A Killer Guide to Improving Your Online Shopping Business August 2, 2016My BusinessOff

If you own an eCommerce business, then I’m sure you want to improve it. Even if business is going good and you’re proud of your achievements, you’ll still want to improve your site. Why? Because higher quality means strong sales; and… better business means you’re on your way to becoming an expert in your field.

Here are some of the best ways to improve your eCommerce website.

Include a blog. If you’ve made an online store, then you’ve probably already spent some time researching the ways in which you can drive traffic to your site. I’m not going to be boring you further with the same old advice for getting your website to be flooded by visitors. But there is a particular piece of advice here that most eCommerce businesses feel don’t apply to them. And that’s the hosting of a blog.

What use could an online store have for a blog? Well, there’s the fact that having a well-kept blog can help drive traffic to your site in droves. But it can also help you enhance the customer experience by providing them with relevant information and opinions. You could hire writers to host reviews of particular items, for example. Of course, you’re probably going to want to stick to hosting positive reviews. As long as they’re honest! You could post blogs about commercial or technological trends. This could pique your customers’ interest in related items available on your store.

Improve your fulfillment processes. One of the biggest signs of a great online store is in their delivery performance. The success of Amazon can definitely be traced, in a large part, to how quick their average delivery time is. But it’s not just about how fast the delivery is. They’re also famed for the quality of their packaging. For how simple it is to process a return. For how efficient their storage capabilities are.

All of these things are part of what we refer to as the fulfillment process. That is, the process of fulfilling the order — actually getting it from you to the customer! One of the biggest problems that new businesses in this arena have is that their fulfillment process often isn’t up to scratch. Now, very few customers will be expecting you to reach Amazon’s levels of delivery perfection. But in our age, eCommerce fulfillment is expected to be of exceptional quality. If you’re having trouble, see if you can get some expert help with your fulfillment processes!

Perfect your mobile version. You have a mobile version of your online store, right? Mobile phones have been the most popular way to browse the Internet since last year. That means that if your online store doesn’t work properly on a smartphone that you could be losing a lot of business. You can’t afford to cut corners when it comes to the functionality of your website on a mobile phone.

There are two ways you can optimize the mobile phone experience. Having said that, you should really be engaging with both instead of choosing just one. The first step is to the make sure that the website itself is optimized for mobile phone viewing when it’s being used in a mobile phone browser. Have you ever opened Amazon on a mobile phone? You’ll notice that it doesn’t the look the same as it does on a computer. The browser can tell when the user is using a mobile phone, and redirects the user accordingly. The other way, of course, is to create an app that your customers can download.

Have more sales. This seems like way too obvious a tip, right? Well, I’m not sure how obvious it is to a lot of people. The reason I’m unsure is because there simply aren’t enough sales on the majority of e-commerce stores! Another reason I’m including this tip is because people may not understand exactly how to have a sale. That is to say that many business owners aren’t sure what they should put on sale, or why they should put that particular thing on sale.

Basically, it has a lot to do with what we call your sell-through rate. Not sure what that is? Don’t worry — an alarming number of e-commerce business owners don’t! It’s a fairly basic bit of retail mathematics, though. Basically, it’s a good way of calculating if you need to buy more of a particular item or sell more of that item. Let’s say you buy 100 guitars. After a month, you’ve sold 25 of them. Assuming your referred period to examine is month, that would mean you have a sell-through rate of 25 percent. This is a fairly solid rate, but you could consider lowering the price a little. If your rate is below 10 percent, you’ll want to consider a strong sale on the item.

Photo by Jurgenfr | Shutterstock

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