Running an ecommerce business isn’t easy work. Of course, you know that: you’ve likely already experienced struggles equal to your triumphs no matter how long you’ve been selling online. The beauty of the modern age, though, is that there are endless resources at your fingertips.
Because the ecommerce world is so large (and centralized on the Internet), there are lots of experts that have shared their best tips on the web. We’ve collected some of the greatest business advice and ecommerce hacks from the people who really know their stuff. Whether you’re looking to get a leg up on your competitors or simply improve your own business practices for your own sake, we’ve got you covered.
Start using countdowns
The days of just being able to sell good items are over. Now you need to employ certain tricks in order to convince customers that they should shop with you rather than anyone else. Whether that’s a positive or a negative thing is up to you to decide, but it does indeed open up a world of psychological tools that you should consider using. One of the most effective is the sales countdown. By putting a small countdown on your items, customers will know that the best time to buy is right now. This will prevent them from putting off purchasing – and inevitably forgetting about it later.
Stop skimping on your copy
In the online world, you need to utilize everything that you can to convince customers to buy from you. One of the often-neglected ways of doing this is crafting great copy for your business. You should have copy with a solid, consistent voice throughout each step of the shopping experience. If you don’t feel confident about writing it yourself, don’t be afraid of hiring a copywriter. It’s easy enough to contract out a writer for a small bit of writing, and they will make small improvements that can have major benefits on the experience of your shoppers.
Deal with your bad reviews
Getting a bad review can happen to even the best shops. Maybe the item shipped slowly due to reasons outside of your control; maybe the customer just didn’t like the product because they wrongfully expected something else. But even if the bad review doesn’t reflect your business, you still need to do something about it. Even just a few bad reviews can push away potential business. One way to help deal with those dissatisfied customers is to reach out to them personally to see if you can do anything to change their opinion. If successful, they may just change their reviews.
Utilize science in your sales
Building credibility among your customers is really important if you want them to believe that they should buy from you. If you can convince them that you are an absolute authority in the niche that you are selling in, they are far more likely to trust you and want to buy products. One way to do that is to incorporate science in your marketing. Whether it’s your website copy, your product descriptions, or anything else, consider tossing in some scientific facts and research that backs up the quality of your inventory. Even just a small figure can go a long way.
Show that other customers like your products
Reviews are perhaps the most important thing in the ecommerce world. If you aren’t getting positive reviews, you basically have no chance of competing with people selling similar items. But many sellers get good reviews and then do nothing with them. That’s a mistake! There’s a big opportunity to flip your positive reviews into powerful marketing tools for your company. Put your best reviews or testimonials on your website to show that your business leaves customers feeling satisfied and happy. It’s an easy way of invoking social proof, and you don’t even have to write up any copy.
Display the results of your products
Here’s a trick that won’t work for every industry, but it can be very effective for any product that makes a visual difference (cosmetics, decorations, et cetera). On the page for an item, show off pictures that demonstrate the actual result of the product. Plenty of sellers show the product itself, but few show what the product actually does. A before and after photo comparison works wonders here, as it directly shows how the item will impact the customer’s life. People are much more likely to buy something if they can see how it will benefit them.
Try out user testing
User testing can really help you hone in on the most effective marketing for your online shop. The best way to do this for most sellers is to pick out two groups and present each group with a different presentation of the same product. Pay close attention to which group provides a more enthusiastic reaction. If you don’t feel like getting too in depth with user testing, don’t worry. You can do a kind of testing called “hallway testing” where you essentially just run two different ideas among groups of your friends and colleagues.
Turn one customer into two
Coupons really make the world go ‘round. Customers love receiving them, and businesses can really benefit from the increased purchasing that happens from those motivated customers. One way to take advantage of this fact is to offer coupons to anyone who brings in extra business to you. Implementing a basic referral program is super simple: just tell customers that they will get some kind of reward for referring another buyer to your business. The best way to do this is via a code you send in a confirmation email, but you can also reach out to customers directly and personally.
Use a free shipping progress bar
Many shops encourage their customers to purchase more by offering free shipping costs once they hit a certain threshold – generally around $100 spent. This is a great tactic, but it can fail when customers aren’t aware of how much they’ve spent or how close they are to getting their shipping costs covered. To deal with this, many sellers have started incorporating a “free shipping progress bar” of sorts. This progress bar will tell customers how much more they need to spend to hit free shipping, giving them a clear and actionable goal of how much more they should buy.
