Imagine you are out shopping and find a small local shop selling a hand-carved bamboo pitcher that catches your attention. It’s beautiful, it’s handmade, and you immediately imagine using it in your kitchen. Then, like many shoppers in our digital age, you decide to go online to check if you can get it for less.

 As price-savvy consumers, it’s normal to want the lowest price, and most e-commerce stores run on an “unbeatable price” business model. But in this instance, a quick search brings you to the same product, and what you see surprises you.

Bamboo pitcher comparison between Flipkart and Kalpataru Trading, a Chennai-based boutique owned by Bhavani K., who recently took her brick & mortar store online with Zoho.

The same product at the major e-commerce store is actually more expensive than what the local store is charging! So, on the one hand, you’re probably happy the local store is cheaper so you can support them and still save money, but on the other hand, you probably wonder why. Isn’t online shopping supposed to be cheaper than shopping at brick-and-mortar stores? After all, the cost of running a brick-and-mortar store is usually much greater than an online store.

Cases like these may seem commonplace and trivial, especially amidst the increasing dependence on e-commerce during the pandemic. However, the story here is ironically not about the consumer, but rather about the small and micro business owners.

Because of the lack of a digital presence, most micro and small businesses in India rely heavily on selling through large e-commerce platforms like Flipkart and Shopify because of the sheer volume of customers they draw.

However, these small businesses are often unaware of the losses they incur from the drastic price variation, monthly charges, referral fees, and other fees they have to pay based on which services they choose.

According to a recent Reuters report, select foreign e-commerce platforms like Amazon do actively undercut micro and small retailers in India. Fortunately, with technology, micro, and small businesses can now compete with online retail giants through affordable technology and better adoption support.

At Zoho, we’re committed to supporting innovation and opportunity, which means we are also committed to helping small businesses to succeed both online and in our communities.

Debunking digital transition myths

f you’re a small business owner, how many times have you reconsidered a tech upgrade, either fearing the high cost or thinking the digital method wouldn’t work as well as your traditional process? If you have, don’t blame yourself.

Until recently, these have been the prevailing notions among small businesses regarding tech. On one hand, many expect digital transformation to be expensive, complex, and too difficult to manage without extensive tech experience or a programming degree.

On the other hand, cost-effective solutions are often considered a temporary fix, something to tide you over until you invest into “big tech,” which unfortunately illustrates the old saying, “you get what you pay for.”

The perception that you will have to sacrifice quality—unless you come to the table with a lot of money—has prevailed until recently as the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a rise in techno-optimism.

 As these “high-cost fallacies” unravel, the shift to SaaS has given small business owners access to important technology at affordable costs.

The cost of professionalism

Small businesses often hesitate over a digital transition, assuming that even a straightforward cloud-based operating system might have hidden costs too. This is a valid notion, given that most small businesses in India are accustomed to both legacy systems and large e-commerce platforms known for periodic maintenance investments or increasing annual costs.

 Fortunately, the benefits gained from transitioning to a SaaS e-commerce platform far outweigh these fears.

Let’s look at a local example. Bhavani K, who runs Kalpataru Trading, shifted her boutique from a Chennai-based brick and mortar only to an online storefront in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic with Zoho Commerce. She says, “One of the main elements of shifting online was the cost-effectiveness of the transition.”

After this switch to online, Bhavani K. was also able to convert small orders into bulk orders and integrate Zoho Mail into her business communication, helping her reach a wider audience while retaining the authenticity of her small business.

To read the full article please visit Zoho.com

Zoho One, our comprehensive platform of 45+ Zoho products and services, now has one more powerful addition: Orchestly. This addition is a business orchestration platform that helps automate workflows, enforce compliance, provide visibility, and cut out inefficiencies. Orchestly is the one place to view and track information flowing through the various apps of Zoho One, as well as third party applications.

Imagine a grand symphony orchestra comprising myriad instruments. There is much variety, ranging from gigantic tubas and trombones to tiny piccolos and bells, and yet when they follow a well-composed score and are guided by a skilled conductor, we hear harmony and beauty. How fantastic would it be if our business workflows could run this smoothly? With Orchestly, you can achieve harmony like this, no matter how complicated the process.

Let’s look at an everyday example of how a team might use Orchestly:

A marketing agency running on Zoho One, that builds websites for its clients, has the following workflow. The work begins with the team brainstorming ideas and options. This could happen in Connect groups, Cliq channels, or via face-to-face meetings. Once this is done, a content writer creates the content in Writer. This is reviewed and needs approval by an editorial team, who collaborate in the same Writer document. Next, the job moves to a central design team, using Desk to manage requests, and then to a development team which uses BugTracker to log issues and track progress. Finally, the content manager needs to review and okay the website before it can be delivered to the client.

Such workflows involving multiple systems within Zoho are common today. If the communication between the different teams is only done over email or calls, things can become chaotic and information can be lost. It can be challenging for the person responsible for this entire workflow to know where a particular job stands and where the bottlenecks lie. It can also be easy to accidentally bypass crucial steps, like the editorial review or content manager approval, with no one realizing in time. 

