5 Effective Tactics To Fire Up Festive Season Sales in 2023

The Indian festive season of 2023 has almost begun. Many news sources confirm that eCommerce brands are expecting this festive season sales to record at least 2X more profits than last year. A 10% surge in order placement with manufactures ahead of the mega season authenticate the news.

With 2022’s festive period recording a 28% increase in sales and generating about USD 11.8 billion in sales compared to USD 9.2 billion in 2021 suggests that this is a golden period for brands to get out there and maximise their earnings. Industry analysts and behemoths are expecting 2023 to surpass 2022’s numbers and break all records.

While predictions are overwhelmingly positive and showcase remarkable growth of the Indian eCommerce industry, the truth is, a majority of these sales are still being clocked in by the eCommerce marketplaces. 

Though 2022 has shown that India’s D2C brands are on a growth trajectory. They’ve been able to convince customers to make purchases from their online shops. However, many basic yet grave issues continue to persist, especially in terms of, 

• High advertisement spends 
• High customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Poor checkout and payment process
• High cart abandonment rate
• High return-to-origins (RTOs)
• Inconsistent post-purchase customer experience

Due to these pressing issues, D2C brands are losing quite a chunk of their potential sales to the marketplace behemoths. 

In this blog, we aim to decode how D2C brands can create a seamless customer experience at the most critical stages of a conversion funnel i.e. the checkout and payment page, and clock in 2X sales during the 2023 festive season sale and even beyond.

Let’s get started. 

1. Create A Seamless Checkout Experience

Considering today’s scenario where D2C brands have access to state-of-the-art marketing tools, it’s fair to assume that they’ve already cracked the code to building a customer-centric website with means to generate high traffic.

However, a customer’s actual experience starts after they add items to their cart, click on that checkout button, and enter the arena of the “checkout page.” 

A checkout page is ideally where a customer creates an account or logins and enters necessary personal details for the D2C brand to process their order(s) and subsequently make deliveries.

While account creations/logins and basic customer details are critical from a brand’s point of view, these are also a cause of friction and high abandonment rate. According to Baymard, about 24% of people abandon their carts because a website asks them to create an account. 

And, the chances of abandonment further increase especially during the festive season sale period. This is because, shoppers want to avail maximum discounts and rewards by quickly checking in and placing orders. An additional step to create an account or login breaks their shopping experience. This makes them abort the entire idea of shopping from a D2C brand and buy from a marketplace instead, or go to a competitive site where placing order is simpler and frictionless.   

So, how to solve this problem?

At GoKwik, we’ve realised that the best way to reduce cart abandonments at checkout is by optimising your checkout process. Here’s how to do so.

A. Offer An Auto-login Service

If a shopper is able to auto login into their account without entering their mobile number, the chances of them converting into a paying customer are nearly 2X more than those who need to create an account.  

GoKwik provides the industry’s first ever single-sign-on (SSO) feature called the GoKwik Network Effect. It enables nearly 15% of the shoppers to directly log into 250+ partner D2C online brand stores without entering a mobile number or OTP.

2. One-tap Login Via Truecaller

GoKwik has recently partnered with Truecaller to provide an OTP-less login process to customers to reduce their login hassles and increase brand conversions.  

Here’s how this works. 

GoKwik uses Truecaller’s one-tap verification feature to verify a shopper’s identity and enables them to login in a single click.

3. Address Page Optimisation 

Besides this, GoKwik also offers address pre-fill option. GoKwik leverages its vast network of data to pre-fill addresses for over 35% of the shoppers accurately with the help of its advanced algorithms.

The algorithms help reduce another step into a user’s journey, make the process all the more simple and also reduce the checkout time exponentially. 

As per internal analysis, pre-filling addresses increases conversion rate by almost 40%.

4. Discounts And Offers

On average, 1 out of every 3 users abandon carts due to unavailability of best discounts deals. Here, GoKwik enables its partner merchants to add a discount drop-down list on the checkout page, making discount discovery and application simple and quick. 

This not only helps play with the psychology of the customer by helping them save additional cost on the order, but also leads to an enhanced checkout experience and higher conversions in the future. 

Provide Multiple And Preferred Payment Options

Compared to half a decade ago, hybrid shopping has gained much momentum today. People today are more confident paying via digital payment modes than before. In fact, according to reports, Indian shoppers made USD 9.36 billion transactions in Q1 2022, of which 64% were processed via UPI,

As a brand, your payment and service options must not be limited, rather meet the evolving needs of the Indian payments landscape. 

1. Multiple Payment Options 

While 60%-70% of total eCommerce orders still account for cash-on-delivery (COD) orders, the ratio of online payments has fairly increased since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Hence, it becomes important for online brands, especially D2C companies, to provide a diversified range of online payment options for customers to choose from 

The more the number of prepaid orders, the less the risk of return-to-origins (RTO).

Some popular online payment options that D2C brands must offer based on today’s customers preference include, 

• Credit/debit cards (Visa, Master Card, American Experience, Diner’s Club, RuPay, etc.)
• Wallets (Paytm, PhonePe, MobiKwik, etc.)
• UPI (GooglePay)
• Net Banking
• EMI 
• Buy Now, Pay Later (Simpl, LazyPay, ZestMoney, AmazonPay Later, etc.)

Of these, Buy now, pay later (BNPL), in particular, has become a strongly correlated option to increase conversions, especially during the festive season. 

BNPL basically increases a shopper’s purchasing power, in turn, helping a brand record high ticket-size sales. 

On the other hand, UPI stands as the most preferred payment option among shoppers in 2022. As of date, UPI holds a 64% market share in volume and 50% in terms of value. Offering it as an option will exponentially increase conversions.

Moreover, GoKwik goes an extra mile and makes UPI payments even simpler. This intent based flow (1st of its kind in India) on both mobile and web browser adds to the positive experience of a shopper. 

