Boutir: Optimizing Online Business through Mobile

Demonstrating business expertise through social media has changed the marketing and communication scenario. Today, enterprises are utilizing social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp to grow audience and customer base—building brands in a strategic way. Though companies rely or sell their products on social media, the challenge of reaching and targeting the right customers has become a demanding task for any business. Recognizing the trend and providing a mobile-commerce platform to customers for selling and for shopping online, is Boutir. The firm integrates online business with social media— leveraging social selling through mobile devices.

‘Boutir – Online Store Builder’, the e-commerce app launched by Boutir, allows its customers to finish their entire business process on mobile devices, from taking pictures of the product, editing photo to uploading the products. “Merchants can create branded online storefronts in minutes and our social marketplace allows them to connect with customers they would not have otherwise reached. Moreover, our payments are worry-free for our buyers and sellers, as we partners with secure online payment gateways PayPal and Stripe,” says Eric Ng, CEO, Boutir. The Snapsell feature of the app allows customers to take a picture with their smartphone’s camera eradicating the face-to-face meeting to complete a sale. The feature enables the customer to upload the product’s image through Boutir’s cloud-based server then the customers receive a link by Boutir through social media. Merchants can also import product photos from Instagram post or Dropbox. Picking up the link, the customer can browse the product’s image and related details and create product pitch. Storing the images on cloud infrastructure, Boutir keeps the original format of the image to serve it to different clients.

The product's image uploaded by the customer is automatically transformed to different resolutions based on the different screen size of the consumer’s mobile device.

Boutir targets not only the consumers but also the merchants by providing a highly efficient way to build their brand and bring relevant traffic to their website. In partnership with small retailers, Boutir helps them to start their online business store and test the market efficiently. At the same time, Boutir also provides an Enterprise version for Retail or Wholesales group. For instance, MaBelle, a Hong Kong-based diamonds jewelry brand, wanted to further digitalize their business. They empower their staff and clients to establish their own online stores, personalized with MaBelle products tailored for their customers, communicate and complete the transactions with their customers online through secure payment methods and gateways, and fulfill the order through their retail and partners stores at place and time convenient to customers. Boutir helped MaBelle to set up hundreds of online stores for their staff and clients and use the mobile app to sell their products using their network and customer base. Boutir comforted the retail group with enterprise solution increasing their revenue. The traffic on social media platform is more as it comes from the front page or customer’s friends, so those people already trust the fellow or the merchant. “Since the traffic comes from the trusted sources, the conversion rate is high whereas, in traditional e-commerce platform, one does not know the seller and therefore does not have enough confidence to buy the product online,” expounds Eric.

In future, Boutir will be seen adding the instant message integration and Chatbot feature to help merchants to generate order more easily. Integrating Chatbot solution through the Facebook Messenger can effortlessly bring together retailers and their respective customers and hence, rectifying the customer queries. “Chatbot can help to answer customer queries and can assist them to generate order through the Facebook Messenger. Once the consumers confirm the orders they can click the pay button and then finish the transaction,” concludes Eric.