Improvising ecommerce services is the primary goal of every store owner, irrespective of the size of business. With so many options to explore at the fingertips of your potential customers, it is important first and foremost that your ecommerce business provides a positive user experience. Moreover, creating a positive customer experience must be a growing hunt. With leading ecommerce platforms such as Builderfly that offers a complete ecommerce solution, you might have had a thought to start an ecommerce business of your own. After all, setting up an ecommerce store is a great way to start making money online. However, simply setting up an ecommerce store is not enough to generate sales. You must know how to improve your ecommerce store in the market in order to boost sales for your business. In this article, we will be discussing the things you must do to improve your ecommerce business efficiently.
What are the ways to improve your ecommerce business?
Without any further delay, let us jump into the ways by which you can improve your ecommerce business and stay ahead of your competitors:
Provide Easy Access
When you provide easy access of your ecommerce website/ store to your customers, you are making them feel comfortable with your business, confident about their buying decisions, and satisfied about their experience with your ecommerce business. For this, you must be transparent about a few things:
- Pricing policies
- Shipping method and charges
- Estimated delivery dates
- Returns policy
- Refunds policy
- Other terms and conditions (if any)
When you are upfront and transparent about your business with your customers, the likeliness of your potential customers purchasing from your website/ store shoots up. By being transparent, you are establishing expectations with your customers, and therefore, you are bound to meet those expectations to provide them with satisfying customer experience. You can also consider providing a simplified checkout process. Asking your customers to complete multiple steps to make payment and complete a purchase is the most frustrating experience for a customer and a leading reason for cart abandonment. Lastly, you must make it easy for your customers to contact you. Customers feel quite reassured when they know that you are available for them in case they need you.
Cross-Sell and Up-sell
Almost every ecommerce platform including Builderfly offers the facility to feature related products. If you are missing on cross-selling and up-selling, you are leaving sales on the table. Cross-selling is a process to encourage online shoppers to purchase complementary products once they have purchased products from your ecommerce website/ store or have indicated their wish to purchase. Up-selling, on the other hand, is a process that involves encouraging an online shopper to purchase a similar product to the one they are already viewing which either has a higher selling price or a higher margin. Usually, the cross-selling and up-selling offers in ecommerce websites are provided on the product page or during the checkout procedure. Using customer data that includes their buying choices, you can consider cross-selling or up-selling to encourage them to boost their order value and add more items to their shopping carts. All you have to do is invest quality time is research and you can easily employ cross-selling and up-selling to improve your ecommerce business significantly.
Create Exceptional Product Pages
It is known without saying that your products are the most significant part of your ecommerce business and you ought to do everything possible to highlight them to the right audience if you wish to boost your customer conversion rates. The key factors to create successful product pages are intriguing product images, and definite, brief, and fascinating product descriptions. When it comes to product pages, a compelling product image is worth thousands of words. In the first set of browsing of an online shopper, they often go through the product images and do not read the product description. Therefore, the product images have a great potential to create the first impression for your products. It can indeed grab the attention of your potential customers before even they make their decision to purchase the product. Investing in professional photography is a great idea to improve your ecommerce business.
Coming to the product descriptions; it must be inclusive of significant marketing of your products that states what your product is, what its uses are, and why it is the best than the rest in the market. By describing all these, your potential customers would be able to feel confident about choosing the right product and that they have made a smart buying decision. Your product descriptions must also be inclusive of the important product details and specifications such as the product size, weight of the product, shipping information, delivery details, and direction of use. By doing so, there will be considerable decrease n the returns rate, customer frustration, and abandoned carts.
Dissolve Low-Selling Products
You have listed products in your ecommerce store to sell them; which is obvious, right? But, what about the products that are not selling much or better say, are placed in the shelves of your ecommerce store? Let us answer that; it is simply slowing down your business growth and reducing the cash flow. There is a reason why every store releases a closeout sale! You must have a look at your inventory for the seasonal products, are perishable, that sell fewer than once a quarter, have been replaced with a newer model, or that which has not been sold since a month or more. Put these products on sale, offer special prices, and give out freebies. You will see a direct explosion of cash flow that will eventually improve your ecommerce business.
Feature Security Badges
Online shoppers have the same level of anxiety as shopping from the brick and mortar store, except for the fact that they can leave the online site easily without a ray of embarrassment. However, this is a threat imposed on an online ecommerce business. And we have learnt that the primary reason for customer anxiety for online shopping is security. Is their credit card/ debit card data at risk? Is your ecommerce business trustworthy? And there would be many such questions that arise in an online shoppers’ mind before making a buying decision. Now to battles such concerns, the best way is to feature the security badges that have been accredited to your ecommerce business which is visible to the audience, ideally during the checkout process.
Assess your Website’s Traffic
In order to improve your ecommerce business, you need to understand your customers and their interaction with your business. With strategic use of analytics, you can measure the rate at which your customers are visiting your site and what are their activities once they visit. You can consider mapping the percentage of customers that are actually purchasing once they enter your ecommerce website or store. However, you might also need to focus on the other side where customers are visiting your website and are not making a purchase. Find out the way they navigated to your store, the time for which they were on your website, and the page from which they bounced back. There are various online tools to help you get these data easily.
Integrate the Live-Chat System
The live-chat system lets customers or visitors ask their queries or express their worries during the process of making their buying decisions or after they have made a purchase. It can potentially boost your conversion rates by improving the customer experience with your ecommerce business. When you integrate the live-chat system, you will be able to discover even the minute issues of your website as well as the common concerns of your customers regarding your business. If you address these issues right at the beginning, you can witness a whooping increase in your conversion rates. Moreover, integrating the live-chat system does not require much technical expertise and can be done easily by using online software available. Moreover, it is probably the most inexpensive way to improve your ecommerce business and it can be turned on and off as per your availability and convenience.
Seek Product Reviews
Research has proven that more than 84% of online shoppers trust online product reviews as much as they do in personal recommendations. As an ecommerce business owner, your primary concern is and must be to satisfy your customers’ requirements and for that, you must know whether your customers are satisfied with your services. Therefore, start asking for product or service reviews. It is quite simple to add this to your selling process. Especially for an online ecommerce website, all you have to do is setting up an automated email after shipping and delivering the product to your customers. You can ask for reviews on your website, on trusted platforms, such as Google, social media platforms, and other sites if any. If you are successfully getting the customers on your site for reviewing the products, be sure that you mark their review so as to score the stars in Google’s search result. You can easily find online software that is available for marking customer reviews for your website.
All these data can aid you in learning the areas of your ecommerce website/ store that need improvisation. By investing quality time and efforts in these eight factors, you can boost your sales, grow your business, and most importantly, improve your ecommerce business significantly.