With Orchestly, the marketing agency could create a blueprint for the new website workflow with simple drag and drop options and no coding.

You can expose the above blueprint as a website request service in Orchestly. Now each new website request would create a new ‘job’ that would pass through the above predefined steps. 

The appropriate persons can be assigned to the different stages so that they (and they alone) can get alerted at the right time and spring to action. You can mandate actions, such as requiring the link to the Zoho Writer document to be attached when sending it to the editor. It is also possible to pull the relevant information from the various other systems involved (Connect, Cliq, Writer, Desk and BugTracker in this case) and display it in Orchestly. You can set up a service-level agreement (SLA) to have multiple levels of escalation if there are delays. You can configure auto-transitions to occur between the stages based on different conditions and, if needed, schedule them to occur after a set period of time. Out of the box reports give you insights on redundancies and hold-ups, or you can customize your own based on specific needs to help tune your workflows for optimum performance.

Our example here involves only Zoho One apps to illustrate the use case of a typical Zoho One user. However, teams currently use Orchestly to handle workflows involving third-party apps or even those handled via email. Similarly, it is used across various departments, including HR, Finance, IT, and Operations, and for many different processes, such as purchase approval, hiring, employee on-boarding, order processing, IT change management, and more.

 “I have been using this tool for the past 5 months and found it to be easily configurable to our organization’s workflows,” says Sibaprasad Senapati, an IT lead at India’s first corporate hospital and pioneer in the Indian healthcare industry, Apollo Hospitals. “I strongly recommend it to those who are struggling to streamline or ‘orchestrate’ the workflow in their organization.”

 Orchestly is available now to all Zoho One users at no extra cost. Furthermore, our enterprise solution experts can work closely with you to help map out your different business workflows with Orchestly. To find out more, just email us at support@orchestly.com.

Zoho One, the operating system for business, has just received a major update and we are overjoyed to share it with you.

Three new OS-level services, a new app and several other features … we continue to pack Zoho One with value for our customers. All the updates in this post will be included in Zoho One for free. Read on to find out more.

App usage on the rise

Before we get to the updates, we want to thank the 20,000+ customers worldwide, who are currently using the most expansive suite of cloud computing business apps anywhere.

We built Zoho One in keeping with our conviction that businesses prefer a tightly-integrated suite of apps and not a fleet of solutions from multiple vendors requiring complex and costly integrations.

Approximately 25 percent of Zoho One customers use more than 25 applications on the platform and more than 50 percent utilize beyond 16 applications.

The State of the OS  

Zoho One already packs several unmatched operating system level services, including Artificial Intelligence, Business Intelligence, Messaging, Search and more. These services span the platform making it powerful.

To this list, we are adding three services – Telephony, Single Sign-On and Provisioning. This makes the platform even more powerful and useful for enterprises that rely on Zoho One to run their entire business.

Telephony integrator

Typically, telephony systems in businesses work in a silo and not closely integrated with other apps. Our telephony service integrator PhoneBridge will help Zoho One user integrate their telephony service to work across all the apps in the Zoho One ecosystem. Once enabled, customers will be able to make calls from within apps, get contextual information on incoming calls, automatically log calls and set reminders on missed calls

Single Sign-on

The new Single Sign-On service from Zoho One will allow customers to integrate any third-party applications onto their Zoho account. We are launching Zoho SSO with support to around 50+ third-party applications and will add more in the coming months. In addition to other MFA (multi-factor authentication) choices, Zoho One admins can now enforce YubiKey as an additional layer of security.

App provisioning 

Provisioning of apps and access management is critical to businesses. We have been offering provisioning and app management to Zoho One admins for the 45+ apps in our catalog. We are now extending it further – to custom apps created using Zoho Creator as well as external apps available through Zoho Marketplace. Admins can now create groups or set conditions to provide access to apps, monitor app usage and generate reports on resource utilization.

Orchestly for workflow management

Our new app, Orchestly offers code-free workflow management service where end users can create complex workflows using a simple drag and drop interface. This service targets business users who cannot code, but still want to create and optimize cross-departmental workflows like purchase approvals, content publishing, asset management, and onboarding.

Zoho Sign with blockchain-based time-stamping

Zoho Sign, our digital signature app, now offers an additional level of document verification through blockchain-based timestamping. The feature has been enabled through an integration with Ethereum, the globally-accepted open source platform. When someone digitally signs a document using Zoho Sign, an Ethereum transaction takes place in the background where the hash of the signed document is added in the transaction notes

The mission continues

We launched Zoho One launched with 35+ apps and today it has over 45+ apps, more OS-wide services and several other improvements. We continue to offer it at the same price point at which we launched. We have also made conscious efforts to make the platform easy to use across the spectrum – someone with no coding knowledge will still be able to extract substantial value out of it as would someone with professional coding experience.

It is our mission to democratize the use of business apps so that the latest, most sophisticated technology is available in an easy-to-use form at an unbelievably affordable price. That will continue.

