When you hear the term ‘e-commerce,’ you likely think of big brands such as Amazon, Walmart, or eBay. However, e-commerce isn’t exclusive to just these few large corporations. Many companies worldwide do some form of online selling, whether it be a local bike shop or even a band selling merchandise. Regardless of what you sell, setting up an online store is an excellent opportunity for you to sell your products to even more consumers.
However, to have success selling online, you’ll need to work smart and have a good strategy in place to help you stand out from the competition. Let’s take a look at a few things you can do to improve your overall e-commerce strategy.
Improve Your Web Design & User Experience
When people arrive on a site that either loads slow or is hard to navigate, they typically bounce from that site immediately. If you have an e-commerce site that makes it hard to locate products and information, you’ll have difficulty making the sale.
Investing in a website that’s built from scratch by a talented designer, you can be confident that your website will have a nice flow and engage with your visitors. Your site should make it as easy as possible for visitors to find your products and information.
Additionally, you’ll want to be sure that your site speed is up to par. No one likes to wait for a slow website to load. With so many other e-commerce sites to choose from, visitors will happily try another option. To correct a slow site, you’ll want to be sure that you invest in the right web host that’s going to make sure your site loads at an acceptable speed.
Integration Between Your Online and Brick & Mortar Location
One of the most prominent aspects of e-commerce is the connection between the online and brick & mortar store. By blending the two experiences, you can help your customers learn more about your products, find out about deals, and find all the information they need about your business. Additionally, consumers have become increasingly dependent on their smartphones. By having a strong website on mobile devices, you can begin to tie together the in-store and online buying experiences.
A great example of integrating the online and physical stores is in-store pick up. In-store pick-up allows customers to purchase their products online, then travel to the physical location to pick up their products. This will enable visitors to buy online, visit your store to pick up their products, and potentially purchase more. It’s a great strategy to improve online orders and increase traffic to your physical store.
Read and Understand Your Website’s Data
Reviewing your data analytics is the best way to get a pulse on what’s going on with your business. Collecting data on what your customers are doing and how they’re shopping can be paramount in helping you adapt your strategy. Analytics can inform you of what visitors are doing when they come to your site, length of stay, what pages they click on, and when they leave your website. By making sense of the data, you can begin to adjust your strategy to make shopping easier for those that visit your site.
Go After The Abandoned Cart
For many consumers shopping on e-commerce sites, they’ll go through and add products they might consider buying to their cart. For whatever reason, some people won’t follow through with the checkout process and will abandon their cart full of products.
This can happen for a variety of reasons. It may be the consumer doesn’t have the funds at the moment, or maybe your checkout process is too long. Regardless, follow-up visitors who abandoned their cart with polite reminders that they didn’t make a purchase is a great way to get people to finish checkout.
For many e-commerce sites, there are plugins available that can automate these messages for you. This allows you to focus on more important things than sending follow-up emails to countless abandoned carts.
The Takeaway
The primary takeaway is that e-commerce has become an increasingly popular and competitive way to sell your products online. As more companies switch to utilizing e-commerce, it’ll take a considerable amount of adapting and refining to ensure success in selling in such a competitive market. Be sure to take advantage of some of these tips to help improve your overall e-commerce strategy.