The ultimate guide for telecom e-commerce: explaining the three key drivers for a telco’s success in achieving digitization goals.
However, this is easier said than done. The unique complexities of the telco industry make achieving these goals challenging.
By the end of this article, you’ll understand the three key drivers of telco e-commerce success that provide the basis to becoming a digital telco in today’s market, and how you can apply this at your own company.
What are the 3 Key Telecom E-commerce Drivers?
Why are the 3 Key Telecom E-commerce Drivers so important?
1. Traffic Generation
Driving traffic to your e-commerce website is the first step to generating sales. This involves attracting new potential customers, but also existing customers that are visiting your website for service or renewal purposes. The latter is a highly important moment to ensure customer loyalty through up- and cross-selling.
To do this in a highly competitive market, offering an extensive product assortment with personalized pricing is crucial for attracting and retaining customers. To address the complete market effectively, all niche products and brands need to be included in your product assortment as well.
2. Website Conversion
A well-designed website that offers an optimized and personalized customer journey is key to converting visitors into buyers. If the website is not optimized for conversion and retention, all the work that goes into generating traffic is worthless. If you invest heavily in attracting traffic but visitors land on a poorly designed page, you risk losing half of your potential buyers immediately. In e-commerce, especially within telcos, delivering a seamless and intuitive customer experience is non-negotiable.
3. Order Conversion
After ensuring the website is highly converting, the next critical step in the e-commerce journey is ensuring that customer orders can be activated seamlessly.
For telcos, this involves much more than just processing payments and shipping products. It includes complex steps such as configuring accounts, performing Know Your Customer (KYC) checks, signing (digital) contracts, and provisioning services—all while avoiding unnecessary friction for customers. For example, the current checkout process of telcos often has quite some friction, potentially causing order conversion rates to drop from 90% to 60%. Again, this drop can undo all the work that went into optimizing website conversion.
How to Optimize each E-commerce Driver to become a Digital Telco
Let’s take a closer look at each telecom e-commerce driver. What do you need to do to get it right? Why are you likely struggling with it thus far? And what can you achieve when you ensure all drivers work together seamlessly?
1. Traffic Generation
What Is Key To Get Right: Traffic generation involves leveraging various sources, including search engine advertising (SEA), search engine optimization (SEO), affiliate marketing, social media marketing, above-the-line (ATL) marketing, door-to-door sales, and retention campaigns.
Additionally, telcos must provide a wide range of products and services, including mobile devices, fixed/mobile connectivity, and all related products and services, with the ability to combine them as bundles to meet diverse customer needs.
Lastly, in combination with this, it is vital to have highly relevant landing pages that match what potential customers are searching for. For example, if a customer searches for an iPhone but hasn't decided on a specific model, direct them to a landing page where they can filter between all available iPhones. If they search for a specific iPhone model, send them directly to that model’s buying funnel.
Why This Is Difficult: Telcos often face stiff competition, making it more difficult to capture the attention of target customers. This makes it vital that the three points mentioned above are optimized.
However, this requires advanced tools and expertise, which many telcos lack, as traditional commerce software cannot support this. These solutions were not built for offering complex telecom product structures, preventing the ability for them to be offered in a bundled way. This is, for example, why telcos often find it difficult to offer a extensive range of products on the same website page, as it is very difficult to manage this within the existing setup.
2. Website Conversion
What Is Key To Get Right: When visitors land on the right page they are looking for, this page of course needs to be performant. Highly converting website pages make sure customers have all the information they need to make informed decisions, showcasing social proof to build trust, and providing clear calls to action so users know exactly what steps to take next. All of this needs to be done with a high performance speed as well, because fast page loading times are vital to website conversion.
E-commerce, though, is not about making one or two changes that will enhance conversion by 10%, but actually it is about improving thousands of small things that each boost conversion by 0,01%. A/B testing, for example, can quantify changes that improve performance.
Why This Is Difficult: Consistently optimizing each page by A/B testing what works best requires a lot of time and effort, and telcos often don’t know where to begin. Often, these systems are integrated separately from the commerce solution that telcos use. This is because many telcos are hindered by outdated or non telco-specific commerce platforms that cannot deliver the modern, user-friendly experiences customers expect.
This creates a double challenge: making changes within outdated systems is slow and costly due to paid change requests, and without proper testing, those changes often don’t deliver the desired results either.
Personalizing the customer journey requires sophisticated data analytics and integration across multiple systems—something that many telcos find challenging due to a fragmented IT infrastructure. For example, telco customers need to be able to see exactly what type of orders they are eligible to make (e.g. based on address, previous products purchased, etc.), which means commerce software needs to support this as well.
3. Order Conversion
What Is Key To Get Right: A smooth order conversion process requires telco-specific KYC, a fast and clear configurable checkout process (again providing social proof), and optimized order activation and fulfilment processes. Clear communication of all steps to guide the customer through this process is required. An there’s an added benefit of doing this: you gain the opportunity to increase margins through effective cross-selling and upselling.
In the end, the customer needs to have a perfect experience and needs to feel in control, in order for them to trust you and become loyal.
Why This Is Difficult: Telcos face unique challenges in order conversion because it requires connecting orders to back-end systems for eligibility checks, KYC, and activation. Legacy systems often lack the automation and integration needed to seamlessly handle these requirements, leading to errors or delays.
