Data-Driven decisions: How local businesses can leverage technology against aggregators and marketplace

Are you a local business owner feeling squeezed by big aggregators and online marketplaces? You're not alone. A recent survey found that 43% of small businesses struggle to collect and analyze customer data effectively 57% of small business owners say online marketplaces are a threat to their survival. But technology can empower you to fight back.

By collecting customer data, tracking purchase patterns, and leveraging analytics, you can make smarter decisions, create personalized offerings, foster loyalty, and compete with far larger competitors.

This blog will explore practical ways you can use data to strengthen your business against the aggregators and marketplaces aiming to dominate your industry.

Local businesses are losing control and visibility

Aggregators like UberEats and Amazon Marketplace have put local businesses like you in a tough spot. They have total control over their digital order flow and customer data. You have zero visibility over your customers. This leaves you struggling to build direct relationships or even fully understand your customers.

Aggregators control the customer relationship

Aggregators dominate the digital experience. They own the customer relationship from discovery to purchase and beyond. A neighborhood pizzeria may receive 100s of orders via Grubhub.

But all interactions happen in the food delivery software and data flow through it. And not through the restaurant directly. This means you lose visibility into key details like order frequency, items purchased and total spending of top customers.

Harder to understand customer behavior

Also, once a customer begins ordering through a third-party site, it becomes exponentially harder for you to market your brand to them directly.

For example, if you run a cafe and use DoorDash to get new customers online. If you are unable to entice DoorDash diners back to your online food delivery software and loyalty program, you will miss opportunities to tailor offers, update them on new menu launches or address poor experiences quickly.

Reduced brand visibility

By encouraging your customers to engage primarily through their platforms, aggregators and marketplaces reduces awareness of the actual local brand.

Think of it this way. You run a bakery. You may spend years building loyalty on third-party marketplaces but you will never have your brand visibility. This ultimately reduces brand visibility and control over the customer lifecycle.

Harness your own customer data

Fighting back starts with taking back control of your customer data. With the right online order management software, you can capture every order detail even from 3rd-party services. Explore more on how you can harness your customer data below.

Collect order histories and customer details

Imagine you run a pizza shop. You have a pizza order and delivery management software to easily manage your business. You can track data of your customers to identify more frequent customers who order takeout 3 or more times per week.

Understanding these VIPs allows you to enroll them in a special loyalty rewards program for additional discounts or freebies to incentivize ongoing orders.

Track purchase patterns over time

Tracking the demand spikes of the orders gives you the data to know when to increase staff. For example, at Christmas time or the new year in December, bakeries and other stores are overloaded with foot traffic and online orders.

With the bakery management software, you as a bakery owner can come to know what items are sold the most during the festive season, so you can make it in more quantity to avoid losing sales.

Moreover, you will also come to know the number of staff members to increase to address the traffic online and offline.

Identify your best/most loyal customers

Advanced data also reveals your VIP customers. A local butcher can pinpoint the high-margin corporate accounts ordering premium cuts regularly and ensure they receive special care.

The meat order and delivery management software provides the insights, but you can leverage it to maintain the customer relationship.

Use data to make smart business decisions

The key to success lies in leveraging data intelligently and making data-driven decisions. The data not only helps you in making smart decisions but also in competing with aggregators and marketplaces. Let us know in detail below.

Adjust staffing to match busiest days/times

Consider you are a restaurant owner and you are using restaurant management software. With it, you can identify the busiest days and nights. You can access the same current data in the future when it becomes history. Based on this data, you can ensure that you have adequate staff during peak periods while avoiding overstaffing during slower times.

Refine menus and offerings based on popularity

Online ordering and delivery management software can help you refine your menus and offerings based on your customer preferences and popularity. Meanwhile, you can also monitor which items are selling best and which may not be performing as well.

With this information, they can make informed decisions about what to keep on the menu and what to remove or change. This can help you to improve your customer satisfaction and increase sales.

