Last updated - July 8, 2021
Running an eCommerce website isn’t for the faint of heart.
Not only would you have to deal with cutthroat competition, but you’d also have to deal with the internal — often tedious — aspects of your business. (e.g., Finding the right people, tools, your finance, etc.)
The good news is, while there are bajillions of challenges involved in running an ecommerce store, there are seasoned entrepreneurs who have undergone these very challenges and have overcome them with the right set of marketing or ecommerce strategies.
In this guide, we’re going to cover some of these tried and tested strategies that seasoned entrepreneurs are using to explode their ecommerce sales.
Let’s get right to it.
1. Automate
There are countless methods you can use to cut your overhead cost, but to give a bit of context, let’s say you are a dropshipper using Shopify as your platform to house your ecommerce business.
With Shopify, you can use Oberlo, an ecommerce solution to help you automate your product integration process.
The Oberlo plugin allows you to import product information – description, title, price, etc. – from the suppliers to your Shopify store with a few clicks.
The screenshot above shows how you can import the product information from the supplier to your eCommerce website.
Oberlo also offers the option for you to modify the information to your liking.
Aside from the automation features that make dropshippers’ lives easier, Oberlo provides users income generating business ideas by giving them a guide showing examples, graphs, and tips in coming up with an ecommerce business approach.
Ecommerce solutions like Oberlo offer a degree of automation in your sales processes for ecommerce site owners like you that want to avoid or lessen the amount spent for your work hours.
2. Work with industry experts
There are a lot of benefits that ecommerce website owners can leverage when working with seasoned digital marketers or agencies.
Aside from the obvious productivity increase they bring to ecommerce site owners, working with agencies exposes business owners to unconventional — yet, effective — strategies that people who offer ecommerce as a service only knows.
Reputable agencies like PWD offer ecommerce, branding, and digital marketing-related services (among other things) to ecommerce entrepreneurs. As people work with agencies like PWD, not only can they ensure that the tasks they’re outsourcing are done right, but they can enjoy the fact that the tasks are done by experts, even when they’re offline.
By outsourcing, you can focus your time and resources on other important aspects of your ecommerce business operations.
3. Mind the site load speed
An ecommerce site that takes more than two seconds to load would only lead their would-be customers to click the close button.
If that fact doesn’t alarm you, then maybe this will: One second is all it takes to reduce your conversion rate by 7%.
Now that’s frightening.
7% may not seem like a huge amount to some people, but depending on the size of your business, that could translate into hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of loss.
Because our generation is all about instant gratification, you can imagine the disastrous impact a slow loading webpage can have on ecommerce businesses.
There are, however, ways to fix your site’s load speed issues:
Go for reliable hosting packages.
Most web hosting providers offer different hosting service levels.
Review your current hosting plan and compare the different features – look into changing to a better plan to ensure that your website is at optimum speed.
In the screenshot above, the web host provider offers three hosting plans coupled with different features.
The third plan provides four times the processing power and memory. It may cost a bit more, but it’s worth investing in to ensure your website will have a fast load speed.
Compress Web Images
There are a plethora of free tools on the internet that you can use to optimize your website images.
Imagecompressor.com is a tool that lets you compress your images for free.
The larger the image size is, the slower your website loads.
Optimize your images so that it doesn’t affect your load speed negatively.
Test your Load Speed
Checking your site’s load speed isn’t that complicated. When you use Google’s PageSpeed, you can review which parts of your website need improvements for faster load speed.
Using amazon.com as an example, the speed test results are as shown in the screenshot below.
The tool will also provide you with specific recommendations to improve the speed performance of your website.
The results from the tool’s analysis give clear recommendations, giving you a better picture of the best actions you can take to optimize your website’s load speed.
Add trust badges
Phishing and cyber attacks continue to be prevalent issues on the internet.
Because of this, customers will always have the dilemma of whether or not to trust ecommerce websites for fear of getting hacked.
So what ecommerce strategy can you use to make customers feel secure and purchase from you?
The answer: By displaying trust or security badges on product pages or the checkout page.
Take a look at the screenshot from AmazonPay below.
The goal is to get your customers to feel secure when they buy from you since they’ll be sharing personal information on your website such as their address and credit card information.
Trust badges displayed on ecommerce websites give customers a sense of assurance that their personal information is safe and won’t leak out into the internet.
Assure your site visitors that it’s safe to transact with you, and you’ll be in a better position to convince them to purchase.
What’s next?
Operating an ecommerce website isn’t as simple as some would imagine, but equipped with the right tools and applying the most effective strategies, it’s also not an impossible endeavor.
There are so many other techniques you can find online, and the tips shared in this article have proven to be effective in helping ecommerce site owners increase their revenue. Give these tips a try and check how they can improve your ecommerce website.
If there are other ecommerce hacks you would like to share – along with your suggestions, questions, and feedback – feel free to do so on our comments section below. Cheers!
