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Businesses that can only operate out of fixed locations are vulnerable and may soon be a thing of the past. For many Filipino businesses, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic was proof that a failure to properly transition to an eCommerce model could prove to be fatal to an organization.
Thankfully, many businesses in the Philippines had long started pivoting towards online models as a way to reach a wider market. Those that had emphasized remote collaboration and implemented work-from-home policies beforehand were not only better able to weather the crisis, but quite a few also thrived during this time.
Maya’s vision to empower everyone to be able to buy anything, anywhere has proved crucial for the success of many organizations since 2007. Subsequent events have only underscored why the entrepreneurs of today should be able to run and grow their business wherever they and their customers may be.
However, managing a business remotely has different challenges that you might not have previously experienced or anticipated. Drawing from our years of helping Filipino startups, here are 12 proven ideas that will make running your organization remotely much simpler.
The point of having any business — whether offline and online — is to make money. This will be a lot harder to do if your customers have problems purchasing your items. And it’s not enough for a serious online business to just rely on direct messaging and social media pages forever.
As soon as your customer base grows and your sales increase in volume, you might find that you simply don’t have the time to chat, call, or email everyone who wants to buy something. You’ll find yourself losing sales simply because you can’t help customers in time. Invoicing errors will also start to accumulate with any manual system, which can bring its own problems, including potential issues with tax compliance.
Checkout by Maya Enterprise and Maya Digital Invoice are easy-to-implement online payment solutions designed to meet the needs of today’s Filipino entrepreneurs. Checkout by Maya Business gives you a secure method of accepting major credit and debit cards through Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento while Maya Digital Invoice simplifies creating invoices and sending them to customers wherever they are in the world. If you want to make it easy for customers to buy from your store, these are the solutions for you.
If you have an eCommerce site or if you’re planning to build one, you’re probably already familiar with the most popular eCommerce platforms. In the Philippines, Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento are the most popular, by far.
Each one has its strengths and weaknesses. WooCommerce for example, works extremely well with the WordPress content management system, making it a good fit for small and microbusinesses. Shopify is known for its simplicity and extremely wide availability of themes and localization options. Magento is known for its excellent mobile options and easy-to-understand content management system.
Among these choices and others we haven’t mentioned, none of them can necessarily be considered better or worse for your needs. Each of them has their unique benefits and drawbacks, depending on your organization’s needs.
Whatever major platform you choose, Maya has plugins that will simplify your checkout process. Supercharge your eCommerce platform with Maya plugins for WooCommerce, Shopify, or Magento.
A growing number of Filipinos are starting to turn to alternatives to cash, simply because of the convenience. Maya’s pioneering cashless payment options include the Maya ONE system and Maya QR.
The Maya One device integrates seamlessly into your point of sale system and allows customers to use a wide variety of payment options. The device is portable and allows the use of debit, credit, and prepaid cards. Dip, tap, and swipe cards are all accepted.
For mobile transactions, Maya QR is a mobile cashless solution that allows any customer with a smartphone to make contactless payments instantly. All a Maya app user has to do is enter the price amount and scan the QR code to finish the transaction, making this the ideal labor-saving solution for businesses with a physical location.
Broadly defined, automation is the removal of active human control in a process. Automation is desirable in repetitive tasks, of which there are many in most business operations. Investing in more automation ultimately means you need fewer people to complete different tasks, which makes it easier to keep your business small, agile, and ready to move as needed.
While Filipinos may tend to think of “automation” from a manufacturing standpoint, manufacturing processes are not the only ones that could be automated. Maya’s Checkout plugins, for instance, keep you from having to actively interact with customers to facilitate their purchases, which means you don’t need to have someone acting as a cashier at the point-of-sale. Customers can buy from your store 24/7 and during holidays, even when you’re out of the country, on vacation.
There are other types of automation as well. For example, form auto-fills, employee performance tracking, and even applicant screening can be automated.
Depending on the type of business you have, automating these otherwise fiddly tasks can free you and your employees to do other important tasks elsewhere. If you find yourself doing a task over and over again, it may be worth checking out how you can automate it.
ERPs or Enterprise resource planning software helps integrate your business processes, allowing data in one process to be immediately available in another.
For example, you can set up your ERP so that each sale is automatically reflected in your inventory in real-time, speeding up audits, and reducing the potential for pilferage. The same sales data can also be automatically made available to your accountant and the inventory data can be used to trigger orders, eliminating the need and expense of a large warehouse. The same system can also be used to provide immediately accessible data for your marketing, R&D, or customer service operations. They can even help your HR and payroll departments monitor the performance of individual employees in real-time.
The possibilities of ERPs are virtually limitless, and businesses use their choice of ERP software in different ways. They can vastly reduce the manpower needed to run a business effectively and allow organizations to act on new information, rather than having to wait for the end of the month or the quarter for the reports to come in. Most importantly, modern ERPs now have the option to be cloud-based rather on-site, which is great for entrepreneurs that want to be able to run a business anytime, anywhere.
As your team grows, you’ll find that it may become a complex task simply keeping track of everyone’s progress on various projects. This is difficult enough if you all work together in a conventional office. Keeping people in different parts of the world on the same page is another challenge altogether.