Target promotions to customer segments

By analyzing your customer data, such as purchase history and demographics, online ordering software for restaurants can help you identify the buying patterns and preferences of your customers.

You can collect the data, make a group of people ordering the same items, and do the targeted promotions. This way you can increase sales, promote brand loyalty, and improve overall customer satisfaction.

Set optimal pricing based on demand

The food ordering software for restaurants helps you set optimal pricing based on demand by implementing dynamic pricing strategies.

By analyzing historical data and customer behavior from the software, you can predict future demand and adjust prices accordingly. This not only maximizes revenue but also helps you to maintain your customer satisfaction.

By the way, know that - Local businesses that use data-driven marketing see a 5-15% increase in sales productivity instantly! (source)

Build direct customer relationships

While aggregators and marketplaces like Uber and Amazon excel at scale and convenience, you can build direct customer relationships with online ordering and delivery management software development. See how you can leverage the software and build direct customer relationships.

Offer loyalty programs

Offering loyalty programs can be a great way to attract and retain customers for online businesses. With the right software, you can create and offer loyalty programs to your customers.

Some of the benefits of using loyalty programs include increased customer retention, higher sales and revenue, and the ability to gather valuable customer data.

Know that: More than half (51%) were likely to use an app that offered reward points.

Send targeted communications

Based on the order history, you can communicate with the targeted customers. You can send personalized messages based on specific criteria such as buying patterns, customer demographics, and more.

With this feature, you can easily manage your customer relationships and keep your customers informed throughout the entire order process.

Provide personalized recommendations

The software allows you to provide personalized product recommendations, promotional offers, and delivery options based on the customer’s previous orders, search history, and preferences.

This also helps you increase customer loyalty, improve sales, and reduce customer service calls.

90% of leading marketers said marketing personalization significantly contributed to profitability (Google)

Compete on convenience and service

Apart from the price, there are other key factors that you can compete on and attract more new customers. Offering convenience and the best service are 2 of them. With the help of technology, you can easily compete in the market. Check it out below how.

Streamline ordering and delivery

Customers order from those who offer convenience. And in today’s digital landscape, the convenience is online ordering and offering on-demand delivery at your customer's doorstep.

With the delivery management software, you can streamline your entire operations in a single chain. This reduces your burden of managing orders and deliveries separately.

Integrate the all-in-one smart ordering and delivery management software in your offline store and streamline your ordering and delivery.

Offer seamless omnichannel experience

The grocery builds loyalty by welcoming familiar faces and knowing a long-time customer always wants this, this, and this item. A personalized touch and staff recognition go much further than the convenience a faceless grocery delivery app provides.

Little gestures to surprise and delight regulars keep customers coming back directly rather than through anonymous aggregators.

Provide high-touch customer service

Allow your customers to receive immediate assistance with any issues or questions they may have. Provide an enhanced level of interaction between the customer and the support team with chatbots, phone support, email support, and live video chat.

Meanwhile, providing product expertise ensures customers get the right recommendations every time no matter the channel.

Important note: Retailers who offer tailored experiences win big, receiving 20% higher NPS scores and encouraging 40% of shoppers to spend more than planned.

Highlight your local presence and commitment

And while third-party apps like UberEats and Amazon minimize your brand visibility, you can spotlight your identity, history and community roots across touchpoints. You can showcase your connection to the community and build trust with your customers.

Additionally, with the help of technology, you can offer special deals and promotions to customers who order from within their local area.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that aggregators and marketplaces make it harder to run local businesses. And they do it through unmatched scale, digital dominance and control of data.

But by leveraging technology to harness customer intelligence, efficiency improvements and sharper decisions, you can personalize relationships and highlight your uniqueness to successfully compete alongside single-minded giants.

If you are operating a business offline and want access to your customer data, you should go for the white-label online ordering and delivery management software. It is almost the clone of UberEats, DoorDash, Zomato, and more.

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