Shopify marketplace apps are no novelty anymore. They are everywhere and have been around since 2006 as part of Shopify, an instrumental eCommerce platform for retail point-of-sale systems and online stores.

Shopify is a feature-rich, future-ready digital ecosystem for online sellers since it provides a user-friendly interface together with an exquisite range of tools to set up your online store. You can hire certified Shopify experts to get a full-featured online store that meets your expectations and unique needs.

With Shopify’s self-hosting services, you can push your store live right after a quick and easy initial configuration.

Though Shopify has covered a lot of good ground ever since its phenomenal inception, it still doesn’t provide the multi-vendor marketplace setup support as provided by the likes of eBay and Amazon.

It may be quite a spoilsport for Shopify lovers who want to capitalize on this dependable and versatile platform to launch a multi-vendor marketplace, but that’s the way it is.

Does it mean you can’t host a Shopify multi-vendor marketplace? Fortunately, no. With custom application development services, you can certainly build a multi-seller Shopify marketplace app and achieve your business objectives.

What is Shopify app development?

While most of us understand the concept of a multi-vendor app, let’s catch up. A multi-vendor marketplace app is an application that serves as a digital distribution platform or bridge to facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers.

For instance, eBay and Amazon are multi-seller apps wherein the sellers can upload their products and the visitors can purchase them. A multi-vendor application owner charges a predefined commission to the seller for each sale or on a subscription basis.

Such platforms are cherished by online vendors for the basic reason that they offer high benefits in terms of improved sales, user experience, efficiency, and convenience.

As of today, physical strategy businesses are not progressing as they should. Over 50% of the populace today surfs the web and invests their time in online locales instead of visiting physical stores to make a purchase.

Therefore, the clients these days are more willing to go online with a multi-seller web-based business that they can operate from just about anywhere as they will receive an assortment of merchandise from different vendors at a single stop.

These online stores provide better returns on your time, money, and energy as compared to opening a brick-and-mortar store that shoppers seldom visit these days.

Though several technologies can help you build a multi-seller app, Shopify is the most preferred option due to the wide range of features and merits it has on offer.

What can Shopify multi-vendor marketplace apps do?

Shopify multi-vendor marketplace apps provide your website with rich functionalities to offer vendors an easy way to access your website’s backend, with no admin controls. From the backend, vendors can quickly add, categorize, edit, and remove their product listings from your website.

Besides, the app helps you set up commissions that the vendors will pay for using the online store either monthly, annually, or on a per-sale basis.

Why is a Shopify multi-vendor marketplace app so important?

With customers increasingly counting on online shopping, ecommerce is opening new possibilities for countless entrepreneurs. Nasdaq predicts that around 95% of purchases will be done online by 2040 and, therefore, entrepreneurs have a serious reason to try their hands at eCommerce. And when we talk about eCommerce, multi-seller platforms are the new norm.

Due to the phenomenal surge that the eCommerce multi-vendor marketplace has witnessed over the last decade or so, having a multi-vendor architecture has almost become a necessity.

Gone are the days when a single business owner used to set up an online store, showcase his line of products, and drive sales almost single-handedly. The multi-vendor approach is the next fascination.

Due to the formidable business competition that the eCommerce niche has at present, just building an online store or eCommerce app is not enough for merchants to survive or thrive. In this always-online age, profits and sales are driven by user interactions and communities. Therefore, the need to have a multi-vendor mindset was never more urgent.

How does a custom multi-vendor Shopify marketplace work?

You can get started with this smarter, better eCommerce marketplace in three simple steps:

1. Create a custom Shopify multi-vendor app to transform your online store into a marketplace that is 360-degree functional.
2. Once you push the store live, invite other businesses to collaborate with your Shopify marketplace app to display their merchandise digitally in an organized manner to ensure customers can search, browse, and purchase their products.
3. Keep a track of all sales and set a commission for each sale to earn from your local as well as global sellers.

Merchants can also use these multi-vendor online marketplaces as a launchpad to create and enhance their online presence. This helps them earn recurring sales and loyal customers.

Shopify’s app library flaunts quite a few marketplace apps to help you convert your online store into a full-spectrum digital marketplace; however, there’s a catch.

If you have a unique product niche, plan to add some out-of-the-ordinary products at some stage moving forward, or have potential sellers from a diverse business genre, going with a strict, predefined architecture may not be a good pick.

Such solutions may not provide you the factor of flexibility in terms of adding customizations as required by you or the vendors selling their merchandise on your platform. It’s like you’ll be handcuffed with a restricted reach, and that’s surely the last thing you’d ask for.

Case study of a custom multi-vendor marketplace app development

Our Shopify app development, The Brihaspati Infotech, recently helped a client achieve his dream of hosting a revolutionary online store that can fit in his budget, entice the audience, perform seamlessly, and cater to the rapidly-changing expectations of his vendors.

Our Shopify app development team delivered a multi-vendor marketplace on time and within budget.

Here’s the case study:

Client requirements

The client had an online liquor-based multi-vendor Shopify marketplace app.

The client had the following requirements:

• Enable other liquor vendors to sell their products through his app
• Properly categorize all store products
• Integrate 24×7 live chat on the store

While the requirements were pretty straightforward, implementing the solution on an active Shopify store with a quick turnaround time wasn’t anybody’s game.

Therefore, the client decided to hire Shopify developers from us.

The solution

Our development team divided the whole project into two parts, namely:

1. Interface for the store owner
2. Interface for vendors

Doing this on an open-source platform like Magento would have been easier. However, in Shopify, we had no scope for intervening with the base code. Therefore, we created separate interfaces and used them as embedded apps at the back-end panel with iframes to build the marketplace app.

With Shopify APIs and webhooks, we can POST and GET data “TO and FROM” the Shopify website to the custom-built interface.

We used Yii/LAMP technology stack to build the interfaces. The store owner interface was hosted as a Shopify app on the client server and linked to the Shopify website using the client’s Shopify partner account.

The vendor interface was hosted on a sub-domain of the store owner’s website and vendors were able to access it by logging in with their vendor accounts in the multi-vendor marketplace Shopify app.

