Even if your e-commerce business is going well, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. Here are five ideas of ways you can take it from good to better.
1. Invest in quality website content
Your website is your storefront, your shop window and your calling card. You want it to look its best at all times.
Quality content can make the difference between a completed sale and a page abandonment. And you probably know this from your own experience as an online shopper. You access the page, the product looks like it’s what you want, but you don’t buy it — because there’s only one product photo, or the photos cannot be zoomed in, or the product description is faulty.
So, make sure your website content is appealing and detailed enough. Pay attention to:
- Website design — it should be simple, clear, with colours that represent your product.
- Images — product photos must be high quality and varied, showing the product from all angles, and highlighting details as well as giving an overall view. Other images must also be high quality, and pertinent to your service or product. The same goes for videos.
- Text — all text must be free of typos, and product descriptions must be detailed and honest. If you are selling in a foreign language, make sure to use a good translation agency so your texts are properly translated.
2. Create a strong About Us page
Your About Us page is the first page a new prospect will go to if they are curious in learning more about your brand. It’s your chance to reward their curiosity, earn their interest and establish the basis of a relationship.
Unfortunately, too many online businesses don’t have an About Us page, or else they fill it with generic information about their company. But if you are shopping for sportswear, do you really care to know how many square metres the company’s warehouse has? Besides, people relate to other people, not to organizations. So instead of talking generic and technical, share your company’s origins, its story, its values. Your About Us page should answer these questions:
- Who started the company, and why?
- How did the company evolve?
- Who is the owner now, and what is their business worldview?
Learning this will help your prospect get to know you better and trust you more.
3. Maintain high quality across all pages
Many businesses invest in having a great homepage, but don’t bother to keep other pages at the same quality level. However, homepages are often not the most viewed on ecommerce websites, because many prospects enter these websites through product category pages.
This is why you should make sure your product category pages are also high quality. Invest not only in good design and photos, but also in concise and reliable text. Text that really helps your prospect understand that kind of product, and how to choose the one that better suits his needs, will set your landing pages apart from those of other ecommerce businesses.
4. Market in different channels
Not everyone uses all kinds of media, so if you only advertise in one platform, you are certainly missing out on potential sales. Research your target audience to find out how you can best reach them, then invest in marketing in all those channels.
Maybe Facebook ads are the best way to reach your middle-aged prospects, but Google ads will work better with people above that age range. And have you checked if print catalogues are still a thing in the country you are selling to?
5. Internationalize your online store
If your ecommerce project is going well, and you want it to grow even more, you should probably consider expanding abroad.
The first step is to check what neighbouring countries have commercial agreements with your country, so that it would be easier and cheaper to export there. The next step is to understand where in those countries there’s a demand for your product — or for some other product that you currently don’t offer, but that you could start producing.
And when you do set up a foreign language version of your website, make sure to use reliable translation services that will do justice to your webpages and your products.
There are many other strategies to improve your ecommerce — but these five are a good starting point.
