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Your Complete Guide to Boosting Your E-Commerce Sales

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Written By Adeyemi Adetilewa

If you are running an online store, you’ll always be open to new ideas that’ll help you generate more visibility, visits, and eCommerce sales.

Your profit margin relies on grabbing the attention of web users on the internet, and that means using all of your skills and knowledge – plus the skills and knowledge provided by experts online – to have your products more visible than your competitors.

This guide is all about increasing eCommerce sales online without losing your profits while doing so. 

1. Modern Website

Every good eCommerce plan has to begin with your website. It is here that you’ll show off what you are about as a company and show customers the most attractive and enticing photographs of all of your products.

It goes without saying that this is your shop window, and therefore it is something that you should focus on in the months ahead. 

There are two ways to make your eCommerce website more attractive and more visited. You should engage with website design and SEO experts to make your website feature higher on Google’s search results listing pages. They’ll help you clean up your text so that it’s optimal for you to draw in more customers.

Then there is the appearance of your eCommerce website, and that is what we are coming onto next.

Modern Website

2. Attractive Layout

Your eCommerce website needs to look good. It needs to be a place where people are confident visiting and parting with their cash.

Any website that looks like it was made ten years ago and hasn’t been updated since will be a turn-off for consumers, who won’t trust that their cash will be treated seriously and may not believe that you are still in operation.

An eCommerce website that is updated with the latest bells and whistles will inspire the confidence and trust that are crucial to encouraging shoppers to part with their earnings.

As such, you shouldn’t only focus on SEO and redesign your website for visibility purposes. You should also hire a web designer who will be able to tweak your existing website to make it more attractive.

This might mean changing everything from the font and colour scheme to the product pages themselves and how you lay out your stock for people to browse.

3. Stock Photos

This is a tip you can use for your website and eCommerce platforms where you are hosting your products. When you are selling products online, the key to getting them flying off the virtual shelves is giving consumers a very good idea of what they look like.

Because shoppers aren’t able to pick up the product and examine it in person, you need to give them all the visual data they need to feel like they know exactly what they are buying. 

Ultimately, that means taking a variety of different photographs from different angles. You could also experiment with 360-degree photographs, although you’ll need special hardware and software to do that.

Meanwhile, consider hiring a videographer if your product would work well with a demonstration or a model for photographs if you are selling lifestyle and fashion products.

eCommerce Platforms

4. eCommerce Platforms

There are two schools of thought when it comes to running a store on a large eCommerce website as well as your own website.

One school believes that it is not worth putting your products on an eCommerce website, as you’ll be competing with hundreds of other businesses for views, and you’ll have to pay a portion of your profits to the website itself. Whether that is eBay or Amazon, your profit margin will be slightly lower. 

The other school of thought is that, even though that profit margin is lower, your sales volume will be sky-high on these much-visited platforms. If you are looking to sell a high volume of products, this is the place for you to draw millions of consumers’ attention.

But if you are selling high-end or luxury goods, you may do better by investing more time and cash in your own website. Luxury shoppers tend not to visit e-commerce websites as much as bargain hunters do.

 

5. Offline Marketing

Many eCommerce stores choose to use digital marketing as their sole tool to get seen. They are ignoring the fact that advertising in the physical world – whether on television, on the radio, on billboards, or via flyers and posted marketing material – still works for many businesses.

All you need to do with each of these marketing methods is to share your website’s URL, and people will know where to find you and how to shop for the products you are advertising. 

The best aspect of this form of marketing is that it is cheap. Because so much of the marketing world is now operating online, the prices for more traditional advertisements have dropped considerably. Still, you should be careful with which types of marketing you choose to invest in.

A posted pamphlet could perform very well if you are selling products to the senior market. If you are selling for a distinct community, you might find a billboard works best.

Targeted Adverts

6. Targeted Adverts

As well as doing all you can to boost your SEO, you should also consider other online marketing methods that’ll help you locate the types of consumers you believe will be most interested in trading with you.

Targeted adverts can help you ensure that your marketing spend is always directed at the very people you believe will want to buy your products the most. That means knowing your target market.

If you haven’t established what your target market is, it is worth doing some market research to hone in on the ideal consumer.

One form of targeted advertising is the “pay per click” model, which can be particularly useful for firms that are reluctant to invest a huge amount of cash in their marketing efforts. By this model, you’ll only pay when a consumer clicks on an advert that you’ve targeted at them.

That online shopper will be genuinely interested in your store and your products and will therefore be more likely actually to make a purchase from your website. 

7. Social Media

In today’s world, the majority of people consume the majority of their media on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

These channels are invaluable for businesses that are interested in building a following, sharing new products, and creating a buzz around their firms. They are even more important for businesses that are focused on the younger demographics, as young people are more likely to develop their shopping habits and interests via the social media that they use. 

Developing a social media audience can take time. You’ll need to be active on the platforms that you are registered with, and that activity should also be fun and engaging rather than overtly promotional.

To gather more people into your orbit, you should share your social media pages with shoppers on your website and recommend they follow you for discounts, deals, or exclusive coupons that they can redeem on their next visit to your website.

Customer Loyalty

8. Customer Loyalty

Next up is customer loyalty, which is a crucial element to getting any business to profit in the long term. You’ll gain the loyalty of customers by offering a good service and by impressing them with your products and your prices.

If you undermine their trust or deliver something that disappoints them, you’ll be unlikely to see them returning to shop at your store. As such, you need to focus on service delivery as a first step to gaining customer loyalty and return customs. 

But there is so much more that you can do to encourage shoppers to return to your store. You can set up coupons, as mentioned above so that they enjoy a discount on their next shop. You can offer them exclusive deals and offers, which you can send to them via email, to make them feel special.

Most importantly, perhaps, you could offer a loyalty card that rewards them every time they shop in your store. 

9. Constant Updates

Perhaps the most important tip of all is for ambitious eCommerce stores to never rest. You shouldn’t leave your store static for more than a month without an update, a marketing drive, a new product line, or a new discount system.

All of these updates will help you to stay ahead of your competition while ensuring that you appear to be a modern and forward-thinking business. 

As soon as you rest, sit back and watch the sales roll in, you’ll be letting your competitors come back at you and take away some of your market shares. So it is imperative that you work as hard as you can to keep ahead of your rivals, using a combination of slick sales and marketing as well as the other tips shared above to keep driving sales on your site.

Increasing Ecommerce Sales Fast

Increasing Ecommerce Sales Fast

Bear all of these tips in mind when you are searching for new ways to boost your eCommerce sales online without losing profits:

  • Responsive website.
  • Attractive layout.
  • Stock photos.
  • eCommerce platforms.
  • Offline marketing.
  • Targeted adverts.
  • Social media.
  • Customer loyalty.
  • Constant updates.

Each one of these eCommerce tips will offer you a slight advantage over your competitors in the quest to gain more market share in your niche.

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