Features for Shopify App Development Solution

Working agile, our Shopify app development team came up with a secure, easy-to-use, and fully functional multi-vendor Shopify app. The solution was tested vigorously for functionality, performance, and user experience.

The Shopify app development solution we delivered had the following salient features:

Comprehensive, easy-to-use seller dashboard

We delivered a crisp, clear, and clean interface for the dashboard landing pages. The dashboard helps the client get a real-time overview of the number of products, orders, buyers, and messages received by the seller.

Also, the dashboard flaunts an overview in the form of a bar graph powered by HighCharts for dynamic chart implementation.

Several powerful functionalities and features were provided for the seller, including options to add new products, review buyer and order history, view purchase orders, and interact with buyers through instant messaging.

Immersive, easy-to-use admin interface

Our Shopify app development company used an embedded app module to help admins access their admin interfaces through the default Shopify admin dashboard.

Our Shopify app development company deployed Shopify APIs to sync the customer data, orders, and products efficiently with the default Shopify database.

The store admins can simply launch the Shopify multi-vendor app within their Shopify dashboard to manage seller accounts, submitted products, and a lot more.

Major challenges and roadblocks during the development process

Though we’ve successfully developed quite a few multi-vendor Shopify apps, each project has new challenges based on the client’s unique requirements, budget, time, technology, existing architecture, etc.

This project had its share of challenges such as:

1.   Custom nested product filters

We created nested filters such that selecting one filter affects the option of others in the Shopify app development plugin. However, doing this with the default filters available in the Shopify backend was not possible.

We resolved the conundrum with separate product creation forms, providing a unique form for each collection. Furthermore, we created product tags to be used as filters.

Based on predefined product categories, tags were created for each product type

Predefined product categories were used to create tags for each product type based on which the filters showed relevant data. The tags were added automatically and were visible to store admins.

As we used Yii under the MVC architecture to create the forms, they were easy to enhance and modify as per the client’s business needs. The plugin also remains adaptable to changing business requirements.

    2. Creating a live chat

The client wanted live chat functionality for real-time user interaction on the multi-vendor Shopify app development module. Furthermore, the client wanted all chats to be saved on the backend to help the buyer pick up a conversation from where they dropped it earlier.

The seller can keep a track of new, ongoing, and past chats under the Messages section.

For this, we used Chat ID as a unique identifier for each conversation. The Chat ID helped identify who has sent a message and then display it under the corresponding User ID.

Using this approach, not only were we able to implement real-time one-to-one chat, but we were also able to save and access the chat record between buyer and merchant in the database.

      3. Real-time sync of Shopify and seller database

As the multi-vendor marketplace, the Shopify app had the seller dashboard as a separate interface developed in Yii and hosted on a separate server, the solution had to make sure that whenever a seller creates a new product, it is simultaneously created in Shopify as well.

For this, we used the Shopify console runner to work in the background and call the Product API each time someone adds a new product. It helped us implement a real-time data synchronization between the Shopify and seller dashboard.

Case study summary and result

The Brihaspati Infotech delivered a stable and dynamic Shopify marketplace app to the client on time and within budget. The solution helped the client regulate and manage their business on various levels, improve efficiency, and save time on repetitive tasks.

As we have successfully delivered several similar solutions such as a Shopify Payment Gateway Integration, the turnaround time for this Shopify multi-vendor marketplace app was quick and all the client requirements were completely addressed.

We delivered a feature-rich solution with various high-end functionalities, such as:

• The ability for sellers to define custom shipping methods and tracking IDs
• Integration with Hubspot
• The ability for admins to define a commission rate
• Scalable and customized dashboard
• Real-time data sync between the Shopify and seller dashboard

The project met our criteria of 100% client satisfaction with seamless communication, project transparency, regular updates, stringent testing, and after-sales support.

Few words about us

The Brihaspati Infotech is a 360-degree Shopify app development services provider to startups, SMBs, and enterprises. Our solutions are tailored for your unique business needs and aimed to accentuate practically every square inch of your business and ultimately help you max out your ROI.

With half the world moving towards a work from home setup, the risk of your business security is a worrying point. In a recent survey,  87% of small business owners do not seem to prioritize this as a concern. In another staggering study, it was also seen that half of the small businesses are prone to a cyber attack.

Businesses that are based online are a soft target for hackers. These businesses have a lot of data to take care of and not all their security measures are always efficient. Hackers can steal this information and put your business in jeopardy greatly. But, cybersecurity for your business becomes integral, because the biggest way to put your business at risk is when you haven’t taken measures to secure it.

So, in this article, we will take a look at how cybersecurity for your business is important and what are the top 5 ways to ensure cybersecurity for your business:

5 Ways to Ensure The Cyber Security of Your Business

While we recommend using a trusted software to keep the cybersecurity of your business intact, here are some additional tips you can use:

• Train Your Employees Well
  
  Firstly, we recommend that you have a business security plan, especially pertaining to cybersecurity. Your employees should be well acquainted with this. It should have guidelines on the best practices, especially the ones that you expect your employees to follow in the event of a crisis. You should tell them about your cybersecurity policy as well as the protocols that the employees must follow in case a breach occurs. Educate them about simple practices like creating strong and unique passwords for each of the accounts. Also, tell them to avoid using company accounts on personal devices without stringent security measures. Encourage them to use a two-factor authentication method to keep data safe. All of these measures would surely help in taking a step towards setting up a safe framework for efficient cybersecurity.

• Keep your computers updated and in sync with the latest technology

One of the best ways to ensure cybersecurity for your business is on track is by regularly updating your company devices. This includes your laptops, desktops as well as mobile devices that you provide to your employees. Make sure that your operating systems as well as web browsers are updated and are protected (via MDM Software)against any threats that may harm you and your client’s data. Have a dedicated team or resource to keep a check on new versions of software that you are using, which includes security software too. Nearly, all software stored in your computer requires regular updates. On the other hand, follow up on your cloud software being up to date, as the update process will be facilitated by the provider of the cloud software.