Add a live chat function to your site
Most customers these days really love the convenience and ease of shopping online. But Internet stores are at a disadvantage when compared to the personal touch offered by brick-and-mortar shops. To combat this, add a chat function to your website. Yes, you’ll need to have someone ready to respond to messages at any moment, but it has helped multiple ecommerce businesses gain way more traffic. Buyers love knowing that they can immediately have any of their questions answered. Lots of business gets lost as people try to find clues in a confusing FAQ section.
Harness the power of videos
Some consumers love to read. When they get to a product description, they gravitate towards the copy rather than the images. But for the more visual-minded customers that you might have, videos can be even more powerful than pictures. Simple videos can break down the features of a product that might be otherwise confusing to some people. If you can use a video to make your items as understandable and approachable as possible, way more shoppers will be likely to buy. People don’t want to spend money on things they don’t understand, after all.
Encourage customers to not leave
Getting people to your ecommerce shop is one thing, but you also need them to stay and purchase things. The majority of shoppers who end up on your site probably won’t actually buy anything, and that’s okay – but you should try as hard as possible to keep their business. That’s what exit-intent pop-ups are for. A small window that pops up when someone tries to leave your site can help encourage them to stay. This is particularly effective if you offer them some kind of incentive: think free shipping or 10% off their next purchase.
Include cards asking for follows
Social media engagement is becoming increasingly important for every ecommerce business. If you want to keep up, you basically need to have active Facebook and Instagram pages. But how do you actually get followers? Well, one way is to recruit people that have already purchased from you. To do this, include a personalized card with every package that you send that has links to your different social media accounts. If they’re happy with what they’ve received, they’ll be likely to follow you for future updates. Plus, who doesn’t like getting a nice card with their purchase?
Guarantee satisfaction
It seems like more and more companies these days are offering some kind of guarantee to their customers. Lots of businesses have even made this their calling card. This is because it’s actually a great marketing tool. Telling customers that they can return a product if they aren’t satisfied shows your own confidence in what you’re selling, and it also puts customers at ease and makes them feel like their purchase won’t be risky. Even if they do end up returning what they bought (which is relatively rare), they’ll still have a positive opinion of you for being trustworthy and helpful.
Offer customers personalized recommendations
The power of the algorithm can’t be understated. You know how Spotify will use your homepage to automatically recommend you new music based on your listening habits? You can apply this same idea to your ecommerce shop. A “recommended for you” section will make users feel like they are being given a personalized experience, something that is very powerful in this day and age. Of course, actually automating a recommendation process is difficult, so you may need to get some outside help to pull it off. With that said, it’s definitely something worth considering.
Partner with influencers
Traditional marketing just doesn’t work anymore. Social media has changed everything, and all shops need to adapt with that in mind. If you aren’t already using social media influencers, now is the time to start. Many top shops report that they have reached new levels of success by simply partnering with people who are popular on social media. There are multiple ways to do this, but one is to offer free products to influencers in exchange for posts on their feed. If they have a lot of followers, you can get a lot of new eyes on your business.
Do research on your customers
Lots of ecommerce businesses invest too much effort into understanding what new customers might look like. Instead, try out researching the customers that you already have. Look at the reviews they’re leaving; check online discussions customers are having about your items; reach directly out to them to ask them questions. If you can get a really clear picture of who is already purchasing from you, you then know what market segments to seek out for recruiting new customers. This research can also help you improve your business as a whole if you can discover what your current customers like and dislike.
Change up your checkout process
Interestingly enough, getting someone to the checkout process isn’t actually the endgame in the ecommerce world. You need them to finish checking out. That might sound pedantic, but there’s an important distinction there. Many customers can get overwhelmed, distracted, or bored during a lengthy and complicated checkout process that requires them to create an account and enter a lot of info. To prevent this loss of business, consider adding a “Checkout as Guest” option. You can also allow customers to check out with their PayPal info to lessen the amount of info they have to manually enter.
Use gamification to your advantage
Human beings love games. This fact can be used to make your customers do certain things like enter their email or use a coupon. Many online shops have started incorporating a “spin the wheel” type game that offers up deals such as free shipping in exchange for their email address. As a customer, this is a lot of fun. As a business, you get another contact to add to your marketing list as well as an excited customer that is ready to buy something with their brand new coupon – if they win the spin, that is.
Use AfterPay (or a similar service)
There are lots of reasons why someone might decide not to buy something that they want. But if they really do want it, they are probably opting to not get it because it costs too much. That’s where services like AfterPay come in. They let customers split up their payments over time, meaning the initial investment is lower for them. Shops that have incorporated payment systems like this have seen non-trivial increases in business conversion. It’s relatively easy to set up, too. You might be surprised at how many new customers you get from incorporating something like this.
