Taking Your Business Online In 2022 With Blink

The year 2022 has walked in with the star-spangled potential for online businesses. We, at Blink, strive for growth – not just for ourselves but also for our business partners. In that sense, your growth story should ideally report on an upward trajectory. 

Last year, we disrupted the MENAP market on multiple forefronts. Thanks to an aggressive stance on hyper-growth, our clients from the retail and food & beverage industries fulfilled more than 1 million orders. This growth spectrum is associated with 100+ brands spanning multiple outlets and a staggering 400,000+ satisfied customers.

Now that we are at the start of 2022, we plan to enable clients’ online business scalability through a combination of a quick commerce technology stack and brand-new innovative solutions.

2022 Is The Time To Strike For Your Online Business

Although the COVID-19 situation has been contained to a great extent, businesses worldwide aren’t out of the woods yet. During the last two years, many industries had to transition to digital platforms due to operability concerns. This transition ensued a ripple-like effect across all sorts of markets. 

The restaurant industry, in particular, shifted the majority of its online business to quick commerce-enabled platforms. Signing up for a vendor account with a restaurant order system management company. For those name-brands looking to scale rapidly, the three main core systems of a restaurant order management platform need to comprise

• Sales 
• Marketing
• Customer Data Analytics

Blink streamlines all the verticals above through quick commerce enablement technology. We have integrated marketing solutions, a dynamic sales report dashboard, and a powerful fleet management system for fast order fulfillment. After such a business model, each restaurant has been able to ramp up its overall customer experience. 

As we gradually move forward in this new year, we wanted to shed some insight into the importance of an internet-based restaurant management system for your online business. As the business community has already shifted to the digitized modes of serving online food and retail order customers, the timing couldn’t be more perfect for you to scale things. 

Statista experts suggest that e-commerce sales will hit a net worth of $6.3 trillion by 2023. Since people are looking to shop online for food and just about anything else, restaurants have better chances of banking on the branding factor. 

The only caveat in operating online is that many existing and new business owners aren’t aware of how to manage different operations. For instance, restaurant marketing is a unique vertical, which sometimes overlaps with PR and other branding campaigns. Then again, there’s so much marketing-related data with enough potential to help you shift the next gear towards the hyper-growth phenomenon if you were to analyze data-driven metrics. 

If You Haven’t Shifted To Online Business Mode, Give It a Thought

Taking your business online in 2022 with Blink or any other quick commerce enablement platform comes with good reasoning. 

• There are 51% of Americans who have used internet access to order food online. Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, this percentage is up to 71% for users scattered across the region. 26% of the population in the UAE orders food at least once a week. 
• Customers spend over $50 per order when using online food ordering apps. 
• During the last two years, the contactless delivery option was one of the most sought-after delivery modes. This fact isn’t related to business scalability, but it does illustrate that there’s always room for flexibility and outside of box ideas. 
• According to the National Restaurant Association, restaurant apps or online food order app users need to have multiple technology options. 
• Revenue in the Online Food Delivery segment is projected to reach US$312,153m in 2022.
• Revenue is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2022-2025) of 8.74%, resulting in a projected market volume of US$401,391m by 2025.
• The market’s largest segment is Platform-to-Consumer Delivery, with a projected market volume of US$169,193m in 2022.
• The average revenue per user (ARPU) in the Online Food Delivery segment is projected to amount to US$154.31 in 2022.
• In the Online Food Delivery segment, the number of users is expected to amount to 2,638.1m by 2025.
• User penetration in the Online Food Delivery segment will be 26.6% in 2022.

These days, customers expect that food ordering is a much-needed facility that should be available 24/7. Any online business that hasn’t already shifted to digital platforms should consider doing that. 

Now, if we talk about some known facts related to Deliveroo, JustEat, Foodpanda, or DoorDash, the growth story is obvious. These online businesses did take a jolt or two during the initial phase of the pandemic, but they all experienced gradual growth due to online business operations. 

Similarly, if we talk about the arts and entertainment industry, Netflix and other companies witnessed phenomenal growth because more and more people were looking to watch flicks during the brief lockout period. 

Netflix and Hotstar improved their bandwidth handling capacity to cater to a slew of an audience that wasn’t there before. 

Blink is the ideal platform for you to run your online restaurant or retail business. Due to the quick commerce enablement factor, there are many moving parts on the Blink platform. For example, Blink is customizable to suit your brand requirements. The dynamic dashboard based on Microsoft Power Bi reports acts like a portal to optimize customers’ food + shopping experience. 

Some of the main highlights of the Blink platform are:

• Direct engagement with your customers because you own your  customer data
• Seamless and flexible payment options for your customers
• Innovative marketing experiences through integrated backend solutions
• Access to valuable business analytics such as low and high selling items, top-performing branches, and loyal customers to drive business decisions 

Critical Steps to Launching Your Food Business Online In 2022

We are sure that by now, you are excited to be part of the online business crowd in 2022. Whether it’s a restaurant you are looking to digitize or a retail business, here are some of the most important steps to consider before going all in.

Plan

Craft a strategy related to who your online business audience will be. The best part about operating an online business, regardless of whether it’s a restaurant, is the mobility associated with changing the direction of marketing campaigns. 

You can target different keywords, niche audiences, locations, and vice versa. To scale and optimize your marketing KPIs. Everything is reachable, and long-term goals no longer seem like a far-fetched fantasy.

Therefore, planning is important – and that too, about different aspects of your food and beverage business. 

• How will you create and optimize your online food ordering menu? 
• How will you accept online food orders?
• What does your overall marketing strategy look like?
• How do you plan on handling your deliveries?

Questions like the ones we have stated above are something you should plan around before moving your business online. 

Launch

This is the part where you launch your online business. If it’s a restaurant that you’re already running, some of the main questions that you should be able to answer are:

• How will you accept online food orders?
• Which online ordering platform do you need to partner with?

With Blink, you can register your business as a hypergrowth platform due to the quick commerce enablement. We already talked about it. It’s an amalgamation of different technologies that allow our restaurant and retail side clients to fulfill orders quickly. As a result, each online business can grow at an advanced pace.

Support

This is the part of your online business where you need to maintain a delightful customer experience.

Ideally, your customers should be happy to revisit your online food or retail business app. Take customer feedback into account, and adopt a proactive approach to mitigate any service-related issues. Maintaining a healthy relationship is important now more than ever. It takes a handful of unhappy customers to start posting negative reviews about your restaurant or retail business these days.

In other words, sales, services, and marketing are the important business factors that need to be accounted for when running things online.

Over To You

Since we are at the start of 2022, there’s a lot more to painting different kinds of growth stories for online businesses. Having said that, how was 2021 for your online business? Did you learn any lessons valuable enough to share with our readers?

If so, feel free to use the comments section below to share your side of the story. 

Good luck.