Ecommerce is an always-changing business, as long as the digital world and devices are changing and becoming more and more practical, an online store must keep up with that, in order to be relevant as well as closer to its potential customers.
In this article, we’ll explain the most up-to-date timeless ecommerce tips, 10 tips for you to keep your online store relevant, and boost your performance.
Let’s start!
Timeless Ecommerce Tips
Make a good first impression
On the first hand, it takes about 50 milliseconds for users to decide if they like your site or not, and on the other hand, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. For this, you want to be as creative as possible, because a first impression can last for years, and it helps you with gaining lifetime customers.
You need to invest in the best design possible, a reliable ecommerce platform like Woocommerce or BigCommerce, the right site structure so you deliver a nice and visually comfortable experience for users.
Source: www.karooclivias.co.za
Be Customer-Centric
The biggest shortcoming of ecommerce business is the inability to let their customers touch, feel and try the product before making a decision. While there is currently no solution for solving this issue, you can cover this deficiency in other areas of your business.
Some of the best things that attract users and keeps them attached to your site are offering the appropriate pricing, giving free shipping and making the purchase process as short as possible, in addition to making the checkout process easy with simplified shopping carts.
These extra services and offers keep your customer engaged with your site and motivates them to make a purchase.
Offering eco-friendly shipping is also a good practice, it can shift your brand image. People like to support companies that are doing good and your customers will appreciate that you give them a chance to be eco-friendly.
Be mobile-friendly
A recent study by mobileinsurance.com has revealed that the average person spends almost 100 mins a day on their mobile device. Do you think you were there during that time? Or let me ask you, is your site mobile friendly so people can browser it during that 100 min per day?
Bill Siwicki of Internet Retailer references Goldman Sachs, saying, “Tablets will play an increasingly important role as worldwide consumer spending via mobile jumps from $204 billion in 2014 to $626 billion in 2018…”
That means if you aren’t building ecommerce businesses with mobile in mind, you may be irrelevant in three to five years. Be next to your potential customers, if they’re on mobile, that’s where you should be too.
Source: www.bredekamp.co.za
Align yourself with social media
Neglecting social media or being socially absent, is one of the worst decisions ever for your online business. In fact, social media plays the role of the heart of your business, as it gives you an endless uninterrupted glance into the lives of your customers.
You shouldn’t only involve a community manager, it is preferred that you also be present there, social media can be a core of decision-making for your business.
Try Buffer or Later for automating your social media marketing. It is an incredibly powerful marketing app that automatically fits your products into compelling, professionally designed layouts and promotes these on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr.
It keeps track of each channel’s best practices and schedules the frequency and timings of posts accordingly. And if you’re interested in growing your Instagram followers and engagement, then it’s a must-have app.
OrangeTwig’s InstaSuccess ToolKit will help you get the right hashtags for your posts, make your posts clickable and comment on posts – while being fully compliant with Instagram’s policies.
Talking about Instagram and its evolution to support ecommerce business, there was an announcement that the Instagram company is creating a 50 person team in New York just to focus on ecommerce features for the app. If there was ever a time to double down on social, it’s now and it’s Instagram.
Here are a few quick ecommerce tips for you:
1. Post regular content, 3 images a day, daily stories, and weekly live content
2. Comment and like on competitors highly engaged followers
3. Follow and unfollow competitors highly engaged followers
4. Leverage influencer marketing to hack growth from other paid account promotions, shoutcart.com is a great tool for this!
There is even plenty of other methods to grow your Shopify business hijacking social media. You can check some cool creative ideas at Whole Design Studios.
Use more photos
According to a research made by 3M, the corporation behind Post-it Notes, visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text.
Since 65% of people are visual learners according to the Social Science Research Network, one of the best ways to drive the message to your customers is through visual content. One way to do this is to use more pictures on your site.
It’s no surprise then that HubSpot’s social media scientist Dan Zarrella found tweets with images are 94% more likely to be retweeted than tweets without. In brief, provide users with photos that stick to their memory. “A picture is worth a thousand words” –Arthur Bisbane.
Source: www.amazon.com
Stay on top of SEO
As the ecommerce economy experiences rapid growth, more and more businesses will be entering this increasingly crowded space. A list of 1,000 tips on SEO wouldn’t be enough to even focus on the things you should do in order to increase your position in search engines.
In 2013 there were 2.2 trillion Google searches, but 90% of the users clicked only the first 3 results, so if your product is ranked last on your page you rely only on the rest 10% to find your site.
You should think about optimizing your titles, URL, and descriptions, provide useful and fresh content, improve your website’s loading time, implement Google authorship and register your website with Google and Bing webmaster tools.
Building a website without SEO is like building a road without direction.
Use Live Chat
Using live chat is a method that helps your potential customers make a decision faster. Nowadays ecommerce is strong and growing, but nothing beats the human interaction in an offline store. You need to make your users feel like they’re interacting with humans, not a machine, live chat humanizes your site.
The live chat strategy makes your user feel like he’s in a real store, having all his questions answered by a shop assistant. You should place your live chat button in the most visible spot. You want it to be easy to notice and visible at all times, whether the user is scrolling or reading a product review.
Here are some live chat statistics, this might be more convincing:
21% of online shoppers are tempted to buy from a site that offers live chat. 46% think this is the perfect communication medium, and 62% of buyers that have used live chat are more likely to buy again from the same website. In conclusion, talk to them, don’t let them feel like they’re interacting with a robot.
Source: tawk.to
Create Call To Action & Sign-up Buttons
Avoid lengthy sign-up forms that can take a few pages or so before visitors can successfully register to your site. As an ecommerce site, you don’t actually need to know their address, phone number and what kind of work they do.
A simple email address and a password are just all you need. You should never underestimate the power of call-to-action buttons as this helps in building higher conversion rates and improving site usability.
Make these call-to-action buttons stand out. Think about the button size, color, font, and positioning. It has to be very clear so it would stand out from your website background.
Source: www.blog.optimizely.com
Your data is safe with us
You cannot tell that your ecommerce website is complete until you have proper content management and personal detail security.
When human interaction lacks, you should make your shoppers feel confident about buying products at your site, because more and more customers are extremely careful before placing an order, so you have to assure them that your site is a reputable site that has features to protect the privacy of its customers.
These techniques will reduce the risk of online fraud: picking a secure platform, using an SSL certificate, tracking all your orders, asking for strong passwords, and running a PCI test.
Shopify uses its strong security measures as one of its best features. They have many pages that provide details of their security strategy and a specific page where you can report safety hiccups and possibly get rewarded for it.
Use the right tools
Plugging the right tools into your online store is one of the critical tips that would boost your online efficiency. For you to get the best of your customers, have clear and positive data and numbers (Conversion, Analytics, Revenue, Retention, Retargeting, etc.)
For this, I advise you to check Shopify App Bundles: www.shopifyappbundle.com in which you will find the perfect tools for your online store. Once you use the right tools, making the best out of the market, it is in your palm.
Conclusion
When your customers do not have a physical experience with your business, and they cannot see or touch an ecommerce store in person, they are only left to rely on the functionality and feeling comfortable with the features your online store offers.
I believe these 10 Timeless Tips would make your online store more functional as well as practical, offering its visitors the best features so a body of trust is built between you two. If you’re still in the building process, here are some great tips on how to build the perfect ecommerce website.
Do you have in mind any other timeless tips we didn’t mention in this article? Share with us your ideas in the comments’ section, we’d love to hear what you have in mind about how to ameliorate the eCommerce business.
(Note: Do you know InterWeb SA? It provides a powerful web hosting and domain registration at a great price. Click here and create a web hosting account now.)