Make the purchase urgent
Every ecommerce business struggles with those customers who decide to put something in their cart and then opt to not actually buy it. This often happens because there is no sense of urgency. They figure they can just purchase it later, and then they forget about it once a few days pass. To avoid this, you can add in a message that tells them how many units of that product are left in your inventory. There are also other ways to establish urgency: offer free shipping with a time limit, state how many other people are looking at a certain item, et cetera.
Consider SMS marketing
Email marketing is a cornerstone for ecommerce businesses. But there are other ways to send out advertisements to your customers. SMS is a largely underutilized marketing method, and you can definitely find a boost in engagement by trying it out. While it’s unlikely to generate a majority of your business, it can bring in a small amount of revenue for a low investment. There are lots of SMS marketing programs out there, so try out a few and see which work best for you.
Bring in an SEO expert
Search engines are complicated and mysterious. Unfortunately, they are incredibly important for every ecommerce business in existence. No matter where you’re selling – Shopify, Amazon, or on an independent site – you need to make sure that your business is optimized for search engines. This is called SEO, and you really need to have quite a bit of knowledge to perfect it. While you can certainly work on your own SEO, we recommend shelling out the resources to hire an expert in the field. The amount of business you can bring in by increasing your search engine performance is stunning.
Take cues from other newsletters
Having a great newsletter is one of the best ways to make sure that your previous customers keep coming back to you rather than your competitors. But you have to remember that your competitors are sending out newsletters as well. That means you need to make sure that your newsletters are better than theirs! A simple way to do this is to sign up for the emails that other companies send out. You’ll then receive them and can make note of what they’re doing that you should be doing – as well as what you should NOT be doing.
Get content on other sites
One excellent marketing tactic that many ecommerce sites have utilized through the years is a company blog. It keeps customers informed about deals and news. But these blogs rarely reach new customers, meaning they are more successful in retention rather than recruitment. If you want to introduce new buyers to your shop (that should always be the goal!), try partnering with other websites. Many popular blogs allow you to partner with them and share your own content with their audiences. Reach out to some sites within your industry to see if you could write guest posts for their blogs.
Get in the holiday spirit
You don’t need ecommerce experts to tell you that holidays are major spending times throughout the year. But do you actually take full advantage of this fact? If you want to capitalize even harder on the holiday spending sprees, start creating themed campaigns around different holidays and seasons. This can be done in marketing, in copy, or even in product selection and packaging. A holistic approach can be very effective here, and customers love to feel like they’re part of a big movement… even if it’s relatively generic. Don’t rethink the wheel here; just get into the holiday spirit!
Stand out by using stories
Okay, you have great products. Your business is efficient and solid. But customers still don’t seem to care. If this describes your situation, it might be because you aren’t offering them a story. Many consumers just won’t be swayed by all the facts stating that they should buy from you; they need a story. In your brand presentation, try to think about what makes your business unique. If you can tell a tale that captures the imagination of your customers, they will feel invested beyond just the transactional component of buying something. Once this happens, a real connection is formed.
Get back lost business with retargeting ads
Have you ever been looking at a product online and then, a few websites later, noticed ads for that very same product? This is what is called a retargeting ad, and many ecommerce businesses use them to retrieve lost business. They make customers reconsider their decision and potentially go back to buy the thing that they had already given up on. It’s easier than finding completely new customers, and many programs allow you to easily set these kinds of ads up. If you aren’t already using retargeting ads, definitely try them out.
Be as honest as possible
You know what they say: “honesty is the best policy.” You might think that this doesn’t apply to ecommerce businesses, but you can actually use honesty to allow your customers to have a clear view of what they are purchasing. Imagine you’re selling workout equipment. Take this example: “Our products won’t magically transform you into a bodybuilder. But they will help you get there along with plenty of your own hard work.” It begins with honesty and then transitions into describing what your products are actually capable of. This builds trust and respect among your customers.
Start upselling
If you sell multiple iterations of the same kind of product – different sizes or editions, for example – you may want to try out upselling techniques. The principle behind upselling is that a customer can be easily convinced to buy a more extravagant version of an item if they have already decided to buy a lesser edition of it. There are lots of ways to do this, but simple prompts such as, “Why not upgrade your purchase?” require little effort from you while having the potential to net you more impactful business.
