With the world of ecommerce growing rapidly it can sometimes be a daunting task deciding what elements are important or on which ecommerce software you should use to launch your business. Worry not, we've done the research and are here to help. In the blog below, we dive into some of the key features you can use on Zoho Commerce, along with a comparison between Zoho Commerce and Shopify. We even give you a quick setup guide to help you get started with Zoho Commerce.

3 Key Features your Ecommerce store needs

With ecommerce being an R86 Billion industry in South Africa, standing out and being able to deliver the best experience to your customers is the only way to stay ahead of the competition. Being able to keep your customers coming back for more is easier than trying to find new ones, you can do this by giving your customers the best online shopping experience with three key back-end features:

1. Mobile Optimisation

A responsive ecommerce platform is the best defense against a high bounce rate over all platforms. Mobile and Tablet users account for over 46% of online consumers and 75% of them admit to leaving sites that aren't responsive or optimised for mobile.

2. Automated Payment & Checkout System 

Having an automated payment system deals with the billing process so that you don't have to, allowing you to avoid manually processing transactions entirely. This can be done through payment integration with online payment platforms like Zoho Checkout, PayPal, or Stripe.

3. Reporting & Analytics Tool

Data and Information are key components to understanding your business. With the correct data you can monitor consumer behaviour, gain insight into product performance as well as track payment reports. These in return helps you make better business decisions related to the growth of your online store.

Using the right ecommerce platform for your business is vital to it's success, whether its functionality, user experience, templates or security. The features ecommerce platforms provide need to be tailored to your business. With so many platforms to choose from, such as Spotify, Woocommerce, Wix etc. you need to choose a platform that works best for you. Not every platform will suit your business' needs, however there are a few that come close, one of them is Zoho Commerce. If you are looking for easy setup with vast integration options, nothing comes close to Zoho Commerce.

What is Zoho Commerce?

Zoho Commerce is an ecommerce platform, providing you with effective ways to design, tailor and maintain your online business. The idea behind Zoho Commerce is to keep your everyday decision-making process to a minimum, allowing you the time to focus on the key aspects of what makes your business unique and leave the mundane tasks to the software. 

With the features designed with your success in mind, let's dive into some of them and how they work for you:

• Website Templates
• Product Cataloging
• Inventory & Shipping

1. FreshBooks

Zoholics is designed to give you the opportunity to learn, network and get the resources to take your teams to the next level. In this event you'll hear about the latest Zoho solutions, get inspired by the visionary keynotes and experience hands-on workshops and one-on-one sessions, and connect with like-minded peers who also use Zoho to drive their businesses.

Here's what you can expect

With the Zoho CRM mobile app, you can oversee your sales on the move.

You can now upgrade to the Standard, Professional and Enterprise editions from the app settings from your iOS mobile device. You can do so by following the steps demonstrated in the image below. 

1. Go to your Zoho CRM app

2. Navigate to settings

3. Tap ''Upgrade''

Zia can understand business metrics, analyse it and predict the possible outcome that can help in decision-making and preparing ones business for the future. To substantiate the prediction results, Zia shows the analytics that were taken into consideration to predict an outcome.

Motivator for Zoho CRM inspires healthy, competitive sales by capturing the data from your CRM account to create a competitive environment for your sales team using sales activities. Motivate your team's sales performance via competition and gamification.

Evaluate team, individual, company or time-specific performance to know whether there is an increase or decrease in KPI performance or target parameters. 

Zoho CRM has also introduced a new dashboard component called "Zone Analysis" to provide more detailed analytical insights of business data. Zone analysis distributes data into different zones which are created by taking the parameters in the X and Y axes into consideration. It makes understanding of data easier and make informed decisions.

Use Zone Analysis to understand the business data that requires more attention and those that are doing well with the help of comparative analysis between two parameters.

Canvas is a no-code, drag-and-drop design studio built into Zoho CRM where you can create contextual, immersive experiences for your entire team.

Now you can redesign your CRM record detail page with this easy-to-use, drag-and-drop design studio that compliments your business, industry, culture and methods.

The Canvas detail page allows you customise the record detail page to your preference by letting you add background colour to each field, arrange them in a different order, use custom buttons instead of field names, use different font styles and a lot more. This view is available in all the modules, including the custom modules.

