In managing your e-commerce business, you need to utilize smart strategies to stand toe-to-toe with your competitors. Failing to get the website traffic that you’re striving for means you’re probably going to need to take targeted steps to enhance your site’s visibility. Likewise, if it seems like you’re getting a disproportionate number of site visits to sales, you might need to make some key adjustments to make your online store more competitive.
Improve Website Functionality
Speed and performance are crucial to the success of an e-commerce site. People typically won’t wait very long for pages to load, and any issues navigating your site could bring an abrupt end to a potential customer’s visit to your website.
Test performance regularly and integrate automated solutions that can detect and address malfunctions rapidly. By responding to problems as quickly as possible, it prevents them from becoming pervasive and negatively affecting a large number of customers’ shopping experience.
Offer Free Shipping
Not having to pay anything for shipping is one of the biggest reasons why customers tend to gravitate towards mega-sized online retailers to make purchases online. It may not be practical for you to offer free shipping on every single order that you send out the door, but you definitely need to explore ways to offer this feature to certain types of orders over a certain amount. In fact, offering free shipping for orders exceeding a specific value might prompt customers to buy additional items to qualify. Resultantly, that might drive up revenue significantly and offset some of the extra expense that you’re taking on by making this option available.
Utilize a shipping API that allows you to access the best rates to ship orders. The best API option should be compatible with your current order management infrastructure and not add unnecessary work onto your fulfillment process.
Be sure to use an API that gives you the opportunity to work with multiple carriers. The least expensive way to deliver an order can vary depending on several factors such as where you are sending it to as well as the size or weight of a package. Ideally, a great shipping solution should display multiple options and also assess the turnaround time accurately.
Improve Product Descriptions
Every product page on your website has to convey all of the essential information that a customer might want to find out before finalizing a purchase. If your site doesn’t have the details and specifications that people are looking for, they might venture off to another retailer’s website to find them.
One of the most crucial things you really need to create fantastic product descriptions is high-resolution imagery. Customers like being able to see products from multiple views. In addition, photos should give site visitors the ability to zoom in. Zooming in allows people to assess the quality of a product with more conviction, and it also helps them envision holding or using it. To this extent, videos can be another excellent component of an eye-catching product description page.
Written information about products should be straightforward and cohesive. However, don’t exclude details in the hopes of improving readability. It is a good practice to put all of the most important details of a product towards the top of a listing where they will be most conspicuous. Below, incorporate more nuanced specifications such as dimensions, weight, and materials.
To create great written descriptions for a large or revolving inventory of projects, it may be advantageous to outsource this function to a provider that specializes in writing product listings for e-commerce merchants. This approach could help you generate high-quality product pages for every item that you sell without taking up too much staff time.
Ultimately, you can’t lose sight of the fact that the e-commerce marketplace isn’t a level playing field. The largest corporations have the lion’s share of retail transactions online. Smaller businesses can find it really hard to compete with retailers that have more resources and more bandwidth. To make your company competitive, you have to use your resources judiciously and work hard to meet customers’ expectations.