•  Create regular backups
  It is also necessary to create a regular backup of information for all your devices. In case the information gets stolen or is missing, you should have a quick stand-by ready. All your vital information needs to have a backup. For instance, you may keep necessary vendor information in a shared folder on your desktop. But, we also recommend keeping it on a stand-by hard disk for easy access in case your shared folder gets lost. Additionally, you should have a copy of your passwords too. The key decision-makers and the IT department of the company must have easy access to these. Otherwise, in a time of crisis, it can get tricky to retain important information.

• Secure your wifi and network connectivity
  Your business WiFi is pretty much the first point for the cybersecurity of your business to be compromised. Secure your WiFi in a manner that only the IT department of your company knows the passwords. Do not circulate all the passwords amongst employees either. Let the IT resource set up the company WiFi for them on their preferred device. In case, you wish to have WiFi for your consumers and clients to use, then make use of a different network. Guests should not have the same WiFi as employees. This can help you in keeping cybersecurity intact and prevent hackers from attacking your data through your WiFi.

• Limit admin access and the decision making should lie with a limited number of people
  Have a set limit for people who get access to your company computers as well as accounts. Even a well-known, trusted person should not be given access to the computers or this information that is typically unauthorized for usage. For instance, we don’t recommend letting a client borrow your laptop to simply look something up. Additionally, employees from different teams should have different levels of access to technology. An accountant need not share accounting and financial information with other colleagues. Similarly, the IT team should have all networking passwords secure with them so as to keep the cybersecurity of business intact.

With the aforementioned measures, you can figure out a strategic plan to ensure the cybersecurity of your business. All of these will surely help in keeping your business safe currently and away from any harm caused by hackers. We also recommend using safe communication tools for your team so that all official data is kept safe and there is no hindrance in the communication either.

Magento Solution springs to mind when one thinks of eCommerce platforms. The Magento Solution is the world’s most popular open-source platform. They provide merchants tools that enable them to manage how the design, appearance, content of a website is handled. Moreover, it has an admin panel that lets the admin maintain the website without any technical or development knowledge.

One of Magento’s most disturbing downsides is the front-end loading speed. After all, nothing is perfect. The fact is, Magento by default is not slow and can be optimized for optimal performance. Let’s take a look at a few ways to improve Magento’s website loading speed.

Reasons for low Magento speed

Slow hardware:

Magento pages can take a long time to load for a number of reasons, the most significant is not meeting Magento’s Technical requirements.

Third-party extensions:

It’s core functionality and is developed by the Magento team. Third-party extensions are made by programmers with average skills. The performance of Magento can be adversely affected by a poorly written extension.

Try turning off all extensions one by one and see if it affects loading speed or not. You can try the default Magento version and see if it is faster. Then you better know that extensions are slowing you down. Magento Development Services can assist you if you are having difficulties with your Magento eCommerce store.

Disabled full page cache:

A Cache is used for storing copies of a website’s pages so that when the user accesses the website they can easily find their earlier stored copies. Rather than creating the pages again and going through the whole process.

You can boost your website’s performance by using caching tools. If you use the best ones and implement them correctly, you’ll show an increase in the website’s loading speed.

Look at a few ways you can improve the loading speed of your website by improving the Magento 2 Admin page.

Minifying and merging JavaScript and CSS files

Magento’s slow loading website can be attributed to unmerged and unminified Javascript and CSS files. Minifying contains removing any extra characters from the code, such as, whitespace, line breaks, comments, etc., and compressing it down to its bare minimum. Minification reduces the volume of code you have to transfer, which improves the speed of your website.

Java and CSS merge means unifying multiple CSS and javascript files into one. This reduces the volume of latency and prevents loading separate files.

Go to the admin page and go to store, settings, then configuration, then “Developer”. In the advanced options, click the “Developer” option. Select the following tabs: Template settings, JavaScript settings, and CSS settings. To merge and minify the javascript and CSS, select Yes and then Save configuration when you are finished.

Enabling a Flat Catalog

Magento stores catalog data in multiple tables using the Entity-Attribute-Value model. However, since attributes are stored in multiple tables, SQL queries can be very long. This adversely affects Magenta’s performance.

You can increase the speed of the collection process by storing data in one flat catalog instead of many tables.

To enable the Flat Catalog, you must go to the store, and then set up the settings and configure them in the admin panel. When you select the flat catalog option under the catalog tab, say YES to flush the cache and reindex the data once done.

Using Varnish Cache

It reduces response times and network bandwidth consumption for equal requests in the future by saving files or file fragments in memory. Varnish is an open-source accelerator for web applications.

Magento 2 is fully compatible with Varnish. In addition, Magento strongly recommends using Varnish in Magento Developer Documents, as it offers wider performance than the integrated full page cache does and is specifically designed to speed up HTTP traffic.

To enable Varnish Cache, navigate to Stores, then Settings, then Configuration, then Advanced, and then System.

Configuring product attribute sets

Standard Magento 2 features include a variety of product attributes. When you create a product, a webmaster simply fills in the attributes associated with the newly created product. All other attributes remain blank.

When a customer downloads a product page, the server analyzes the whole feature list, matches the populated parts, and shows it to the customer. This affects the loading speed of the product page/search page/catalog page.

You can improve the loading of product pages by creating custom feature sets for each type of product in your store. Deploying may take a while, but you will work better and have fewer irritated customers. You can configure product attributes under Stores and then attribute after Products.

Disabling unused stores and store views

Stores and views can take up a lot of space on the server, resulting in poor loading performance. Click on the store’s version in the upper right-hand corner to remove the unnecessary Store View, and then go to Store, then Settings, and then All Stores.

Checking error logs

Checking your error logs from time to time will help to detect any existing errors. You need to sign in to the Magento site so the system can begin taking notes.

This is done by accessing Stores and Configuration, then Advanced by selecting Developer and Debug and enabling the log section for file.

By combining these simple steps, you can significantly improve the overall performance of Magento 2.

