There are plenty of tools that make it easy to sell products online but only through testing and experience can you truly know what works for your online customers, and gets them returning to your online store frequently.
Here are 10 things you can do to your ecommerce website that can help to increase sales:
- Make sure your website is mobile-device friendly : In 2014, almost 50% of internet traffic comes from a mobile device. This is an important statistic to understand and your website should be built with all users in mind. Luckily, the development of responsive web design technologies over the past 4 years has greatly aided in web designers’ ability to create websites that are optimized for a variety of screen sizes and devices.
- Give customers an easy & seamless checkout process : Surprisingly, many ecommerce solutions have cumbersome checkout forms, and lack basic user-friendly interfaces. It’s important to use an ecommerce system that suits your needs but the checkout process, and your (or your website designer’s) ability to customize it should play an important role in the decision making process. Make it easy for customers to checkout quickly with things like social media account login integration, saved orders and reordering, store multiple shipping addresses and more. It’s also wise to try and utilize an ecommerce system that has the checkout process hosted on your actual site and not linking out to a third-party platform. Customers instantly become more wary of the ecommerce websites when clicking the “Checkout” button opens up a new tab or takes them to a website page that doesn’t look like the main website they were just shopping on. Ecommerce solutions like Woocommerce and Magento provide onsite checkout solutions that can help prevent this customer trust issue.
- Get into your customer’s inbox regularly : A strong email marketing campaign is a vital ingredient for ecommerce success. Staying in touch with your online customers regularly with well-designed (and mobile responsive of course!) HTML emails can increase sales to new levels if you’ve never engaged in this type of internet marketing. Use a service like Mailchimp (we love Mailchimp) or Constant Contact to build your email address database and easy to use email design tools.
- Offer coupons, bundle deals and free shipping : Customers love to feel like they got a deal. Offer incentives when asking customers for email addresses, and send them occasional coupons. Do you have products that customers regularly purchase together? Create a bundled product or offer a discount for purchasing a group of specific products. Another great way to ensure that your customers click that “Complete order” button is to offer free shipping. Depending on your costs, you might want to offer free shipping when customers have met a minimum amount in their cart, or gift first time customers with free shipping to encourage them to create an account within your online store.
- Give customers an excellent visual experience : The overall look and feel of your website can greatly affect online sales. Ensure your website is professionally designed, works well on all devices and screen sizes, and overall, is easy to use and engages the customer. Strong, detailed product photography can go a long way to convincing customers to follow through with a purchase. eBay stats show that the more pictures you provide, the more likely your item is to sell. Shopping online is limited to simply a user and a screen, and providing several, high quality pictures of each product can help the customer to feel more at ease with purchasing the product online without seeing it in person beforehand.
- Accept popular payment methods : Many online shoppers love to use PayPal because it saves them from having to input their credit card information on each website that they purchase from, and it also makes them feel more secure when checking out. Make sure you know your customers and if they want to checkout using PayPal, you should consider adding that payment gateway to your site if it’s not already on there. Similarly, weigh up the pros and cons of accepting various credit cards like American Express and Discover Card. Other payment gateway options are Stripe, Amazon Payments, and Authorize.net.
- Remind customers to come back when they abandon their cart : Integrate a cart abandonment feature that automatically emails customers with accounts when they leave contents in their cart without checking out. Many big brands do this and some even offer a coupon the second time they email you to complete your order. This encourages some “on the fence” customers to finalize their purchase that might have otherwise gone elsewhere.
- Get your customers to sell for you : Encourage your customers to engage with your company on social media by sharing product images, things they bought and more. Install FB like, Twitter tweet, and Pinterest pin buttons on product pages, and incentivize shoppers to promote your products for you. After all, a referral from a friend is one of the best sales tools you can have.
- Understand your customers using statistics : The more you know about your customers, the more efficiently you can target them with your marketing efforts. Using a service like Google Analytics allows you to see specific website visitor data like what cities your customers are coming from, how long they spend on your website, your most popular product pages and much more. If you have an on-site product search tool, you can see popular searches your customers are conducting, and you might even see that they’re searching for a product you don’t have available…yet!
- Hire us! : Hiring a professional web design and development company can provide you with a strategic partner that understands what it takes to successfully sell online. Brian Joseph Studios has over 10 years of ecommerce web design and development experience and we always love a new challenge. If your current ecommerce website isn’t performing, or you’re ready to start selling online for the first time, let’s talk! We provide local services to clients near Raleigh, North Carolina, and Fort Myers & Naples, Florida, and remotely to clients all over the world.