According to a Remarkety 2015 infographic, eCommerce in the U.S. is one of the most lucrative markets, with spending reaching $349.06 billion from the 28% of SMBs selling online. If you are one of the 72% that have not jumped on the eCommerce bandwagon yet, you are missing out on a range of benefits, including establishing a strong online presence, attracting new customers, cutting down operational costs, and driving conversions and sales since your brand awareness will be sky high. If this inspires you to join the eCommerce industry, your next step is to create a great eCommerce site.
First, Brainstorm
Before you begin creating your website, you need to have a good business plan in hand. Just having a good product in mind will not guarantee that it sells well and ensures your success. So, find out who is selling similar, if not the same products, and thoroughly research on your competitors. Once you are done with these, move on to brainstorming on your eCommerce website design, but factor in what appeals to your target audience since you need them to approve of your site.
Finally, think of a name for your eCommerce site. This may be the hardest part of building your new eCommerce site as you need to pick a name that reflects your idea yet is easy to remember. Once you have a name in mind, you need to register a domain name with it before someone comes up with a similar concept.
Before you spend thousands of dollars on products no one will buy and a site no one will visit, you need to test whether there is interest in your product or niche and if your offer will convert. One of the easiest ways of doing this is by creating a blog. Even a WordPress blog will do to help you determine whether or not this is the niche for you. You can add affiliate links in the sidebar as well to see whether you get affiliate sales as well. You can even make use of an seo guide by wp seo experts to market your blog or e-commerce store. Just remember to keep track of the traffic you receive and the interactions of people on your blog so that you can discover whether the market is ready for you and learn about your industry.
Select a Creative Design
For your eCommerce website to become a success, you need to keep users engaged and willing to continue clicking through. As first impressions are also important, you need to invest in the best eCommerce design. This is another tricky aspect, but you can master it using the following tips.
- Ensure that the design makes shopping easy. For instance, you can have multiple ‘Add to Cart’ buttons, add links to the cart in every page, and flaunt calls-to-action for adding items to the care in bright colors.
- Successful eCommerce sites flaunt a robust navigation plan. Do not overwhelm customers with more than six navigation choice and make use of subpages.
- Make your eCommerce site more user friendly with a search box. Better yet, use an ‘autocomplete’ function within the box for added convenience.
- Provide quick product previews to enhance the experience of visitors strapped for time, suffering due to slow loading speeds, etc.
If you want, you can always ask for professional help to get a creative design. Though this may be a little pricey, a custom design combined with designers’ expertise will help you get high ROI quickly.
Introduce Yourself with a Good About Us Page
While your design is underway, come up (or hire a proficient copywriter instead) with a killer ‘About Us’ page. This is one of the most important pages on your site; Marketing Sherpa reports that 7% of visitors click to see the ‘About Page’ and tend to convert 30% more than others and sped an average of 22.5% more. An honest and well-designed page can also spark visitors’ curiosity and get them to buy from you. So, open up your brand and discuss your story, history, goals, and achievements so that your buyers can know more about you.
Come Up with a Strong SEO Strategy
Developing an SEO strategy is a major task on its own since users only check the first three results (or the first SERP if they have time). So, if you want to direct more traffic to your eCommerce site and ensure that it stands out from the competition, here are some steps you can take.
- Find keywords that you can use for the website design and content. Come up with long-tail keywords as they are popular with voice searches and wearable devices.
- Avoid duplicating content even if the product descriptions are similar. Analyze the pages of your site and find ways to reduce redundancy.
- To boost your eCommerce store’s visibility by including relevant keywords in anchor text.
- Make your URL structure more SEO friendly so that search engine robots can find your site, crawl through it, and recognize what your site is about.
- Optimize product images by adding keywords into their ALT tags.
Since SEO is a non-stop procedure, it may be better for you to entrust it to someone who actually knows how to manage it. Therefore, employ a white hat SEO provider with expertise in optimizing eCommerce websites.
Establish a Blog
A blog can do much more than complement your SEO efforts. It can increase the number of your site’s visitors by 50% and generate over 855 leads per month. Imagine the revenue you can incur if these numbers were applicable to your own site! However, you need to be prepared to come up with 3-4 articles each week and publish them. You can start slow with one article a week, but you need to work your way up to 5-7 blogs per week.
To help you get blogging right, here are some tips for you to consider the next time you put pen to paper.
- Focus on educating readers of your blog. Your aim should be to provide credible information they can use and benefit from.
- Reserve one post exclusively to customer feedback and testimonials.
- Sot sell at the end of your informative blog, but do not overdo it. The rest of your site is to generate sales, so keep your calls-to-action on your blog to a minimum.
