Doing business has changed dramatically since the inception of the ecommerce market. Customers nowadays no longer need to visit brick-and-mortar stores to shop, all thanks to a wide array of available online stores and platforms.
While ecommerce made shopping a streamlined, easy experience for consumers, there’s still a lot of room for improvement. No matter the brand, big or small, there are still challenges in setting up, maintaining, and getting traction for your ecommerce site. Aside from these, it is also crucial to ensure visibility, quality visitor traffic, and excellent customer experience.
Visibility
With the ecommerce boom, the online world grew into a jungle—attracting millions of sellers and catering to millions of consumers, offering an endless range of products and services to choose from. Although market expansion is generally a good thing, it can be a sticky ordeal for businesses to attract visitors to their website and convert them into paying customers.
In line with that, visibility makes or breaks an online business. It’s one of the key factors to rising above the digital noise, scaling operations, and keeping your competitors at bay.
Quality website traffic and visitor conversion
Developing products, building the website, and maintaining the ecommerce shop is challenging in itself, but attracting the right people at the right time and converting them into customers is an even more difficult feat.
Aside from figuring out the right market to target, retailers must also consider where their target audience is, how to get their attention effectively and lead them to the website, and finally convert leads to sales without blowing the marketing budget.
Customer Experience
Providing an exceptional customer experience can be the key differentiator that separates your ecommerce shop from the rest, giving you a leg up in the competition. Additionally, it aids in creating brand loyalty, making it easier to achieve ecommerce success.
In line with this, it is crucial to do a thorough health check on your website regularly—below are a few simple ways to optimize your ecommerce website and provide smooth sailing service to your customers:
3 Tips to Boost Your Ecommerce Site Performance
Tip #1: Provide a platform that caters to customers who prefer to shop using their mobile devices
While there are still people who shop from their desktop computers and laptops, there has been a huge spike in customers using mobile phones and tablets to shop online. In fact, according to Quicksprout, 63% of millennials regularly purchase online via their mobile devices.
With that, it is important to make sure your ecommerce website is mobile-friendly and optimized to maximize profits. Aside from designing a mobile-friendly website, you can also consider building a mobile app for your online business just like big brands like Zara, Zalora, Shopee, and Lazada—this way, it is more convenient for people to shop as they’ll just be one tap away.
On top of that, with a mobile app, you can better track your customers and analyze data to optimize your site further and offer more precise personalization.
Tip #2: Feature product recommendations to the right customers at the right time
Similarly, the product recommendation feature is also a key factor in running a well-optimized online store. According to The Good, 31% of ecommerce sales revenues were from product recommendations. On average, customers also saw that relevant and accurate product recommendations influenced 12% of their overall purchases.
This type of personalization has been proven effective time and again, and it plays a huge role in boosting conversion rates and the overall success of ecommerce sites. Aside from hitting your sales target, product recommendations can also encourage brand loyalty and repeat customers.
Tip #3: Ensure that the checkout process is streamlined
It doesn’t matter if your products and services are one-of-a-kind or that you’ve put a lot of effort into designing your ecommerce website for customers to navigate it with ease because everything boils down to how streamlined the checkout process is.
According to The Good, seven out of ten visitors abandon the checkout page without buying, losing millions of dollars in potential revenue per annum due to cart abandonment. While you can never ensure zero percent cart abandonment, you can still take measures to minimize it, including offering your customers an excellent, hassle-free checkout experience. A few notable tips include:
- Provide customers an option to checkout as a guest rather than forcing them to create an account.
- Include a range of payment options for customers to choose from—including, cash on delivery, Mastercard, PayPal, PayMaya, and Visa.
- With registered users, provide an option to save their data and pre-fill forms the next time they purchase.
Key Takeaway
Aside from the aforementioned recommendations, you must also prioritize speed as time delays can drastically affect sales. According to Shopify Plus, 79% of customers are less likely to purchase from ecommerce websites with substandard site performance.
About the Author: Gladine is an Online PR Specialist of Spiralytics Inc. — a digital marketing agency. She used to work as a freelance video content producer. Her love for content creation led her to step into a career in digital marketing. For Gladine, a balance between creativity and analytics is what makes work exciting. She likes to spend her free time enjoying a cup of coffee in local cafes.
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