Direct Selling: The Challenges of the Future

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You’ve just earned a customer base milestone in the last month, but the number of customers you have still isn’t enough to surpass the biggest brands in the world.

Sometimes, you find yourself asking, “How did they do it?”

It’s a tough question to answer, and you’re not the only one asking.

Direct selling businesses, just like any other business, face challenges with changing customer preferences, technological advances, and other factors. To ensure that you will be able to come out strong, you need to be prepared and anticipate challenges before they arise.

Here are some you can expect in the next few years.

The Ever-Decreasing Customer Attention Span

According to Source Global Research, people love short and concise content. Over 43% of their respondents liked content that took less than 10 minutes to read. They also liked videos that took less than 5 minutes to watch.

In light of these findings, direct sellers will need to optimize their platform’s selling process.

One example is the seamless checkout process of Amazon. The brand greatly improved its sales platform when it introduced a more seamless checkout process that requires fewer clicks. Their app also helps customers find and purchase products they want quickly and easily.

Dynamic Pricing

You can categorize direct selling companies as e-commerce merchants, and dynamic pricing is one of the biggest challenges they all will face. Automated systems allow e-commerce companies to analyze prices from competitors across the Internet.

As e-commerce industries worldwide are likely to grow exponentially in the next few decades, price movements are likely to fluctuate, possibly on an hourly basis.

How Do You Improve Something that is Perfect?

Tech giant Apple always gains new customers by anchoring its brand to a superior product. The brand constantly faces the challenge of improving both their products and customer experience.

Their talented team and strong brand ace these obstacles year after year. However, it is not easy to innovate new products when you already have something excellent like the iPhone.

Direct selling companies face the same dilemma. Keeping their products relevant to the market is an important but difficult matter to resolve.

Swipe-Shopping with One Hand

If your brand doesn’t have its own e-commerce site and app, you’re in big trouble.

The vast majority of consumers and distributors use smartphones on a daily basis to find products. In fact, your competitors are likely already using hybrid e-commerce sites that allow seamless shopping and publish informative content.

Final Thoughts

From the challenges we’ve listed above, it is clear that direct selling companies need to be prepared with the following:

  • Excellent consumer behavior awareness and analysis
  • Staying within the competition’s price ranges
  • Introducing innovation
  • Making their sales procedure seamless, convenient, and productive

Fortunately, direct sellers can improve their sales procedures quickly.

One way to do so is to use an app for both marketing and sales groups. You can provide a huge discount for customers who use the app. Then, you can integrate the customers’ credit cards for one-click purchases, similar to Amazon.

Industry reports and case studies also reveal the changing behaviors of customers on a regular basis. By acting upon this information, you can create an effective marketing strategy.

Lastly, innovation will always remain important. For companies to thrive in the future, they will have to listen to their customers, conduct feasibility research, and test their products consistently in the years to come.