It may seem like almost everyone in the IT industry is raving about cloud-based software, recommending it regardless of industry or specific business objectives. Cloud-based software, they say, is the way of the future, offering unparalleled benefits and greater digital security in a single package.

Yet many businesses are still hesitant to undergo dramatic renovations of their software or technology departments, and for good reason. Changing to new technology or applications might be costly, particularly if a given business already runs well on existing devices or software. It’s very important that business leaders ask themselves some questions before digitally transforming their business processes to cloud-based.

What exactly is cloud-based software and why is it becoming more popular than ever? The answer to both questions is simpler than you might expect.

Cloud-Based Software in a Nutshell

Cloud-based software comes from cloud computing, which essentially means accessing, developing or storing programs and data on the Internet instead of storing them on a physical hard drive.

Under a classic computing model, any software your computer accesses must be installed on your device’s physical hard drive.

With cloud computing, all your computer needs to do is access the Internet, then it can use a program installed on a cloud server. That software can be accessed by other computers who have the same privileges and permissions, as well.

This decentralized computing style is affecting every aspect of the IT industry, from computer security to software development and business. But its increasing ubiquity and apparent ease of access don’t fully explain why it is so much more popular now than it was just a few short years ago.

Benefits of Cloud-Based Software

Cloud-based software provides a number of advantages to enterprises that adopt it fully. Let’s break down some of the most insightful ones.

Lower Costs Across the Board

For starters, cloud-based software usually comes with lower costs for businesses that leverage it. Businesses no longer have to purchase individual software licenses to install software on dozens of computers for their company. Now they can rent software for their entire staff by paying a single monthly fee.

Furthermore, cloud-based software means you don’t have to rely on many IT support services. Most IT support for a given software type or brand can be handled by their associated data centers.

Even the costs of supporting or maintaining various applications are lower since cloud vendors handle updates and upgrades for any software they provide.

On a more technical level, cloud-based software only requires businesses to pay for the computing resources they need. Businesses also don’t have to spend time purchasing, building, and/or maintaining hardware to store their programs and data. Fees for renting data storage space are usually much cheaper.

Business leaders can easily justify the cost of transitioning the cloud-based software due to the long-term savings they’ll likely see after adjusting.

Faster Access to Hardware and Software

One other advantage of cloud-based software is faster installation. Since a company’s computers can simply download any software or computing resources they need, they no longer have to wait for software licenses to be delivered or for hardware to be constructed.

Instead, all that’s required is for an enterprise to contact a cloud-based software company, sign a licensing or rental agreement, and immediately gain access to what they require for their objectives.

This fast access allows companies to grow at much speedier rates than they used to, as well as handle many more visitors or users during high-traffic times.

Are your servers being overloaded by the number of visitors to your website thanks to a new promotion? Simply requisition more server resources from your cloud-based software vendor.

More Reliable Data Security and Backups

Furthermore, cloud software provides much more reliable data security and backup functionality compared to traditional counterparts.

This kind of software can be updated and improved straight from the cloud, allowing any new updates to be disseminated to individual software versions throughout the network in a flash.

Thus, a cloud services company that finds a minor security breach can patch the breach with their version of the software, then roll out the fix to all affected companies much more quickly than otherwise.

Companies are less likely to have their data stolen or their servers compromised if they use cloud-based software overall. This even extends to physical breaches – disgruntled employees can no longer steal company secrets directly from local hard drives as all valuable data is instead stored behind password-protected cloud servers.

Backups can also be scheduled quite frequently using cloud-based software. This prevents valuable data from being lost due to a power outage or a security breach.

Ultimately, there’s no wonder why cloud contact centers, digital marketing agencies, remote software developers and many other industries are becoming the new normal in contrast to their predecessors.

Any enterprise concerned with greater IT security should transition to a cloud-based software use model ASAP.

Easy Access from Anywhere with Internet

Perhaps most important of all, cloud-based software allows company employees and executives to access crucial data or applications from anywhere they can connect to the Internet.

No longer do they need to make sure they have their “work computer” with them – they can find the files they need or access a company dashboard in a few minutes after logging in with the appropriate credentials.

This will likely provide even greater benefits later down the road as internet marketing for small business and big enterprises becomes more of a necessity.

The Final Word: Cloud-Based Computing and Software is the Future

In the end, any business that wants to survive – and thrive! – in the modern economic environment will need to leverage cloud-based software as much as possible.

Many surveys already suggest that a majority of industry leaders are looking to adapt their business models moving forward, focusing on agility and flexibility. Cloud computing, and the software that comes along with it, is the best way to accomplish these goals in the technology department.

Cloud computing is here to stay, and it’s only going to become more ubiquitous in a few years. Make the leap now, while the shift is still happening, to using cloud-based software sooner rather than later. Before long, your company will see bigger benefits and greater security!

Everybody remembers those cold-calling, knocking over doors, and using the traditional advertising time! But with the intervention of time, many things have changed.

Now the things question why you need a digital marketing strategy. Even if you want to grow faster and smarter, you would need an effective digital marketing strategy. This strategy is not just depicted in plain words; it includes the business’s integrative plan using the power of social media, search engines, emails, and the overall content to promote the business you are planning to grow digitally.

Is this looking easy?

Even if it is looking the way but is not, most businesses fail to implement their digital marketing strategy either they don’t have enough knowledge, time, or experience.

The brands and businesses are expecting a great evolution in digital marketing strategies. Only digital marketing holds the capability to impact the website rankings and the whole approach.

Digital marketing campaigns provide a high surge in traffic, leads as well as sales. Look, the point is straightforward: you can easily search for your favorite content over Google or YouTube in this rising techie world. In fact, you can read blogs, go through the tutorials and learn many things but what is most important is that you can spend money well too.

There are many known privileges of implementing digital marketing services for your business. If it produces positive results, it can enable online marketing to upsurge at a higher rate. Modern business has now identified digital marketing while being the professional tool to direct the traffic. But one main thing that matters is the ability to understand your customers, and it is often underrated. A digital marketing strategy is nothing if it is not tailored to the audience’s needs.