- Integrate social sharing tools to make your content easier to share. This will further direct traffic to your site and ensure conversions.
Create a Unique Shopping Cart Experience
If you do not want your buyers to cram their carts only to abandon them later, make sure to provide them with a good shopping cart experience. In addition to effectively pricing your shopping fees, ensure quick loading pages, and reducing website timeout duration, here are some tips that can help you improve your shopping cart experience.
- Allow customers to checkout as guests rather than forcing them to create profiles. This will show that you care about their time and convenience.
- Take a page from The Body Shop’s checkout page and use it as the last up-sell option. Include your best offers on the page, but do not cram it with tons of products.
- Include a progress bar that shows how many steps customers have to go through until they pay up and start waiting for their orders.
- Do not fill up the page with a lot of fields for your users to fill. This is especially true for shipping fields which can overwhelm buyers.
Provide Customer Support through Live Chat
One of the factors which make offline stores stand out is the human interaction factor. Successful eCommerce stores are capable of replicating this through live chat. If you think that this feature is not important, the following three facts may change your mind.
- There are 80 Million Millennials in the U.S. Alone – According to Accenture, there are 80 million millennials (individuals born between 1980 and 2000) who spend $600 billion every year. Millennials will grow more powerful in 2020, spending around $1.4 trillion dollars and contributing up to 30% of annual retail sales. As over 60% of this age group prefers live chat to answer questions, you need to make sure to provide this feature.
- Live Chat Ensures the Highest Customer Satisfaction Levels – Econsultancy revealed that live chat has the highest satisfaction levels at 73%. In comparison, email scored 61% and phone 44%. What makes live chat stand out is that it allows shoppers to connect with an actual person right away and without having to call or wait for a reply.
- Live Chat Can Increase Conversions and Increase Revenue – Forrester Research uncovered that 44% of online consumers believe that having their questions answered by a live person mid-purchase is an important feature in eCommerce sites. As your phone orders decrease, your web traffic will increase. If you constantly track traffic and analytics, you will further learn how your live chat representatives can improve conversion rates.
So, now that we have established your site’s need for live chat, here are some tips to help you get the most from this addition.
- Make support easily accessible through proactive live chat. Though your clients will not admit it, they need help at times. Therefore, ensure that your live chats are empathetic and capable of educating clients, not patronizing them.
- Reduce long-term pain points by removing barriers which prevent customers from buying what they want. Using live chat as more than an FAQ service to direct lost customers or restate your site’s returns policy.
- Use live chat to enhance the power of personalization through in-chat product recommendations. This tip will make your customers happy and increase your bottom line.
- You can use live chat to convert your customers. As a result, you will experience fewer cart abandonment rates.
Set Up Payment Options
While most online transactions require credit card payments, digital payment companies like PayPal are growing in popularity. Therefore, you need to include multiple payment options. If you need help in this regard, here are some valuable tips to get you started.
- Find out which payment gateways are supported by your eCommerce platform. Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce have a range of plugins and gateway that help you integrate certain payment gateways. If you’re not sure on which software is the best for your website needs, then looking at something like this comparison between woocommerce vs shopify could help to make your decision a bit easier.
- Take the fees of payment gateways and merchant accounts into consideration. There are sites that can help you compare them before signing with a provider.
- Find out how long your contract will be. If you have to stay with the same provider for two years or more, this can be an issue, especially if you are not happy with the service you receive.
- Run a survey asking your clients about a third or fourth payment option aside from credit cards and PayPal.
Get Social
Social media is necessary for eCommerce sites on both the short term and long term. For starters, this tool can drive traffic back to your site whenever you include high conversion keywords to your social media posts, provide reviews of your products, and rely on paid advertising tools such as Facebook ads and Promoted Tweets.
Social media is also effective in locating and engaging your customers, be they first-time buyers or loyal fans. For instance, you can use your Twitter account to provide customer service, responding to customer queries quickly, spotting and responding to unpleasant customer experiences, etc. Moreover, social media allows eCommerce site owners to experiment with the ways they interact with customers, promote their brands, and publish content. The more you test, the better your site will be at catering to your clients’ needs.
To reap the benefits of social media, though, you need to have a strategy in hand. Without one, you will be stumbling in the dark and without a direction. As a result, you will end up wasting your resources. So, get a specialist to create one for you in order to reap the benefits of social media. Be open to experimenting with it, though, as social media success is a never-ending cycle of trial and error.
These suggestions will definitely make your eCommerce a success. After all, they are what the top members of this growing industry have integrated in their own sites to rise to the top. If you need help with any of these or would like more guidance on building the perfect eCommerce site, we are just a call or email away. So do not hesitate to get in touch with our skilled staff any time.
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