The rise of female entrepreneurs

This week we wanted to focus on an article that has caught our attention and made us proud to be a female-founded company. Startups.co.uk have published a piece online titled ‘Female entrepreneurs killing it in the UK start-up scene’. This is the kind of headline we like to see!

It runs through a list of some really great women who have spent the past few years building up their successful businesses and provides a small back story on how they thought of and developed their own companies. It’s an incredibly inspiring feature which highlights the issue of gender diversity and equality and highly praises the women who are still part of a small group leading the way in female entrepreneurship and being their own boss.

It is so important to show the younger generation of females that they too can create their own companies if they wish to. Not all successful and profitable businesses have to have a male at the helm. We think that what each and every woman in this article has achieved is great. We truly hope to see features like this being published more often, and with more women making waves in the world of business.

Check out the article for yourself HERE and get involved with the conversation on Twitter @smartzer.

Retail Systems Awards

We had some more great news this week, when we found out we’d been shortlisted for the Retail Systems Awards taking place in London this November.

We have been nominated for the Startup Company of the Year which is quite a title. So, fingers crossed!

This is the eleventh year that the awards have been held celebrating excellence and innovation in the retail sector. The shortlist is made up of retailers and technology suppliers who are leading the way in areas such as mobile, online, payments, loyalty and personalisation.

As always, it’s incredibly flattering to be included amongst some great companies also doing their bit to change the face of retail. We will be sure to keep you all updated with the result. You can follow us on Twitter @smartzer for daily updates, and check out @RetailSAwards for updates on the night.

How to reduce shopping cart abandonment

We thought we’d give a little shout out to our friends at Styla this week after reading their article on Actionable Tips to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment. This is a very real and current problem for fashion retail ecommerce, in fact as stated in the article “Shopping cart abandonment rate is as high as 68.63%". It’s a case of people almost becoming customers, but then not actually becoming customers.

Illustrated by a graph, the article clearly displays reasons why people leave a retailer’s website with “hidden and unexpected costs” appearing to be the key factor.

As well as advising numerous helpful ways to encourage buying; always show costs, offer free shipping and use more images, to name a few, another suggestion is to make content shoppable.

“...if your content is directly shoppable, i.e. if people can buy products directly from it, people can add items to their shopping carts right away - and as a result, buy more.”

Something that we noted and found really interesting is that by making your content interactive, you can also tick off other points made by Styla such as improve speed and be smart about CTA’s.

Overall, this is a really great article with some seriously useful tips that have been proven to work for some companies. With the abandonment rate being at almost 70%, it’s really important that all companies read this and take note. Don’t just settle for people browsing your product, adding it to basket and then changing their mind. Find the route of the problem, address it, and resolve it.

You can read the article for yourself HERE.