Additionally, balancing robust fraud prevention measures with a smooth customer journey is difficult, especially since telco-specific KYC solutions are hard to find. You can imagine that the steps should be very straight-forward for a 10-year customer upgrading their iPhone for their contract compared to a first-time customer buying an expensive phone on credit. This makes achieving a reliable and frictionless order conversion process hard for most telcos.
Gijs Nieboer (Commerce Expert at Gomibo Platforms): “Visitors have to go through several steps to go from a first visit to a successfully delivered order. In essence, it comes down to making each step a visitor or customer has to go through as easy as possible, so that someone does not drop out. Each step is an opportunity to differentiate yourselves from your competitors.”
How all E-commerce Drivers influence each other
It’s important not to see these drivers as individual concepts, since they all influence each other. To show the value you can gain from this, here’s an example based on a real-life situation.
Say you have the following current situation in terms of yearly numbers:
But what if you would make some small improvements in copywriting through A/B testing, leading to a 0.1% increase in website conversion? This seems very conservative in terms of an improvement, right?
This would be your new situation:
9,000 additional orders are generated from a very small improvement which was only 0,1% in website conversion. If you have an ARPU of $30, this means revenue is increased by $3,240,000 on a yearly basis.
Not only this, your Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA) has now also decreased, as your marketing costs are divided by 9,000 additional orders. This newly gained revenue you can, for example, now use to further invest in a new campaign for traffic generation, and the whole improvement process starts again.
As you can see, a very minimal change, which you can do many times in a year, already provides a lot of value. Making one improvement for one e-commerce driver allows you to create gains for all.
Jeroen Doorenbos (founder and CEO of the Gomibo Group): “The great thing about e-commerce is that you can clearly see results from the smallest of improvements. Each tiny change can impact the entire funnel, from the first touchpoint in traffic generation to the point of conversion. It is the ultimate gamification of your work.”
Why Traditional E-commerce Solutions do not support this for Telcos
So, if you are struggling to optimize your telco’s e-commerce journey, don’t worry, everybody in the industry has this challenge. Traditional e-commerce platforms were originally built for companies selling physical items, not for the unique needs of the telecom industry.
As a result, they often fail to meet telecom-specific requirements, particularly when it comes to supporting the many different product combinations that are required (both in the product catalog and on the website front-end), integration with back-end systems, complicated eligibility rules, activation processes, and KYC processes. Telecom commerce goes beyond selling physical products like smartphones—it involves complex processes such as managing service bundles, configuring contracts, and activating services.
Additionally, since telcos often maintain different brands to capture the entire market demand (e.g. premium and budget segments), these brands would need new (commerce) systems, further adding to the complexity and costs.
Traditional platforms lack the flexibility and telco-specific functionality required to handle the intricate customer journeys that are a fundamental part of telecom operations. This results in the need to hugely customize these platforms, which in turn decreases the time to market of new products, and makes improvements to the website become a lot more time-consuming and expensive.
Why Telcos Need Telecom-Specific Commerce Software
To succeed in e-commerce, telcos need a commerce solution that was built specifically for the complexities of the telecommunications industry. Getting e-commerce right is hard, as it requires consistent improvements and it takes many years to obtain this knowledge.
The ideal solution should already offer a highly converting telco customer journey out-of-the-box, with further possibilities for configuration and enhancements. It needs to be able to integrate seamlessly with current core IT systems, simplify the customer journey, and automate the complex processes inherent to the industry. Such a platform must enable telcos to efficiently manage their extensive product portfolios and deliver a consistent and personalized customer experience.
As Gomibo Platforms, we contribute to this cause by offering a telco-specific e-commerce solution that integrates with the existing IT core that your telco has in place. With Gomibo’s platform, the complexity of your customer journeys and customer experience is already figured out, designed, and ready for you to configure. Our solution has been built through decades of hands-on telecom industry experience. It has been battle-tested by millions of customers, meaning we have carried out thousands of A/B tests to optimize it.
What product combinations make most sense for customers to be able to filter through? At what point in the customer journey should visitors be able to conduct an eligibility check? Should you show your service descriptions in MBs or GBs for higher conversion? We have tested it, many times.
As we have gone through all of these complexities ourselves, we have optimized our solution throughout the years, allowing us to provide a seamless digital experience. Our users rate the platform with an average of 9.4 out of 10, and our Net Promoter Score (NPS) is 67. This means that not only do we believe it works, but our telco end customers agree.
Offer all complex product combinations in a bundled way, ensure a highly converting website with fast loading times, and deliver fast and reliable service your customers—all while minimizing the operational burdens that typically slow you down. This enhances your digital customer experience and sales, while also decreasing IT costs, as many functionalities that would otherwise need to be custom built are already included, hugely increasing your telco’s flexibility.
Conclusion
To stay ahead of today’s telecom market, getting e-commerce right is crucial. Over the next decade, we foresee digital telcos being the front-runners of the industry, as they can adapt quickly to market demands and innovate faster than ever before. Our experience shows that telcos adopting this proactive approach to e-commerce are already seeing double-digit improvements in digital sales, customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
To achieve this, telcos must focus on the optimizing these three key e-commerce drivers in their business operations: traffic generation, website conversion, and order conversion. Implementing these effectively, however, requires more than a generic e-commerce platform—it demands a solution built specifically for the telecommunications industry, as well as extensive knowledge and experience in this domain. Gomibo Platforms is here to help telcos navigate these challenges and drive success in the digital era.
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