Let us talk about the industry’s variation that triggers the growth of digital marketing strategies and how they are providing growth marketing trends in the year 2021.

1. The introduction of content marketing: You must know that content marketing is the topmost demand generation strategy. Nobody has a clear idea that this specific strategy can light the entire customer life cycle, varying from basic to excellence. Just content and lots of it can help in extending this lifecycle via seamless experiences. In fact, a wide portion of this marketing budget of the business is fully bent towards content marketing.

2. Investing in the customer experiences: Obviously, if you are a true business leader, you will definitely talk about serving the customers and bestowing them the best experiences. This way, the expansion of the customer base is possible. Boosting the whole landscape for the customers with the digital marketing tool can flip the business’s complete script. Now, if you ask for an example, then nailing the Facebook Ads is the holy grail of customer-centric digital marketing. The results will be incredible if you use it as the explicit goal.

3. Personalizing the whole digital customer experience: Whatever the business type you are holding, you know a wide portion of your customers have full access to the information and are well-versed with the other vital information. Personalizing the digital customer experience can create sense for almost all businesses with easy access to the information. Remember that the companies that have mastered the art of personalizing the digital customer experience would definitely secure the specific benefits over the adversaries.

4. Investing in the omnichannel experiences: The relevant omnichannel campaigns can only work well if you know-how about the people and the things online. It can also create perfect personas of the target audiences depending on the complex data and the social media where these customers are most active. Even due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has also become necessary for the individual to rely on online sources. With the development of more awareness among the business related to building these digital marketing tactics, you need to ensure the alignment of the campaigns across each and every platform to secure better growth and success.

5. The absolute growth marketing channel: It’s your customers only that represents the best growth marketing channel. Even money comes afterward than the happy, satisfied, and loyal clients. To acquire this kind of customer loyalty takes a lot of effort and a long-term commitment to the program’s success. This can be made further with the great products and service delivery initiation with the exceptional customer experience. You can consider the things like special reward programs, loyalty promotions, as well as many surprise gifts in the order. Try to give the best and exclusive treatments to your clients.

6. Facilitating Interaction with the targeted audiences: The digital marketing methods cooperating with the target audiences are the dream for many. Most businesses lag when they don’t know how a significant variant can impact their business well. All that your business need is result-driven interactions. Therefore, facilitating the engagements with the clients would be able to let you know the things that your prospects would need. The better formation of the data will let you make the perfect arrangement of the business’s next moves that can build superb associations and gain your outstanding business experiences.

7.  Building the brand reputation: Why would anyone want to do any stuff related to the search and digital marketing tactics to pull the greatest of the audiences. This is due to building a brand reputation. Therefore, offering the same stuff you guaranteed would allow you to build up a significant association with the clients they can refer further. This will ultimately influence the businesses to sustain the trend and grow widely. Your online reputation has a huge hand in building the reputation of your business.

Don’t just stop to build your customer persona; grow your awareness, visibility, traffic today and gain the conversions.

Always follow the digital marketing tactics that focus on audience engagement and the acquisition/ growth of the business.

These are the times when people are physically distant from each other. But the technology is constantly advancing and managing to keep people in contact and connected. Video conferencing works as an asset for companies and businesses in such a case. It is a platform where people organize and attend meetings and have meaningful conversations face-to-face. Video conferencing allows to have such interactions irrespective of the location and keeping people of a workplace engaged. Moreover, in the pandemic situation, the collaboration from the video conferencing software has helped people stay remote and safe.

Two of the leading software in this field are Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Although both companies offer similar video conferencing and collaboration features, each software varies significantly to specific features. Microsoft Teams grab advantage from the fact that it is associated with Office 365. It has SharePoint, Outlook, OneDrive, and many other essential applications. On the other hand, Zoom provides something more than audio and video conferencing but performs well in both fields.

Here are some of the other critical comparative features between Microsoft Teams and Zoom. These will help you decide whether to buy Microsoft Teams or Zoom:

1. Security: Security is one of the most critical features a company looks for while choosing software. The company needs to have software having end-to-end encryption and no data leakage. Microsoft commits to providing such a level of security and multi-factor authentication (MFA) and Rights Management Services (RMS).

Zoom, on the other hand, has a bit different security approach. It has third-party data centers and provides two-factor authentication and passcode protection.

2. Interface: In terms of interface, people enjoy the view of both the applications. It entirely depends on the taste of the person using the application. The interface of Microsoft Teams is more professional, whereas many enjoy seeing a gallery in the Zoom. Thus, it all is a matter of choice.

3. Voice Compatibility: Microsoft Teams allow users to make phone calls and manage them with an in-built phone system. Zoom also has voice compatibility, but it does not offer a feature like connectivity to existing voice technology.

4. Pricing: This is another crucial feature to consider while looking for good software. Microsoft Teams comes along with many other applications useful for any business or Enterprise. It comes with Office 365 and offers all the advanced features like security, online exchange, receiving and transferring calls, etc. Therefore, one can buy Microsoft Teams at a price and requirement that suits best to the company. It starts from Rs 125/user/ month for a basic business suite to Rs 1440 user/ month for Enterprise.

Zoom has a 40-minute meeting cap and comes at the cost of Rs 1300/ month, Rs 1800/ month, and Rs 7950 annually for Professional, business, and education purposes, respectively.

Therefore, if we compare all the essential features of a video conferencing software, Microsoft Teams is worth buying. When one goes to buy software, it should be kept in mind that the licenses are genuine. It is important because it helps in the proper up-gradation and prevention of cyber threats. To buy Microsoft Teams, one can contact Wroffy Technologies who provide genuine licenses and installation services.

In the mid of this decade, a wave of No-Code Machine Learning Platforms is coming. Many businesses have turned their market strategies, focusing on influencing artificial intelligence to develop software-based products. No-code AI platforms will ramp the development process multi-fold as they can turn complex tasks related to design and development with approachable solutions and streamline interactions.