When we launched Zoho One we said we’d be delivering unmatched value to customers. Today we’re happy to announce the addition of two new apps to Zoho One, taking the total number of apps included in the suite to 40. These new apps—Zoho Flow and PageSense—accompany our other recent additions—Zoho Sprints, Sign, and Notebook. These five recent additions bring an incredible range of new functionality to the Zoho One suite at no additional cost.

First, A Note on Value

Below I’m going to give a brief overview of each app we’ve recently added to Zoho One. But first I want to take a moment to talk about value.

When you pay for an online service, you’ll see features get added. You might see part of the app get re-designed, or maybe even a complete refresh. If you look at the Zoho Blog you’ll find plenty of these types of announcements—the recent revamps of Zoho Sites and Zoho Campaigns come to mind.

But it’s not every day that you see a post telling you about five apps. Five apps that are suddenly included in your current Zoho One subscription, at no additional cost, that you can deploy to your employees and use to improve your business. How often do you see something like this? Have you ever?

Zoho Flow: Integrate Your Apps

Many businesses depend on multiple apps working together to operate efficiently. But getting apps to work together is often challenging, expensive, and frustrating. With Zoho One we’ve sought to simplify integration to boost your organization’s productivity while simultaneously reducing your costs and risk. Zoho Flow is the next exciting step in our pursuit.

Zoho Flow is an integration platform that helps you connect apps to automate tasks and increase workflow efficiency. Flow currently integrates with over 100 apps, giving you more flexibility for connecting Zoho One apps with each other, or it can be used to connect third-party apps whether you use Zoho apps or not.

Building a custom integration, or flow, is simple and requires no coding. Just drag and drop a trigger—like when a new lead is added to your CRM or helpdesk— and then choose which action(s) you want to happen—like posting in a chat channel or creating a new task in a project management app. You can also install pre-built flows from the gallery.

What’s especially nice about Zoho Flow is that you can visualize your integrations and workflows. Being able to visualize your flows makes it easier to create and modify existing process. This is particularly helpful if you need to understand or alter a flow that was created by somebody else, or if you’re collaborating with another colleague or team.

Zoho PageSense: Optimize Webpage Conversions

A website should be an essential part of every business’ marketing strategy. Of course, for a website to be effective, it needs to convert visitors into customers. Zoho PageSense helps you optimize your website to do just that. With PageSense you can visualize, test, and measure visitor behavior patterns a number of ways, including A/B tests, heatmaps, and even funnel analysis.

If this sounds like a powerful new marketing app, that’s because it is. But what makes PageSense great is how easy and straightforward it is to use. Start by adding a snippet of PageSense code to your website. Then use the tools available to help you analyze your visitors’ behavior. For example, say you use the heatmap to see how many visitors are clicking your primary call to action. Maybe you decide that your headline could be more effective, so you decide to run an A/B test. With an A/B test you’re able to show two different versions of your web page to visitors at random and compare results. Once you have the results, you can see if you need to make the change permanent, or if you need to try another idea.

PageSense has an out-of-the-box integration with Zoho Sites, our recently revamped website builder, plus a number of third-party services, like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google AdWords, Kissmetrics, and more.

Zoho Sprints: Project Management for Agile Teams

Different teams work in different ways. One way of working was laid out in the “Agile Manifesto”, which puts individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Unfortunately, the speed and simplicity advocated by the manifesto is nowhere to be found in today’s clumsy, complicated apps for managing agile projects.

With Zoho Sprints, agile project management finally becomes fast, easy, and clutter-free. Zoho Sprints encourages teams of all sizes to work iteratively and incrementally, over short periods of time, to quickly release potentially shippable products. Sprints follows the scrum framework and combines backlogs, agile reports, collaboration tools, and customizable scrum boards, making it ideal for software developers and other teams that follow the agile methodology.

Zoho Sign: Sign Digital Documents

As more and more companies ditch paper-based systems, the need to interact with and sign digital documents increases. That’s why there’s Zoho Sign, available in both web and mobile versions, so businesses can sign and send legally binding contracts from anywhere, using a simple signing process.

Zoho Sign integrates with other Zoho services such as Zoho CRM and Zoho Writer, so you can complete approvals and agreements. You can also import documents from third-party apps such as Gmail, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, and OneDrive to sign documents on the go.

Notebook: Take Notes Across Devices

Last, but certainly not least, we have Notebook, the consumer-facing app of the bunch. Our notable note-taking app gives you an elegant, thoughtful space to remember what matters, across devices. It was recently made available on the web.

Notebook uses a note card concept to format different types of notes in different ways. With Notebook for Web you can take text notes, create checklists, and upload files and photos. You can even save content to Notebook from the web with the Notebook Web Clipper (Chrome, Safari, Firefox) and we’ll automatically format it into distinct note cards. With a number of customization options, like adding custom notebook covers or choosing custom note colors, Notebook offers a compelling note-taking experience.

What’s Next?

Believe it or not, we have more apps, integrations, features, and revamps in the works. Our next Zoho One update will include enhancements to the Admin Panel. As we’ve said, with Zoho One we’re committed to delivering unmatched customer value. I think it’s safe to say we’re making that promise loud and clear.