Thankfully, there are plenty of cloud-based project tracking solutions for businesses of every size and budget. Trello, JIRA, Asana, and Basecamp are just some of the most widely-used project tracking apps used by Filipino startups today. Google’s G Suite also has collaboration features that are perfect for smaller businesses with employees working in different geographical areas.
If your business sells physical products it will need a reliable third-party logistics provider to deliver them. While there are plenty of low-cost logistics providers out there, they don’t all deliver the same performance. This can be crucial as your choice of service provider has a direct impact on your customer’s overall experience and satisfaction. Fast delivery times and safe handling can do a lot to increase customer delight while slow service and bad handling may make your customers think twice about ordering from you again.
Be sure to match the logistics providers you choose with both your business’s needs and the type of service you want to deliver. Try to choose ones that are familiar with your industry and the geographical area you are serving. You can also give your customers a choice of logistics solutions to better target both time-sensitive and cost-conscious customers.
Even though you may have Filipino employees and plant assets in the Philippines, that does not mean that you have to restrict yourself to the local market. Maya is your solution for simplifying cash transfers from abroad.
Previously, one of the biggest barriers to small businesses doing business with foreign customers was all the red tape that was involved with the cross-border transfer and acceptance of cash. The process of banks processing credit or debit cards on behalf of a business is called “acquiring”.
The acquiring process becomes even more convoluted when you account for foreign exchange rates, interbank fees, international trade agreements, and other complications associated with sending and receiving money from foreign sources. This complexity meant only larger businesses were able to regularly do business with foreign customers.
Thankfully, those days are over. Maya helps Filipino entrepreneurs level the playing field, offering a straightforward acquiring solution for small businesses that want to tap into a global market.
In most cases, repeat customers generate the most income for a business. You can’t increase repeat business if you don’t take steps to build a lasting relationship with your customers. How you do this depends on your business but it’s crucial to think beyond that first sale.
The best way to do this is to deliver a better experience than a customer might expect. In the context of eCommerce, a “better experience” often boils down to making things easier and more intuitive for the customer. This means the classic “PM for price” line many Filipino online stores use may not be the best strategy for delivering true customer delight and satisfaction.
Delighted customers will help do your marketing for you, which means you won’t have to be as active or spend as much when it comes to advertising. On the other hand, annoyed customers (perhaps because you forced them to go through a complex payment process?) are far less likely to buy from you again — if at all.
Investing in customer relationships systematically will, over time, reduce complaints, improve your marketing and sales performance, and help you rely less on expensive advertising.
You can make continuous improvements to customer experience easier and scalable by investing in customer relations management (CRM) tools. CRM tools help track your interactions including customer complaints and comments that may help you better identify what it is exactly your customers want and what they keep coming back for.
Whether it’s logistics, IT, or graphic design, outsourcing has started to become the norm among newer Filipino businesses for good reason. Outsourcing things that you only do infrequently or have no expertise in usually ensures you get better quality labor at a lower cost. More importantly, it means you can keep your core team smaller and more agile.
Having a smaller core team offers several advantages. The most obvious is lower relative labor costs. But even more compelling is that smaller, tight-knit teams are usually able to communicate better and react faster to new challenges to the business. This ability to pivot to new directions within moments rather than days has, time and again, allowed smaller businesses to outmaneuver and outperform much larger competitors. Smaller teams are also less of a hassle to manage remotely or move to a new office, should the need arise.
It seems that every year, you’ll find so-called experts declaring search engine optimization (SEO) to be an outdated practice in the time of big data and frequent search algorithm changes. Every year, they’re proven wrong.
The basic principles of SEO have implications that go far beyond simply getting your website found on Bing and Google. Virtually every social media site and ecommerce portal has its own internal search engine and understanding how people look for things can have a major impact on your marketing efforts.
By diligently applying good SEO practices to everything you put out on the internet, you’re ensuring that you won’t have to work as hard just to be found. In a time where online retail continues to grow despite a global recession, this is worth keeping in mind.
These days, it’s not just businesses that are literally on the move — customers are now highly mobile as well. It’s a mistake to think of business in terms of the traditional brick and mortar store, where both you and the customers have to be in the same geographic location to complete a transaction. Virtually every Filipino today has access to the internet through a smartphone or some other mobile device. And not only are you now able to run your business anytime, anywhere, but your customers are also able to find you, buy your products, and leave reviews for the world to see “anytime, anywhere” as well.
Given that more than half the internet traffic in the Philippines is from mobile devices, it’s important to optimize your ecommerce processes for mobile users. Maya’s payment solutions have mobile users in mind, making them your best choice for tapping a growing market.
The Philippines and the rest of the world are rapidly moving from geographically bound habits in both commerce and leisure. If we so choose, we can be more dynamic and more mobile than previous generations may have dreamed of. With partners like Maya, you’ll be better equipped to face the new challenges of a world that moves as it does business.
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Maya is powered by the country's only end-to-end digital payments company Maya Philippines, Inc. and Maya Bank, Inc. for digital banking services. Maya Philippines, Inc. and Maya Bank, Inc. are regulated by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.
www.bsp.gov.ph