This direct method has earned quick popularity, and Artificial intelligence is set to take on strategic significance in helping businesses grow. The AI workflow in development improves in-house activities and diminish expenses exponentially. Compared to building AI-enabled applications according to traditional methods becomes costly, complex, and time-consuming.

The traditional methods are not adept enough to overcome the complexities of handling data. It also increases the gap between clients and the developer team. But No-Code Machine Learning Platforms can help regain confidence among the company.

This no-code ML are suitable for those with a non-technical background. These platforms are the only possible tools to build applications without even using high-level coding, which results in a developing method that is more agile and far more fruitful.

What is a No-Code Platform?

The primary influence of expanding the AI and machine learning area is to make coding as simple as possible, helping small and big businesses develop complex applications with as little efforts as possible. And because the industry is moving towards no-code AI, ML, and deep learning, it’s crystal-clear supremacy for AI in the future, creating the essential requirement for No-Code Machine Learning Platforms to further the mobile app development.

Software development has evolved exponentially over time. A previous couple of years have been fruitful, and No-Code Machine Learning Platforms are on the rise to contest its former strategies. Within the past, primarily, this functionality was only limited to business applications like Microsoft Excel. The concept then got introduced into application development, and now it’s progressed to achieve AI with machine learning.

There has always been a high demand for developers because companies lack the adequate technical talent required to develop mobile apps. Those companies that cannot rent or hire contract-based developers, or people who want to save more of their time in development, are increasingly getting used to no-code platforms for machine learning.

This increasing popularity has attracted a lot of attention from big tech companies, and they now stand tall utilizing these technologies to reign over the mobile app market. It also enables companies and small business professionals with minimal or no coding experience to create applications and fill their talent gaps.

Working of No-Code ML Platforms 2020

It is a software development tool requiring little to no coding to build applications and related development strategies. A No-Code Machine Learning Platforms enables the practice of visual interfaces with minimum logical reasoning and drag-and-drop characteristics, preferred more than general coding languages and their medium.

These autonomous programming tools allow users who haven’t learned the precise understanding of coding or software development to create applications for particular purposes like mobile apps.

Also, these programs have grown increasingly popular as a swift and candid option compared to conventional software development services. Professional and non-professional developers can utilize a no-code program to make various complex apps that meet business demands for growth, autonomous methods, and increasing digital transformation.

List of the Top No-Code ML Platforms 2021

Create ML

It is mainly utilized by mac users to train and test custom machine learning methods. It can easily recognize images, translate text to get a meaning, and relations among numerical values.

It can build an ease-of-use app interface to robust on-device models with machine learning techniques. It can run single projects using several datasets offering advanced training and testing of the models.

Data Robot

It is one of the most productive and popular end-to-end enterprise AI platforms, providing quick and straightforward mobile apps deployment with precise predictive models.

DataRobot is capable of handling powerful AI-based apps at the enterprise scale, also of in-tune supporting the process of preparing, building, monitoring, and deploying software.

BigML

An open-source no-code ML tool, utilizing ML in application development, commodifies ML as a service for business development. This tool only requires a few fresh clicks to create a productive ML or deep learning model.

Google Cloud AutoML

A no-code Auto ML tool helps with the advanced training of high-quality custom models with minor efforts and machine learning skills. It enables developers with limited or no machine learning expertise to train and create high-quality models, especially for their business needs.

It only takes a minute for developers to build custom machine learning model for themselves. It is effortless to utilize AutoML with Google’s ML capabilities to create custom training models for ML and then integrate them into applications and web sites.

Fritz AI

Fritz AI supports iOS, Android, and SnapML, Lens Studio to create machine learning adaptable applications. It can also develop a model of development Studio to train and test custom solutions. Or you can go straight in with pre-trained models to ease business development processes.

Google ML Kit

Google ML Kit, a mobile software development kit, bringing Google’s machine learning expertise to support Android and iOS app development.

It only utilizes a few code lines for achieving its tasks without any expertise in machine learning.

Microsoft Azure Automated ML

An Automated ML tool perfect for training and testing models developed through machine learning capabilities. It influences users to find and identify solutions through a machine learning pipeline.

It is best suitable for practising models in data science with immediate problem-solving.

MakeML

This No-Code Machine Learning Platforms is utilized to build object identifiers and partitioned neural networks. It also makes the process of setting up training models more effortless and more straightforward.

It is a traditional tool for building datasets and requires no python code.

RunwayML

It is a no-code tool for students and artists, making machine learning techniques conveniently available for students and creative professionals for a wide range of activities.

It can train any many of your models to produce images and recognize items in the pictures.

Obviously AI

A no-code machine learning tool best suitable for business analysts. It drives data science effortlessly, allowing anyone to process accurate

predictions with analytical data by asking and resolving natural language queries.

Wrapping Up No-Code ML Platforms 2021

As far we have learned about No-Code Machine Learning Platforms, what are they, how they work, having a clear comprehension of these, stating that mobile apps with AI capabilities are the new future. It also offers hopes for those who are from non-technical background and will open countless possibilities for them.

No matter how big or small your business is, getting noticed in the 21st Century is all about how you market it on the internet. With over 4.13 billion internet users around the world, this is an opportunity that every business invests in, when it comes to marketing. Marketing is an essential part of establishing your brand and generating sales leads for your small business, and because of global digitization, there is no better place than the internet to start with. In this post, we’ll discuss some of the best internet marketing tips that you can use to grow your small business in 2021.

An SEO-friendly Website

For any small business, their website is the storefront where potential customers and users will find you on the internet. This is where people learn about your business and buy your products and services. Building a neat or a fantastic looking website is the first step, however the most important next step is to get your website optimized for both search engines as well as conversions. You can always buy traffic to your website through targeted ads, however, what a small business should target first is to get organic traffic on the website. Here are some tips on how you can do that:

• Create good-quality content on topics that relate to your business.
• Having an extensive keyword research before you create your website.
• Incorporating primary keywords on all the landing pages, titles, meta descriptions of your website.
• Focusing on local SEO and long-tail keywords.
• Optimising page load speed and page design for various devices.
• Utilising structured data for better rankings on SERP.

