Businesses are trying their best to personalize the individual shopping experience. Taking trade online can help businesses achieve this particular goal by predicting consumer buying behavior and needs. Individual customers will get a peculiar experience based on their location, internet browsing history, past behavior, etc. For example, if you go to a retail shopping site and input “casual shirt”, the e-commerce platform in the site will list out recommendations based on your past internet browsing and online purchase pattern. Similarly, consumers also get brands with personalized brand value. Through relevant, and helpful content in e-commerce stores, customers are driven towards the right purchase.

With the presence of both digital and physical mediums for trade, customers are bound to use multi-channels during their purchase process. E commerce stores need to analyze the following to understand the buying behavior of customers:

- Customer’s purchasing process

- Preferred marketing channel of customers

- Purchase intent

Businesses are trying to understand consumer behavior and integrate both offline and online features into a single multi-channel shopping. Create purchase touch points for customers who browse online and purchase offline. Businesses can also implement the product booking strategy which allows customers to book products and purchase and pay from the store. Businesses need to sync their online and offline data to make streamline multi-channel shopping.

B2B e-commerce transaction is gradually rising. There is a growing trend of businesses buying software, products, and services for their own needs. SaaS and technology sectors are the two main industries that are encouraging B2B e-commerce. Similarly, food and garment producers are also opting for a digital medium to purchase raw materials to continue production. Therefore, B2B e-commerce stores need to ensure that they have features that facilitate large orders, billing and invoicing, volume-based discounts and reorder services.

Social media shopping is gaining popularity among online consumers. As social sites improve their selling functions, these platforms have been ideal mediums of advertising and selling. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube are some of the platforms that have introduced the “buy” button to make selling digitally more significant. In Nepal, businesses have limited social media marketing to only advertising. It is high time they took advantage of this trend to start multiplying social media followers and improve the customer base. Businesses can also introduce discount coupons in exchange for social media following or referral to engage consumer activity in their social media pages.

Nepal is heading towards digital commercialization at a steady pace. The existence of traditional shopping practices in consumers and the limited resources compels Nepali businesses to depend mostly on their physical stores. However, the urban community is seeing a boom in the e-commerce business. The tech-friendly consumers in the urban part have found an easy buying alternative. Nepal’s centralized population has alone enabled businesses with an e-commerce platform to perform better than the rival. The inclusion of the entire population will undoubtedly excel in the current market and create better and bigger opportunities throughout the country.