To give you an example, when a customer decides to pay via UPI while shopping via web, they’re ideally shown a window similar to the image given below.

A shopper can conveniently select a UPI option of their choice or even receive a payment link on their registered mobile number and complete the payment in a matter of 2-3 seconds.  

Meanwhile, the experience on mobile is as follows. 

2. Personalised Payment Process

From GoKwik’s point of view, our folks have realised that while offering multiple payment options is an excellent idea to ensure conversions, there’s also a set way in which payment options must be shown to a shopper. 

This is effectively essential as it helps, 

• A shopper save those extra seconds they spend finding their preferred payment option
• Ensure the shopper completes the transaction faster
• Reduce the risk of cart abandonment at the last moment due to unavailability of preferred payment option

Reduce RTO By Identifying High Risk Buyers

As mentioned above, even though eCommerce prepaid orders have exponentially increased post pandemic, a major chunk of people still prefer paying via cash. According to GoKwik’s data, 64% of all eCommerce orders placed via its network were cash-on-delivery (COD) in Q2, 2022. 

And, the chances of these COD orders converting into return-to-origin (RTO) orders, especially during a festive season, are very high. 

Read through our blog on “Return to Origin Can Increase This Festive Season” to get in depth details. 

Our folks at GoKwik have identified how brands can reduce RTOs and increase their revenue stream. 

1. Identify Shoppers With High COD Purchase History

GoKwik uses a highly comprehensive data science model to help brands analyse the historical shopping behaviour of a customer based on 200+ parameters. 

These parameters help assign a specific RTO score to each customer and categorise them into three buckets – high-risk, medium risk, and low-risk buyers. 

This process helps to place necessary interventions for each of these buckets.

2. Provide Lucrative Discounts To Lure Customers To Make Prepaid Purchases

Let’s take an example to understand this point. 

XYZ Ayurvedic has identified a medium risk shopper using GOKwik’s RTO algos. The shopper ideally places 4 COD orders and makes 6 prepaid purchases out of a total of 10 orders. So, it’s fair to assume that the shopper has an intention to place prepaid orders. 

XYZ Ayurvedic decides to use this information to their advantage. They offer an additional 5% discount to the shopper for placing a prepaid order and an additional INR 60/- to process a COD order. 

The deal not only helps the buyer save an additional 6% on the total amount but defer from paying INR 60/-. In such a case, the chances of RTO reduces significantly. 

3. Disable COD Options For High-Risk Shoppers 

If a shopper’s history of COD orders and cancellations at the time of delivery are relatively high, then GoKwik helps partner brands to remove the COD option altogether from the payments page. 

Not only does the rate of RTO reduce, but conversions remain unaffected. In fact, The Man Company and a fashion legacy brand implemented this strategy on their platforms and successfully reduced RTO rate 20% and 45% respectively. 

Provide A Seamless Post-purchase Customer Experience

Besides streamlining checkout and payment process, post-purchase customer experience plays equal or in fact, higher importance to sustain conversions.  

Ideally there are two parts to post-purchase customer experience 

• Maintaining an active channel of communication with the shoppers to keep them informed about their orders and deliveries
• Providing customer support to address any order related issues or grievances

1. Post-purchase Communications

Post-purchase communications is highly effective in 

• Increasing customer retention rate
• Reducing the chances of RTOs

Let’s take an example to understand this point clearly. 

Mr. Z placed an order with The DEF Company. The DEF Company instantly sends Mr. Z a message confirming their order along with sharing the order details.

Similarly, The DEF Company sends Mr. Z regular messages keeping them informed about their order and delivery status.

Such communication helps keep the shopper in loop throughout the delivery process and alerts them from time to time to reduce delivery failures and RTOs. 

When customers are kept informed about their orders, they get a sense of satisfaction. This automatically increases their trust in the brand and in most cases, turn into loyal, paying customers.

2. Quick Customer Support Services

Besides maintaining a healthy communication with shoppers throughout the delivery cycle, going an extra mile and offering quick customer support service is another way to build a loyal customer base.

1. Addresses customer concerns arising at the payment stages

• Ensure smooth payment process 
• In case of payment failures, inform the customers instantly  
• Provide a quick option to complete the purchase and successfully place the order

2. Communicate about abandoned carts

• Ask for confirmation before a customer tries to exit
• Inform them about the deals they might miss 
• Send them messages/emails reminding them about their abandoned carts
• For faster conversions, offer checkout on Whatsapp itself rather than redirecting customers to the website’s checkout 

3. Offer effective communication channels to address after sales concerns

• Enable quick chat option via email/whatsapp to solve customer concerns 

4. Provide necessary warranty details 

• Share warranty information with every purchase via various channels include email, Whatsapp, etc. 
• Offer detailed steps (as videos or listicles) to help customers avail the warranties.

GoKwik has partnered with many communication brands such as LimeChat, GupShup to help partner brands maintain healthy communication with their D2C shoppers. Our partnership helps them keep their customers informed about their orders, deliveries, refunds, and even help them reduce abandonments by providing a quick checkout process via Whatsapp.  

Wrapping It Up…

Every D2C brand must realise that while creating a customer-centric website is important, optimising the most critical conversion steps (checkout, payment, delivery confirmation) is highly critical. 

A seamless checkout process, faster payments, and exceptional post-purchase customer experience is what will ultimately help a D2C brand survive the market heat and not lose potential customers to the marketplace behemoths.  

Optimising these during the festive season becomes all the more lucrative as it’s this time of the year that any D2C brand can not only clock in maximum sales but build a loyal customer base. 

Partner with GoKwik today and bring about a change necessary to help your business scale, get rid of high RTO risk and offer a secure and streamlined payment process.