Zoho One is really competitively priced because you're not paying for every single app on its own which would only be compounded as you add on additional apps. Instead, with a Zoho One licence, you're paying for a bundle or package of applications so ultimately if you sign up for just one Zoho app, you only get access to that app whereas for an unbelievable price of R450, Zoho One gives you access to the enterprise edition of every single app and what's more, the apps all integrate seamlessly with one another.

With Zoho One, Zoho has put together all the applications a company needs to acquire and serve its customers (marketing, sales and support apps); run its operations (finance, recruiting, and HR apps); and provide all the tools for its employees to work collaboratively and get their work done (office suite, mail, personal productivity, and collaboration apps). With one of Zoho's newest features, Canvas, you get access to a drag-and-drop builder to build a custom CRM interface for your unique business needs. 

Now to gain a better understanding of Zoho app pricing, let's take a look at 5 of our best-selling Zoho apps and what they cost individually:

For Zoho's Enterprise CRM edition, you'll pay R525 per user / per month / billed annually.

For Zoho's most popular subscriber-based plan for a maximum of 5000 subscribers, you'll pay R506 per month / billed annually.

For Zoho's Professional Social edition, you'll pay R375 per month / billed annually or for their brand new Premium edition, you'll pay R562.50 per month / billed annually.

For Zoho's Professional Desk edition, you'll pay R300 per month / billed annually or for their Enterprise edition, R525 per month / billed annually.

For Zoho's Enterprise Projects edition, you'll pay R150 per month / billed annually.

In today's blog we will help you understand what POPIA is, detail Zoho's commitment to POPIA compliance and explain the data controls that Zoho has put in place to help you keep your business data secure. 

The POPI Act, also referred to as POPIA, stands for Protection of Personal Information Act. It lays down standards to secure and bring in accountability for collecting, storing, and processing of personal data. Any organisation that deals with the personal data of South African citizens must comply with the POPI Act.

Now let's look at some additional controls that you can put in place to ensure your businesses data is secure and POPIA compliant, when using cloud-based applications, like Zoho.

Conduct Security Awareness With Your Teams

Start by raising awareness about the POPI Act in your organisation and how the process of collecting, storing, and processing personal information must be made secure and to be in tune with the POPI Act standards. Each employee, should sign a confidentiality agreement, after which they must undergo training in information security, privacy, and compliance. 

If you have any additional questions about Zoho's POPIA compliance, contact us on connect@dsltelecom.co.za 

Being able to classify, organise, track and find your documents when you need them can make a big difference for your productivity. Zoho WorkDrive gives you the freedom to organise and categorise your documents the way that works for you and your business structure, which ultimately minimises the time spent searching for documents, and accelerates data discovery and ultimately allows your team to be more efficient.

File notifications keep you informed about document changes, edits and more. With the large amount of documents being created and used in most organisations, it can be difficult to keep track of a particular file and its notifications. To simplify this, WorkDrive has introduced 'Follow Updates' to help you track individual file notifications.

Follow updates for important files and folders to stay up-to-date on all changes made by your collaborators. Get instant notifications for changes like version updates, renaming and comment actions on a file level and create, upload, add or remove actions on a folder level. 

Searching for and retrieving documents can be very time consuming. With the enhanced search feature in Zoho WorkDrive you can easily search for and find your WorkDrive files in seconds. Search using the file or folder names or with document keywords. WorkDrive now supports Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Object Detection to broaden the scope of the searches and accelerate data discovery. Now you can add an additional OCR search language for your files in WorkDrive. In addition to your default language, you can choose an OCR language for searching text within images.

We all know time is money and therefore, using this feature will decrease the time you spend manually looking for certain documents. Now you can locate the desired folders within seconds which is way more productive.

Work better and faster with your pre-made templates and standardise document formats across your organisation. Using this feature allows you to customise and create preset document layouts that help you create files with unique settings such as style, design and formatting, including the default or primary content. 

Using templates and document layouts in Zoho WorkDrive makes it much easier and faster when creating documents. Reworking your documents/spreadsheets for every project or proposal wastes valuable time and money. Instead, focus on content and completing tasks.