Starting an e-commerce business is no easy feat. Once it’s up and running, and you’ve turned your brilliant business idea into a tangible online store, now it’s time to focus on growth! As a business owner, it’s time to think – how can you bring more people to your store? And how can you get more sales across the line?
While there are many strategies you can adopt to help keep your online store booming in the right direction, we thought you might appreciate it if we kept things simple – with our top 3 tips for growing your online store.
Bring more traffic to your online store
You might have a great online store, with amazing products for sale – but do your customers know you exist? Do they know where or how to find you? If you haven’t already heard, when it comes to your online presence – Google is king. That being said, here are a few handy hints to keep Google happy and bring more traffic to your online store in the process:
- Write content other than your product descriptions – the key is in writing articles that are both interesting – and relevant – to what you’re selling. That way, those who come to your site for an interesting read on how to use your product, might also leave with a purchase.
- Leverage other platforms (social or shopping) – Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Houzz, and Amazon, etc. – find where your customers are searching for your product and be there.
- Consider search and content-based advertising – even if you’re budget is small, targeted ads and pay-per-click advertising platforms like Facebook and Google can help drive targeted traffic to your online store.
Increase your conversion rates to your online store
How do you encourage potential customers along the purchase decision-making process and increase conversion rates? Sure, you might be offering a physical product for sale online, but what about the experience your customers are getting when they come to your online store? Are you delivering what they need? Try these simple tips for delivering a better user experience:
- Provide quality product images – and the more the better. Your customers want to know what they’re buying – and you know they say a picture is worth 1000 words!
- Give great product copy – again, this one’s all about your customers wanting to know what they’re buying. You don’t want to leave your customers with questions, or worse – doubts. The more detail you can provide, the less the chance of returns of items that don’t fit or aren’t to the customers’ expectations too – potentially saving you time and money in the long run.
- Offer free or discounted shipping – have you heard of shopping cart abandonment? Sounds scary, right? Don’t deter your customers from following through on the checkout process with high or unexpected shipping fees.
- Offer a way to get in touch – whether it’s displaying your contact information or implementing a live chat feature or simply following up, building trust is key to converting sales!
- Keep it simple – have you ever shopped online and found yourself lost on a website? You’re not sure where to find the item you’re looking for? Or it just takes too many clicks and buttons to actually get to the checkout? You’re likely to give up and go somewhere else, aren’t you? So keep it simple for your customers – ensure the process from product to purchase is as seamless as possible.
Focus on customer retention and satisfaction
When it comes to continued ecommerce growth, your attention should be on your customers. Of course, while getting your products off the shelves is great, if you’re not delivering the best experience – one which customers will happily repeat purchases for – you’re at risk of losing customers.
Outsourcing your operations, fulfilment and/or shipping logistics will help free up your time to focus on what really matters to you in business. Be it wooing new customers, ensuring current customers are satisfied, creating new line extensions or bettering your existing product offerings – you can focus on boosting your bottom line, while someone else takes care of the back end admin and logistics.
Of course, if you’re ready to save more time and money by outsourcing your fulfilment needs to one of Australia’s leading fulfilment service providers, we’d love to help. You can always give us a call on +61 2 9828 0111 (Sydney), +61 3 9240 6300 (Melbourne) or +64 9 263 8855 (Auckland) or drop us a note via the form below. Alternatively, you can find a full list of available services here.