What Are The Top Tips For Making The Most of Your eCommerce Store?

Increasing your online sales is a primary objective of all businesses, both small and large. From holidays and hats to cakes and candles and everything in-between, getting people to buy your product is an absolute must.

Looking for some extra inspiration to help take your sales from so-so to stratospheric? Why not take a look at these top tips for making the most of your eCommerce shop?

Consider your copy

Whilst it is tempting to provide poetic and lengthy descriptions of your products, the best thing to do is to put yourself in the position of your potential customer and review your copy. Is it straightforward and does it portray your product in the best possible manner?

Ensure that your copy ‘does what it says on the tin’ and that your copy has purpose, is authoritative and makes your brand seem approachable. This can be applied not only to your product descriptions, but your overall website copy, search engine copy, emails and social media.

Ensure that you optimise your website content

Utilising SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is essential as search engines such as Google, like website content to be search engine friendly. They rank search results based on authority, relevancy and other factors. Try to optimise for search terms that leverage a good volume of traffic but are still reasonably easy to attain high rankings for.

Consider optimising ranking individual product and category pages for less competitive terms that your competitors may not be optimising for. Not sure what keywords to optimise for? Use tools like Google’s keyword tool and Google Analytics and undertake research as to what keywords have the best balance of volume versus competition.

Reduce obstacles in the checkout process

Take yourself through the checkout process and identify any potential pitfalls that might prevent a customer from completing a sale. Go through every step and make notes of where you think there is an unnecessary step which could be removed. According to recent reports, $4 Trillion worth of online merchandise was abandoned in incomplete shopping carts last year – don’t let your online shop be one of them.

Create a sense of urgency

As consumers, we tend to respond positively to opportunities and incentives that create a sense of urgency. This could be a limited-edition product that you just can’t live without or perhaps it is a time-sensitive special offer.

Make sure that you communicate this urgency effectively to your customers both on the website shop, on social media and your other marketing collateral.

Think outside the box

As a business owner it is important to think outside the box to ensure that your eCommerce business continues to thrive. Why not take inspiration from successful people from other walks of life such as JK Rowling, Usain Bolt, Roger Federer and more?

A great example of a true success story is Bill Perkins who was a complete unknown in the
poker playing community. He went on to compete in some of the richest tournaments in the world. This demonstrates that sometimes you just need to take a leap of faith whether this is in business or other areas of your life.

Utilise PPC and ad extensions

Not using PPC? For those that are not using this form of online advertising, it is something
definitely worth considering. Unlike offline advertising such as newspaper and magazine
advertising, with Pay Per Click (PPC) you only pay when a prospective customer clicks through to your shop or website – so ultimately you are paying for a successful visit.

Ad extensions are a form of PPC where you can increase the size of your PPC advert as you are offering the prospective customer additional routes through to the website. You can direct the user through to a variety of different landing pages giving them more choice, and you as a business owner more choice to channel the customer which will hopefully encourage a better conversion rate. The best thing is it doesn’t cost any extra and it increases the click-through rate of your advert.

It takes a lot of courage, self-belief, initiative and skill to run a business, but especially to run a successful business. Whether you are running a brand-new business start-up or are an established business looking to get some fresh ideas, we hope that these tips will help and inspire you. Why not start making a difference today?

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