In 2019, E-commerce websites are the fast growing trend of stores. Ecommerce sales are expected to account for 13.7 percent of retail sales worldwide this year and the number is increasing by 2% annually.

However, opening an E-commerce store is easy (although time consuming), opening a successful E-commerce store is a whole different battle and following these simple tips, we can help your store become successful.

Know Your Product & Users.

This seems simple, but it’s an overlooked aspect. Each industry has a different demographic and products rarely sell themselves (field of dreams anyone?). Depending on your product, you may have seasonal peaks, weekly peaks or peaks in your products around certain events. Research your competitors and take notes of how they market the products on their website, social media and newsletters.

For example, one of our clients sells health products and changes both her homepage, images and text to be more inviting during the summer. She also will highlight different seasonal products such as Sunscreen, Lotion and other seasonal products. This may seem like a straightforward process but it takes time to research the proper flow of traffic for your products and how to adjust it accordingly.

Are you using analytics? Make sure to see where your traffic is coming from and how your website is being utilized. You may notice an increase/decrease in bounce rate and referral domain during seasonal peaks.

User Experience

You’ve got your products set, you know your products and industry but is your website cumbersome? It’s easy to become blind to any potential issues your website may be facing unless you are seeing it from a customers perspective.

Issues such as excessive load time, broken links, bad content and hidden links are all important factors that may deter a customer from using your website. On average, 80 percent of people stop doing business with a company because of poor customer experience.

Gtmetrix (https://gtmetrix.com) is a popular tool to show you loads times, and issues with the speed, images and scripts for your website. We suggest checking it out to gather a snapshot of how your website is performing. Check your website host, are they up to speed or have you outgrown your website hosting?

A tip for helping with better user experience is to get fresh eyes. During our beta tests with e-commerce websites, we incorporate focus groups that are tasked with finding a certain product, and completing a task in a limited time. Watching a potential customer use your website could lead to some surprising results!

Listen to your customers, they will provide the most valuable feedback you can ever receive.

Engagement

How do you get visitors to become customers? And how do you get customers to return to your store? Engaging with customers can take a one-time purchase and create a regular customer. Consumers are most likely to trust a business that makes it easy to contact people at the company.

Engaging with a customer can be a largely automated process but takes time to properly setup and engage. The most common methods are social media, newsletters, and follow up emails.

Social Media

Social Media is fairly easy to understand as an engagement model. Regular posts on social media will help build your brand, remind customers of past purchases and highlight any specials you may have. Social media will also help friends & family of your past customer to become “likes” or subscribers to your social media channels.

One great tip for social media is to encourage users to tweet, or share a product they recently purchased for a discount off their next purchase. This provides the customer with a great incentive and gets your store great exposure.

Newsletters

Newsletters are a great way to keep your visitors engaged. Creating several signups forms for your website including the option to signup during checkout will help boost your audience. Sending out regular emails is important as well (but not too often, you’ll annoy your customers) with great content.

Create a flow chart for your newsletters, you can use your newsletter to redirect customers to a product or blog post on your website encouraging a high click-through rate and better engagement. Just make sure to watch your open & close rates to make sure your newsletters are effective.

Followup E-Mails

A followup email is a great way to help close a sale, or create another one. Followup emails can be setup using your favourite newsletter provider (Mailchimp for example offers this service) and integrated into your website directly. Woocommerce provides a fantastic plugin that will help you create triggers for your followup emails. (https://woocommerce.com/products/follow-up-emails/)

Abandoned cart emails are a great way to capture lost sales. You can create an automatic email to send out after a user has abandoned their cart for a set period of time. This email can include a coupon or just a simple “feeler” to see if you can help them with any questions. Abandoned cart follow-up emails have an average open rate of 45 percent. That’s 45% of potential lost sales recaptured.

As always, a great store depends on several factors. A good website design, a good designer, great products and engagement.