There are a lot of other things when it comes to getting an SEO friendly website up and running, however these tips are the starting point.

Defining Your Brand Story

What connects people to a brand is the story of their origins, success and what they do the best. This is mostly found in the About Us, section of a website. On your website, telling your brand’s story is the most effective way to form a distinct brand image to connect with your target audience. Brands that have an authentic story about how they came to be, work best in-terms of recall and creating an everlasting impression among your users.

Have a Rewards and Referral Program

This is one of the most simple and effective internet marketing strategies that many small businesses miss out on. While big businesses often use the rewards and referral programs to keep recurring customers, having such a program for small business can be way more fruitful than one might think. Referrals are a way of earning trust of an existing customer as well as building confidence. Referral programs with rewards in the form of discounts/add-on etc. incentivises your existing customers to recommend your brand to their friends. Small rewards for friends who sign up via referrals, like an introductory discount, can also push them to the bottom of the funnel to make their first purchase with you. Rewards in the form of community building like asking your customers to follow your social media handles or take part in a hashtag challenge will also ensure that they engage with your business more often and foster a customer loyalty towards your small business.

Investing in Analytics

On the internet, data driven marketing strategies work the best. They have a better lift rate than what gut or emotion driven strategies would. This is true of the internet, where the user attention span is the least among all media vehicles. There is little scope to make mistakes for a small business when it comes to internet marketing. This is where data plays a key role in helping you understand your customer base as well as how your existing customers actions when interacting with your business on the internet. The best part of having analytics for your website and social media handles is that you really don’t need to pay a lot for investing in analytics. A good starting point for your website is Google Analytics, where you can get insights on the performance of your website landing pages.

Social media monitoring tools also play a key role in paving the future of a small business. You constantly need to monitor your social media for mentions, queries and reviews. Remember, reaching out to your customers via social media can be tricky at times, so to monitor the interactions that customers do with your brand can help you iron out the teething problems that you might have with your marketing strategy.

Using the Potential of Social Media

Social media is the most affordable and effective form of internet marketing tool that a small business can have in its marketing armoury. It’s all about investing your time and effort into social marketing for your business. For many small businesses, it’s easy if you can do it on your own if you are on a tight budget. Outsourcing your social media management is also an option if you are hard pressed for time. Social media marketing is now one of the major drivers of internet marketing for many businesses around the world. All over the world there are hundreds of social media platforms, however the biggest in-terms of users are platforms like – Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and LinkedIn. Make sure you choose the right mix of platforms to be present on to find your target customers. Here are a few things that you need to keep in mind while developing an internet marketing strategy on social media.

• Be regular and consistent in posting social media content pertaining to your business.
• Use high quality visuals in your posts like images, Gifs, videos etc. to catch the attention of your potential customer.
• Don’t forget to add a link to your website into the bios of your social media handles.
• Create your own hashtag to keep a track of the conversations around your business or for any future campaigns that you might want to run for your business.
• Use popular, relevant and trending hashtags while posting to reach more people.

There are a lot of more ways to develop an awesome social media strategy for your business, however these tips will get you started. Patience with social media is also something that small businesses should have for a longer, sustainable and profitable ROI’s for your small business.

These internet marketing tips for your small business can help you lift the performance of your business online in 2021, however take them as a starter kit to get your business going online.

Introduction:

Building the correct Link is not an easy job. The relevant links are making your article more visible. Finding out the relevancy is the most challenging part of link building. For these reasons, professional digital marketers always keep their eyes open to search for new link-building strategies. When Google is changing its algorithm, the strategies and the artificial intelligence is also getting changed.

Every blogger and website wants to see a good traffic report. Link-building strategies are the best way to achieve the desired result within a short time frame. Backlinks are more of the quality, and link building is based on the quality. These two are entirely functioning based on the different strategies.

5 Strong Link Building Strategy Along With Quality Backlinks

Backlinks building is the most effective way to increase your ranking in SEO. Quality backlinks are the most effective as the backlinks give information about the connectivity with the authorized websites.

 Here comes the name of quantity how many types of link builds you are doing to push your website to a higher ranking position. Searching for good quality backlinks is quite a time-consuming process. But link building delivers faster results and pushes your page to a higher position.

Here is the list of five successful link-building strategies along with building high-quality backlinks.

1. Check The Domain First:

SEO looks after all the links on your page. And these backlinks are proof of how much you are reliable. So if you have the authorized backlinks from good quality websites, then the possibility of a higher ranking is there.

But if your backlinks are not coming from the authorized websites, then the SEO is hampering your ranking.

So when you want to cope up with this problem, first check the domain authority, then follow the backlink process. Now many AI-based tools are available to check the domain authority. The good domain authority means the backlinks are quite valuable and can push your page on the google search engine’s top.

Here is a list of AI-based tools to check the domain authority.

• Ahref
• Mozbar
• Majestic

2. Guest Post:

Guest posting is the contribution to the other websites by the contents. These contents are free and delivered in return for the backlinks. Good quality content is making a huge change in terms of earning good quality backlinks. Guest post is the most effective and widely using link-building strategy to earn the backlinks.

First, search the relevant websites where you can offer the guest post, then start the communication with the blogger. You can start the communication on the social media page or from the blogger outreach platform. Create good quality content, and then offer the guest posts.

Before jumping to the action, study the following point carefully, and then decide yourself.

• Search the right site where you can contribute by choosing the relevant site and relevant topics.
• Study the guest posts of your competitors and first approach those websites for the guest posts carefully.

Follow these simple two tricks and analyze the performances of the websites and approach them for the backlinks.

3. OutReach:

Bloggers and writers are always searching for new news and trends. Your personal networking is the only way which is helping you to earn good quality backlinks. Before doing the guest post, search for the best suitable websites and offer them your services.

Social media is the most appropriate platform where you are going to find the writers and bloggers who have the same niches as you.

Reaching out to the blogger is the best way to earn the backlinks, and for doing this, use the social media platform for the blogger outreach platform. The blogger outreach platform is more of a professional platform. Use the platform and outreach the bloggers.

