps means less stress, and perhaps even more importantly, more time to focus on the things that really benefit you when running your business.

Let’s take a look at some of the apps that can help make your life as a merchant easier…

FourSixty

First up, FourSixty. This content platform helps you harness the power and potential of user-generated content, turning your Instagram and ambassador content into beautifully presented, fully shoppable galleries, ready to integrate into your ecommerce store, email campaigns and many other channels.

FourSixty also offers an Instagram posting tool, meaning you can easily queue up and auto-publish content to the platform. An integration with Okendo means that merchants can collect UGC such as customer product images and videos through the review process. What’s more, is that this content can then be leveraged within your wider marketing and promotion.

Making Your Life Easier

UGC is an immensely valuable resource for any retailer. The content that your customers generate is as relatable as it comes. However, collecting this content can be a time-consuming process, especially when it comes to securing the correct permissions to legally distribute across your own channels and wider marketing.

FourSixty makes these challenges a thing of the past — enabling fast and fully compliant collection of UGC, and giving you access to an instant treasure trove of media to enhance and complement your online presence.

Justuno

Next in our lineup of apps to help make life that little bit easier, Justuno. At first glance, Justuno offers quite a wide array of assistance — pop-ups, banner offers, exit offers, upsell promotions, and recommendations. However, a common thread links all of this functionality: optimized conversion. In fact, users see an average 135% lift in their revenue within the first year of using their range of tools.

Whether you’re looking to add an email capture pop-up, apply a little pressure with timer-based offers or upsell a purchase with trending items from elsewhere on your store, Justuno has you covered — the whole process is easy and intuitive.

Making Your Life Easier

If you’re already driving decent traffic to your website, Justuno makes it work hard for you. Maximize the conversion of your existing customers, with no extra effort required from your side. As is so often the case within ecommerce, it’s amazing how small adjustments to your customer experience can help to increase your conversion rate.

Justuno’s intelligent product recommendations leverage several different Commerce AI algorithms, making it simple to apply on-site personalization. It also offers an easy way to get offers on product pages above the fold, without having to commit to a store development overhaul. If you’re looking for a solution with bags of potential, we’d highly recommend experimenting with Justuno.

Alloy Automation

Finally, Alloy Automation. This hardworking and immensely helpful app has a generous free plan available (create up to five free workflows) and could prove to be a real game-changer when it comes to the way that you manage the day-to-day running of your store. Alloy automation offers a range of easily customizable automated workflows, with set triggers using logic to execute practical actions.

You don’t even have to go to the effort of setting up your flows yourself – pick from a wide range of prebuilt automations, ranging from notification of high-value orders through to getting alerted to new products being created and easier segmentation of tagged customers in your mailing lists.

Making Your Life Easier

Hopefully, it’s already clear what a huge timesaver Alloy Automation could prove to be for your business! Not only can it help to save you hours of tedious manual work, but it also makes it easy to automate aspects like reporting (schedule regular updates to deliver via email or Slack, pulling KPIs and metrics from a range of predefined sources).

Gifts to Make Your Ecommerce Store More Productive

An easy life is one thing — but as an ambitious ecommerce merchant, we’re betting you’re more highly motivated by results. In this next section of our gift guide, we’ll dig into a few great choices to treat yourself and your conversion rate.

Third-party solutions hold great potential to get your store working harder for you — amplifying all the effort and attention you pour into your business and brand. Consider investing in some of the following solutions to help optimize your online retail operation, improving your outcomes across the board.

Klaviyo

Klaviyo has a well-deserved reputation for excellence in ecommerce marketing. Their platform offers email and SMS marketing automation, through an intuitive, user-friendly interface that works for the smallest start-up to the biggest brand.

Easily create flows that help you to stay in close contact with your customers, incentivizing them to return to abandoned carts, cash in on their loyalty points, or even leave a review via the powerful Okendo integration.

Making Your Ecommerce Store More Productive

Aside from making the creation of complex and highly functional marketing flows an accessible prospect for brands of any size, Klaviyo has the potential to really supercharge your sales, with growth-focused reporting and dynamic forms to help collect more zero-party data.

What’s more, by integrating with a range of other valuable data sources, such as Okendo’s Attributes feature, Klaviyo gives you the opportunity to segment your audiences by various demographics, characteristics, and behaviors, so that you can provide the most tailored, perfectly targeted personalized messaging and offers.

Daasity

In ecommerce, data is knowledge, and knowledge is power. Daasity helps detangle your store’s data, providing a single source of truth that can help you shine a light on many different areas of your business. Whether you’re looking to learn more about your customers via your sales and marketing channels, centralize your inventory data or get a better understanding of your fulfillment performance, Daasity can help.

