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Secrets of Gaining Market-share by Building a Retailer Self-ordering Platform
by Akshay D'Souza
Gaining market share by altering retailer behaviour through technology is no easy difficult task. All great things begin with a DESIRE to make it happen.
Some brands like Bausch & Lomb, Jyothy Laboratories, Praash, Unibic, Dhamija & many others brands showed great Desire to make things happen and followed it up with action. Check how they are evolving their business for a POST-COVID world
If you’ve mustered the courage, read on.
Let’s begin by emphasizing that no half-hearted attempts at experimentation with technology will cut it. Select a Retailer app that can help you execute the below. Most importantly, make sure it is tried and tested and that its users have a great experience.
1. Smoothly bring retailers into the app ordering platform:
Salesmen are the key here. They will drive your initiative to recruit retailers to the new way of working by capitalising on years of trust with the retailers.
Your friendly salesmen need to get all their outlets to start ordering what they want when they want. To do that, they need to ensure that all retailers are registered on the retailer app and then get mapped to a distributor who will fulfil all orders placed on the app quickly.
Best practice: Companies have provided Sales Incentives between Rs 5 to Rs 50 per outlet onboarded for the Retailer app depending on the category of products.
2. Make a great first impression! To ensure a great ordering experience for retailers ordering on the platform
Distributors need to keep serving the retailers like clockwork. They need to ensure that product demand is met. We have seen that the SKUs ordered by retailers are different from what’s ordered when a salesman visits them. This means that distributors need to be agile to stock the right set of brands, the right volume and the right SKUs.
Best practice: Setting a TAT and ruthlessly measuring fulfilment in the TAT is critical to success. Some companies fulfil orders in an average of under 16 hours. The best companies track exceptions and ensure distributor challenges are overcome while ensuring seamless delivery. Our analytics platform, OneView, helps brands identify very easily the gaps in execution so you can take action, quickly!
Service differentiation can also be created for orders placed on the app. Brands can look to fulfil orders on the same day for orders placed till a certain time.
If you’re looking for a last-mile delivery partner, let us know. We can help. Write to us at marketing@mobisy.com
Click here to hear first hand a Retailers experience on the self-ordering app
3. Give Retailers a strong reason to change an order from the Retailer app.
Now, you must be thinking that you’re offering retailers the flexibility to order what they want when they want rather than waiting for the salesman.
So why won’t my retailers just fall in love with the app and also thank me for it?
Change needs motivation even if the change is good and remember that it’s you, YES YOU, who needs to give retailers that EXTRA MOTIVATION!
Bizom provide extensive capability in Running Trade Promotions
Industry practices and their challenges:
Here we’ve seen companies follow various strategies including offering Trade promotions, exclusively for ordering on this channel. We’ve analyzed some of them below.
a. First order incentive only for the app ordering channel: This while being effective in generating orders has been seen to give rise to the practice of retailers downloading the app on multiple mobile numbers to get the benefit.
Verdict: Not optimal.
b. Differential first order and repeat order incentive: In this, a brand offered a 7% incentive to first-time orders and 3% to repeat orders.
Outcome: This drove adoption by retailers, however, it also led to the same problem as earlier where retailers downloaded the app on multiple mobile numbers to derive the higher benefit from the first order.
Verdict: Better than (a) but still not ideal.
c. Same first order and repeat order incentive: Here a brand offered a 4% discount compared to its other channels for all orders placed on its app (first orders as well as repeat orders).
Outcome: This ensured fast adoption on this channel and also drove repeat usage. However, order sizes remained similar to earlier.
Verdict: Better than (a) & (b) but still need to work to get a higher share of the category.
Best Practice
4. Order volume incentive along with same first order and repeat order incentive: Here the company offered a tangible incentive of an assured gift for order sizes of x and 10x. This was in addition to a fixed 2% incentive on products ordered from the app.
Outcome: This was a huge success and led to rapid retailer adoption. Order sizes went up by 5x. Outlets were now only stocking this brand for the category and in the process it was helping the company gain market share.
Verdict: Best offering in terms of market effectiveness and maximise category market share.
The above practice while being very effective, got the company wanting more.
They were puzzled. They wanted to solve this…but how?
The puzzle that was rattling everyone was how do we make this market-share gain, SUSTAINABLE, over a longer period of time.
At one end, was the futile path of deep and deeper discounting which was absolutely unsustainable.
On the other was the challenge of addressing how the brand could generate repeat purchases by ring-fencing the top 10% of retailers that generated almost 60% of its business. The answer they found in what was built into a loyalty program.
So they began by building the principles of the program.
- Differentially higher benefits for ordering more over the period of the program
- A program built for two quarters
- Differential Incentives and services for retailers self-ordering on the app
Outcome: Sales spiked 2.5x in the loyalty period giving a 20% increase in market share
Self-ordering on apps accounted for almost 70% of total sales
A large number of incidental retailers now became their key retailers. Overall retailer universe went up 40% in the period.
All in all, the path to greater market share is not a hard one, it’s a smart one. It’s one that’s filled with lots of simple technology interventions.
At Mobisy, we’re helping over 500 consumer brands gain market share. Brands such as Bausch & Lomb have leveraged the Retailer app to put themselves into a sustainable market leadership position.
Check what Sanjay Bhutani, Managing Director of Bausch & Lomb – India & SAARC and his team did to win in the marketplace.
If you’d like to collaborate, mail us at marketing@mobisy.com.
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