6 Timeless eCommerce Tips For Small Businesses
5 min readIn the past few years, we’ve seen a rise in the popularity of eCommerce for all the right reasons.
The socio-economic breakdown caused by Covid-19 enabled traditional businesses to think digitally and move towards eCommerce.
For some, it’s worked out perfectly, while for others, things haven’t been so good.
The reasons for eCommerce failure vary from business to business. However, there are some common tips that businesses can follow to avoid failing.
Try the customer-first approach
There is no denying the impact a customer has on the bottom line of a business. The more value you add to the customer’s purchase, the better your chances are at improving the conversions for your store.
This can include adding the right prices, providing free shipping, discounts/coupons on referrals and purchases, and providing excellent customer services.
Another important thing that you can do to improve the customer experience is to shorten the customer journey. This would imply reducing the time required for purchase. When you’ve shortened the path from discovery to purchase, you’re not only making things easier for the customer, but you’re also improving the conversion rates for your business. The last tip that you can use to improve your customer focus is to focus on your branding. You see, there are many eCommerce stores but there are only a few brands. The more you make your store more personalized to the audience instead of focusing on the bottom line, the better it will be.
The mobile-first approach
This one’s similar to the customer-first approach but on the technical side. The average person, ourselves included, spends a lot more time on their mobile phones than we do on our laptops or PC.
A lot of eCommerce owners make the mistake of not optimizing their websites for mobile friendliness and fluid navigation.
This results in an eCommerce store that looks good on larger screens but isn’t intuitive to fit mobile phones.
Optimizing for mobile commerce is the new frontier. If you don’t focus on mobile, you’re losing out on a chunk of customers that otherwise would have entered and purchased from your store.
So yes, the ideal goal is to focus as much as you can on improving the display of your website on tablets, and smartphones.
Don’t isolate yourself on social media
Businesses, especially those in professional industries, don’t take social media too seriously.
Their train of thought is usually along the lines of the perceived seriousness of their business having no connection with the fast-paced world of social media.
That’s a fallacy, to say the least.
Everyone is on social media, be it the trendy millennial or the working professional. If you don’t have a social media team for your business, you’re losing out on a significant portion of the audience that could have converted.
The metrics from social media are astounding and help you make better decisions about targeting and conversions.
If you’re just starting with social media, then it’s best to have a social media account on every major platform.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even Pinterest can prove highly effective in getting the right audiences to your offerings.
Once you’ve got your social media set up, it’s time you move towards managing the accounts. Ideally, you should post daily about your products/services.
To reach the right audience, especially on Twitter and Instagram, you have to have some level of engagement with the platform. The more you interact, the more followers you get.
When done right, social media can be a literal game-changer for your business. We’ve seen businesses base their entire operations based on how well their social media team is performing.
Use more photos
Visual content has the potential to make or break your business.
The better visuals you have on your website, social media handles, and marketing collaterals, the better your chances are at converting them.
Now image content isn’t just limited to having nice product images.
You can use infographics, social media posts, and statistics related to your business to build engagement with your platform.
Your images should have the right scheme of colors to make the audience stop and see what you’re trying to say.
To cater to the attention span of individuals, you need to be aware of the type of content you’re posting.
Stay on top of SEO
The eCommerce landscape is very competitive.
To cater to the audiences that you’re targeting, you need to stay on top of search engine optimization. It’s a concept that’s been present and emphasized for some time now.
From link building to writing good content, to social media posting – there are just so many strategies you can use to improve your position in search engines. For your eCommerce store, you can use the right combination of keyword research in your product pages as well as a blog section comparing products with one another.
Apart from that, you can also make your URLs, descriptions, load time, and Google registrations as optimized as possible. Like we said before, there are so many ways you can go about SEO.
Lastly, you should focus on building a website that’s in line with your SEO from the get-go. This ensures that you don’t run into problems later down the road.
Use live chat
This goes hand in hand with the customer-first approach but deserves a separate section altogether.
An eCommerce business operates 24/7. Customers are connected every minute of every hour. In a world without live chat, you would have to have a group of customer service agents present at every minute of every day to answer customer queries. Fortunately, we have the concept of live chat present with us which we use to our advantage.
Live chat integration work with bots who facilitate answering customer queries and questions.
This ensures that whenever a customer comes with a problem, they have a support system that they can work with initially until a human agent solves their problem.
Conclusion:
Ecommerce is the future, there’s no doubt about that. To stay ahead of the game, you need to constantly try and implement strategies that work.
While these are indeed timeless tips, you can always be creative and think up new strategies that come along with them.
Thanks for reading!
Binary Blogger has spent 20 years in the Information Security space currently providing security solutions and evangelism to clients. From early web application programming, system administration, senior management to enterprise consulting I provide practical security analysis and solutions to help companies and individuals figure out HOW to be secure every day.
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