Making Your Ecommerce Store More Productive

Daasity can help boost your store’s performance by showing you exactly where you should be focusing your efforts, eliminating silos, and giving you a better overview of and accountability to your ongoing KPIs. Quickly identify the areas of your business that need urgent attention – and do more of the things that are working well. By creating a holistic overview of your whole operation, Daasity ensures that you’re moving towards optimization efficiently and effectively.

Attentive

If you haven’t already explored the world of conversational commerce, Attentive could be just the app you’re searching for. Attentive is here to challenge the concept that buying online is a less human experience than buying in-store, providing high-performing, personalized mobile messaging flows that engage and delight your customers.

SMS messaging is a highly effective strategy in terms of response and conversion rates — but compliance can often be a concern for brands with less experience running campaigns of this kind. Thankfully, Attentive has everything you need to ensure you’re staying on the right side of regulation, making it easy to create and deliver beautifully designed campaigns with ease.

Making Your Ecommerce Store More Productive

If you’re looking to scale up your marketing efforts, Attentive represents a great opportunity — SMS engagement rates are high, with 82% of people claiming to open every text message they receive. What’s more, Attentive’s integration with Okendo ensures that you’re able to send review requests via SMS. And the benefits flow in two directions, as Attentive in turn benefits from the zero-party data gathered by Okendo as part of the review process. Merchants can then create hyper-relevant messaging and targeted campaigns via segmentation. Learn more about the Attentive / Okendo integration here.

Gifts to Help You Ride Out Whatever 2022 Throws at Us

The last couple of years in retail have been something of a wild ride. Ecommerce has seen unprecedented acceleration and growth thanks to the impact of the global Covid-19 pandemic, but equally, supply chain issues have been rife, and certain verticals have been impacted more negatively than others.

If we’re learned anything from the last couple of years, it’s that we should probably expect the unexpected. As we head into 2022, here are a few tools to help you roll with punches, whilst feeling as prepared as possible…

Gorgias

When problems arise — be they relating to individual orders or widespread issues that impact your whole business — communication is key. Gorgias helps you keep your customers at the center of your operation, by ensuring your support teams are perfectly prepared to answer questions and solve problems as they arise.

By centralizing all of your support tickets, you’re able to keep close control over your response strategy, easily assisting with a wide range of order-related requests (from updating delivery addresses to modifying subscriptions) and can even go above and beyond to identify and respond to questions or comments left on other channels, such as reviews or social media comments.

Getting You Ready For Anything

Gorgias helps to keep clear and open lines of communication to customers, meaning your team can triage issues, learn more about the impact of complications, and put things right. Close customer connection with regard to support was essential during the multiple lockdowns that the pandemic necessitated, and with the number of ecommerce customers increasing, having a dependable customer support solution is vital.

ShoppingGives

If ’cause marketing’ is high on your to-do list, ShoppingGives is a fantastic platform for facilitating this kind of tactic, enabling your customers to feel great about the purchase they make from your brand by linking each sale to a donation made by your business on the customers’ behalf.

ShoppingGives offers great functionality by enabling a wide range of giving options. Donations can be seamlessly integrated into the checkout process (never taking the customer away from this crucial step, so posing no risk to conversion rates.) The app has been proven to boost metrics such as average order value, customer lifetime value, and conversion rates, so everyone benefits from the strategy!

Getting You Ready For Anything

Looking ahead to the future, ShoppingGives helps you meet the growing trend of shopping with a purpose — customers are increasingly looking to support a certain community or cause through their purchase decisions. Customers are increasingly shopping with brands that support social or environmental issues as they arise. ShoppingGives makes action here easy, meaning your brand can react swiftly and demonstrate your values authentically.

LoyaltyLion

A lot may change in the ever-evolving world of ecommerce, but loyalty will never go out of style. LoyaltyLion provides an exemplary range of loyalty program tools, that help you do more than retain existing customers but also to gain a better understanding of what motivates them and keeps them coming back for more.

Their flexible range of customizable programs means you have the opportunity to create fully tailored incentives, branded and carefully calibrated to appeal to your own unique audience.

Getting You Ready For Anything

LoyaltyLion gives your customers a sense of reassurance and investment, something that is critical for improving retention rates. After the uncertainty of the last couple of years, and increasing levels of competition within ecommerce, this is not an opportunity that any brand can afford to overlook.

Here’s to a Successful 2022…

At Okendo, we see remarkable ecommerce merchants pouring their hearts and souls into their brands every day, and we truly believe that, far from being a luxury, investing in yourself and your business is an essential component of lasting and fully optimized success.

Ecommerce is fast-paced and always changing. The end of the year can be a great time to take stock of your performance to date and consider some of the apps and solutions that might be able to help you in your coming year’s business. We hope this guide has provided some food for thought — and wish you all a very happy holiday season.

Book a demo today to learn more!