As an ecommerce merchant, you have one goal: maximise profit as much as possible. One of the most straightforward ways of doing that is to increase your ecommerce sales, so let RepricerExpress help you get 2016 off to a great start with seven great tips.
1. Streamline Your Site’s Design
The main reason why a search engine like Google far outranks one like Yahoo! is because the former has so much more of a cleaner and simpler design. When you visit Yahoo!, you’re bombarded with ads, news articles and links to…’stuff’. And in between that ungodly mess is a search bar somewhere.
The same principles go for your own website. Make it super easy for consumers to shop for what they want, browse and compare products, and then pay for them. The more they have to navigate and the harder they have to try, the less motivated they’ll be to actually complete a sale.
2. Make Your Site Load Quickly
If you’re skilled in web development, focus your attention on AngularJS. It’s a framework that helps you create Single Page Apps (SPAs), which means that the page loads once instead of the browser refreshing every single time the user clicks on something. There’s a bit of a learning curve to it, but either learn it yourself or hire someone to do it for you.
There’s the temptation to start using all sorts of fancy stuff with AngularJS, but keep it simple so the site loads quickly (remember, every second counts and your users just do not have the patience to sit through seconds and seconds of a page loading). Minimise the number of scripts you use, employ good CSS practices, use HTTP compression, avoid Flash, and use JPG files instead of PNG.
3. Use Third-Party Services to Upsell
No doubt you’ve already practised tons on writing excellent, sell-able copy. But don’t just stop there: use all the help you can get to go even further. There are apps that let buyers see an alternative to the product they’ve selected, once they’ve arrived at the checkout process.
Why would you want to do this? Simple. They might not have chosen the highest-margin products, and allowing you to offer something else can increase your profit margin. What’s really neat about these apps is you can also set parameters so that it only suggests a product if their shopping cart is at a threshold monetary amount, or run BOGOF sales.
4. Turn Abandoned Carts into Paid-For Carts
According to a study from the Baymard Institute, about two-thirds (!!!) of shopping carts are abandoned at the checkout. Two-thirds! That’s huge because it means that you’re only getting one-third of possible purchases. There are plenty of ways to amend this, whether it’s running a little email campaign to gently nudge customers into completing their purchases, tossing in nice perks at the checkout to entice them into pressing ‘pay’ (like free shipping), or throwing in a discount to make the overall cost a bit less.
5. Social Media: Learn It, Love It, Use It
It almost seems like a cliché to keep talking about how important social media can be when it comes to increasing ecommerce sales. But if that seems to be the case, it’s because it’s so important and so vastly under-utilised.
What we mean is that you should have an Instagram account to show off product photos (i.e. try playing with filters to show your products being used in real-life ways), open a Facebook store, be a little cheeky with a Twitter account, set up on Etsy, and showcase your inventory on Pinterest. There are tons of tools at your disposal, so make use of as many of them as possible.
6. Create a Blog and Update it Regularly
Google arranges its ranking based on novel content, and one of the best ways of worming your way into the upper echelons is to maintain a keyword-laden blog. Write posts several times a week and discuss industry products and concepts, and have Google notice that you’re always providing new and relevant content.
7. Make Your Prices Gorgeous to Look At
Ultimately, what a lot of conversions come down to is pricing. If you’ve got the best ones on the block, your chances of making that sale over a competitor are greatly increased. But to get there, you’ll need to be smart and efficient about it. Don’t waste your time scouring your competitors’ pages because it’s a task in futility. Instead, let repricing software (hi there, RepricerExpress!) do all the heavy lifting for you so you can sit back, relax with a drink and congratulate yourself on another sale in your corner.
