It is hard to believe, but the art of shopping on-line started over 40 years ago, with the introduction of early technology like Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and teleshopping in the 1970s paving the way for the modern-day E-commerce store and our accompanying empty wallets.
It is clear that the history of E-commerce is closely intertwined with the larger history of the Internet. Online shopping became possible when the internet was opened to the public in 1991, and although it started off small, it is now one of the largest and most profitable aspects of the modern Internet. Amazon was one of the first ecommerce sites in the US to start selling products online and thousands of businesses have followed since.
The recent explosion of E-commerce started during the COVID-19 pandemic, which impacted businesses worldwide and brought E-commerce to a new level. The pandemic and its effects opened the eyes of many, causing them to quickly adapt to the new dynamic or face huge profit losses. Today, you can reach thousands and millions of people with your products and services online, offering a more personalized shopping experience.
If you have looked at or done an E-commerce business, you know that growing and improving your E-commerce business requires a great strategy and a lot of hard work. In this article, we will provide some E-commerce web strategies for starting and scaling your online retail service.
First Things First: Build a Strong Brand
Understand that there are already thousands of E-commerce businesses, meaning you have competitors, many of whom are already making huge returns. The question is, what sets you apart from these people, and what can you do differently? Your brand and value proposition set you apart from the thousands of online retail businesses; they are crucial for attracting and retaining customers. Therefore, stand out by building your brand strategy, focusing on your target audience, brand values, and unique selling proposition.
The Foundation: Develop An E-commerce Website
With your brand now going strong, the next step to building a successful online retail business is building your website. Your E-commerce website is the foundation of your E-commerce business; therefore, you want it to offer you a great customer experience. To do that, your website must be fast, user-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing and utilize long-tail keywords to improve your SEO. Here are some tips on how to make your E-commerce website optimized for a successful E-commerce business:
- Use an E-commerce platform: You can spend a lot of money building a custom E-commerce website, but it will be much more cost-effective if you use one of the major E-commerce website platforms such as Shopify, BigCommerce or WooCommerce, etc. Even those platforms require some development to really make them custom and optimal, but that cost is a fraction of what it would take to build one from scratch.
- Clean and Intuitive User Experience (UX) : You need to really focus on the User eXperience (UX) of the site before you even begin building it. It must be intuitive to navigate, have unambiguous calls-to-action, easy for visitors to find what they want to purchase and a quick checkout process.
- Long-tail keywords: Helps to conduct keyword research and optimize your blog content and product pages. This is a continuous process, over time you will need to change keywords and product descriptions to optimize search results and sales.
- Improving website speed: Reduce image sizes, use a content delivery network, and minimize HTTP requests.
Leverage Social Media
If you run an E-commerce business, social media is one tool you should not take for granted. The right use of social media can put your E-commerce business in the path of your target audience. Social media, if used right, is a powerful upscaling tool for E-commerce businesses as you use it to engage customers, among other things. With social media, you can build brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and target specific audiences to promote your business. The key to a powerful social media presence is a consistent flow of relevant and well written content about the products and brands that you feature on your E-commerce store.
Provide Excellent Customer Service
The success of an E-commerce business ultimately boils down to how satisfied its customers are; satisfied customers are returning customers. To improve your customer satisfaction and loyalty rate, focus on personalizing your website and providing excellent customer service. The different ways you can personalize your customer experience include tailoring your website content to each individual who visits your site. Also, using customer data to personalize product recommendations and send personalized emails can improve customer experience and satisfaction.
Utilize SEO Effectively
With your website up and running, you want to drive traffic to it through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Ranking your website for SEO helps to optimize it so that it can rank higher in search engine results pages. With your website fully optimized for search engines, you will see a significant increase in the traffic your E-commerce website attracts. In addition to driving traffic to your website, SEO also helps to increase your visibility and establishes you as a credible brand. You can hear more on our Podcast about SEO .
Use Good Product Descriptions
Pay attention to aesthetics of your website and pictures used in displaying your products because beautiful images will always attract people. Even on your social media pages, you want to use high-quality images that sell your product without you saying anything. It is very possible to get your customers to make purchasing decisions even when they haven’t seen the product they’re buying. That is where providing self-explanatory images and product descriptions comes in.
Your goal should be that when a prospective customer searches for your product and finds it, they see a self-explanatory product description. It’s all about not merely telling customers about your goods and services, but showing them; that determines if they’ll take the next steps. Showing potential customers what your product looks like and providing evidence of how it can help them will ultimately build credibility and trust.
Don’t Hoard New Products
E-commerce business owners often make the mistake of hoarding new products because they want to clear out the existing products first. Don’t do that; instead, you can rebrand your old products to make them attract and get new buyers. That is not to say, however, that you cannot still shed a spotlight on your new products because you can. You can highlight your new products on your social media pages, your landing page, and even in your emails.
Offer a Variety of Payment Options
Considering that you’re running an online business, you shouldn’t expect to get physical cash payment for your goods and services. Whatever payment your customers make has to be done online, which is why you want to provide different options. Offering different payment options helps to ensure your business can cater to different categories of customers. Besides, you don’t want to lose prospective customers simply because they cannot use the payment options you have provided.
Apart from providing different payment options, you also want to ensure a streamlined payment process . You wouldn’t want potential customers to abandon their cart because they find making payments difficult. Therefore, understand your target audience and provide payment options ideally suited to them. For example, if your target audience is people above 60, you don’t want to provide payment options only 20s and 30s can use.
Personalize Your Homepage
As an E-commerce business, most of your transactions will be conducted through your website, therefore, make it personalized. When visitors come to your page, make them feel as if they’re in a physical store. That is, they should know where to go to get the product or service they need. Your homepage should be such that a customer can easily navigate their way to purchase their desired product.
Create High-Quality Content
Market your business by creating compelling and high-quality content and doing it consistently. Content marketing is one of the most effective strategies in digital marketing and applies to E-commerce businesses. It entails creating various types of content to market your E-commerce business, particularly copies that would convince prospective customers. More so, compelling content is one where visitors become recurring customers in the long run.
Furthermore, your content should be high-quality, meaning it should be knowledge-based and provide value to potential customers. Creating valuable content on your E-commerce website helps to establish you as an authority in your field. Also, it tells potential customers that apart from profiting from their purchase, you want to contribute to their knowledge. It tells them you’re interested in helping them know what to do and how to do it beyond using your services.
Metrics and Tracking
Tracking metrics and sales data analytics is essential for the success of any E-commerce business. It provides invaluable insights into customer behavior, product performance, and overall business health. By monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and average order value, businesses can make informed decisions on how to optimize marketing strategies, improve user experiences, and increase profitability. Tools like Google Analytics, Shopify Analytics, Klaviyo, and Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) are highly effective for gathering, visualizing, and interpreting E-commerce data. Implementing these tools allows businesses to stay agile, respond quickly to trends, and gain a competitive edge in a dynamic market.
Conclusion
Starting and maintaining a successful e-retail business depends on how well you’ve optimized your website to efficiently serve your customers. To implement these web strategies, you need to first conduct market research and to understand your target audience and competition.
In addition, you must be willing to invest in the right E-commerce technology and tools to enable streamlined operations and ensure improved efficiency. For example, you can use Google Analytics to track your website’s traffic as well as optimize your ad campaigns.
ScreamingBox can help you with E-commerce website creation, development, maintenance and modifications. Please contact us with any of your E-commerce questions.
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