4. Patch Up The Broken Links:

Many bloggers and digital marketers think the broken link repairing is a more time-consuming process than creating the new one. Each link of the website is connected with other websites. The cause of broken links is associated with the contents many websites are moving their contents, which is the leading cause of broken links.

First, search the broken links with the broken links checker, visit the websites, write a relevant topic, and offer them for the guest post. Most of the websites are releasing their pressure after earning the backlinks from the guest post. Regular monitoring is essential to find all the broken links of the websites.

Here are some names of the popular backlink checkers.

• SEMrush
• Ahref
• Broken Backlink Checker

5. Good quality Engaging Contents:

Good quality engaging content is always helping you to earn the backlinks.

Resource page link building is working very well. But if you want to look at your page as the resource page, always focus on creating good, engaging content.

Resource page link building is the strategy where good quality content is added as the resource page, and the websites are proudly showing the excellent quality contents.

Before creating quality content, always keep some factor in your mind, and we are sure you will solve the puzzle.

• Visually drive content.
• Use a good quality image.
• Relevant topics.
• Image and video always play a significant role in the content.
• None plagiarized informative and engaging content.
• Use analyzed keywords and maintains the accurate density of the keywords.

Follow these simple tricks and develop your content as per your niches.

Bottom Line:

Reachout to the people and the bloggers and approach them to get the links. Use these five effective strategies. These all five strategies are effective, and all five strategies are associated with researching technologies. Many Al-based tools are available to make your work simple. Use the tools, and if you think our article is delivering a strong idea about the link-building strategy with high-quality backlinks. Comment back to us and share your valuable information with us.

Digital transformations can be challenging as well as transitional for businesses.

Considering that digital transformation failures can range from 66% to 84%, businesses have to be prepared to face challenges and overcome them effectively. Digital transformation of your business is not a decision that you take overnight. More importantly, you should not do it just because your competitors are doing it. There are successful case studies of companies that have driven value through digital transformation such as Uber, Airbnb, and Yelp, but not all businesses achieve the same success.

Even before you set out to digitally transform your business, you should ask yourself: what is digital transformation, and do I need it? Once you have answers to these questions, you can proceed to ask more pertinent questions that can potentially affect the outcome of the digital transformation, such as follows:

1.  Why is the transformation required for my business?

As is true for any major project that your business embarks on, it is important to set the end goals that you want to achieve through digital transformation. Setting goals is a great way to narrow down your primary priorities and how a digital transformation can play a role in achieving those priorities. digital transformations can affect all aspects of your business making it even more important to analyze if you are ready. Ask yourself what problems will you be able to solve through the digital transformation.

As a business owner, you should also assess why digital transformation seems to be the next step for your business. Are you looking to reduce costs? Or transform processes? Make workforce more efficient? If you are unable to find any reason, it is probably not the right time to go ahead with it.

2.  How is it going to affect my processes and overall business?

What business owners often forget is that digital transformation is just as much of a business transformation as any other major business decision that you take. A comprehensive digital transformation can affect all your stakeholders including employees, as well as customers. Thus, it is important to list down the different kinds of impacts that digital transformations can have on your business – especially on your daily processes and operations.

Value creation is an important part of any digital transformation and as a business owner, you need to assess the value that will be generated through the digital transformation efforts that you are embarking on.

Digital transformations will inevitably affect all aspects of your business, which is why it is important for your to see if the changes brought on by the digital transformation will be worth it in the end.

3.  What can I do to empower the digital transformation?

Digital transformation is a largely technological process and undoubtedly requires IT expertise. But even as the owner of a non-IT business, you have a major role to play in the digital transformation of your business. Such transformations require an adept leader who can guide and motivate the digital transformation process and drive it to fruition. Business leaders can enable the teams that are driving the transformation to do better, and also keep a check on the budget and the timelines.

Digital transformation can be a challenging processing spanning months or in some cases, even years. The onus of being patient and channeling motivation across the workforce falls on the fierce leader that heads the organization. Your experience and acumen as a business leader can be a great asset to the success of the digital transformation of your business.

4.  Do I need additional tools or partners to accomplish this?

The sign of a true leader is not his ability to accomplish everything on his own. It lies in his ability to acknowledge and ask wherever they think they lack the expertise. As mentioned before, digital transformation is a largely IT-driven process and can involve several crucial and important decisions that require technological expertise. If you are the owner of a non-IT business and want to implement a digital transformation, it is a good idea to leverage digital transformation tools and partners.

You can hire a project manager who has vast experience in implementing digital transformations, have an IT team that monitors and moderates the technological decisions within the digital transformation, or purchase tools that can make it easier for you to implement digital transformation in your organization.

5.  How are my teams going to collaborate and communicate?

Collaboration and communication are two processes that boost your business processes in every possible way. One of the major ways to accomplish this is through the implementation of processes and tools that can bolster communication and collaboration among your employees. Communication between teams can be vital in driving inter-departmental collaboration.

Furthermore, team collaboration could be a great way to drive your digital transformation and make sure that it is effective. Employees can help each other overcome challenges that can arise as a result of the transformation.

6.  What are the main challenges that I should expect from transformation?

The challenges associated with digital transformation can affect all levels and departments of an organization. Digital transformation can also affect the customers of an organization making it even more important for organizations to assess possible challenges in advance. It is also important for organizations to consider the resources and processes that would be required to successfully mitigate challenges that arise from a company-wide digital transformation.

You should ask yourself questions such as – do we have enough resources to face the challenges? Do we have enough capacity to handle any possible negative impacts of the transformation? Seeking answers to these questions can ensure that organizations are able to cope with some of the major issues that arise from digital transformations.

Digitally transform your business

Digital transformations can make or break your business. If implemented properly, digital transformation can help you reduce costs and improve your organizational processes. However, if done incorrectly, it can result in losses for your business, as well as lower productivity among your team members. Asking yourself the aforementioned key questions can be crucial in setting goals and expectations for the transformation, and can thus provide you with metrics with which you can measure the success of your digital transformation.