E-commerce is all the rage these days, and owning an online store in 2017 is no big deal. In fact, it’s the smart thing to do.
However, it’s earning big bucks from your store and taking advantage of the upcoming holiday season that’s the challenging part. It’s all about optimizing the store in areas that other people do not pay attention to which allows you to be smarter with your business and cater to more people than possible.
Let’s get right into it.
SEO Optimize Your Online Store
It doesn’t matter if you have a Magento e-commerce website and not one that’s entirely content focused. It’s because online stores need to be SEO optimized so that people can find you using the right terms and searches. You need to ensure your store has good off-store optimization with transparent and friendly URLs, and use the proper keywords, etc. This way, your customers will be able to look you up and shop from you rather than your competitors who don’t pay much attention to SEO.
Simply optimize your store with keywords relating to the products you sell, and you’ll see a surge in relevant traffic!
User Interface and Design
Is your website good enough so that visitors do not get lost or discouraged from navigating or searching for their desired products? If the user interface is not friendly and does not bode well with the visitors, you’re losing on tons of sales. For example, if your site loads slowly, you can easily lose a majority of your visitors who prefer shopping from online stores that load quickly and have better design and user interface.
Hence, make sure that not only is your e-commerce store designed by a professional, but also has an easy to understand navigation.
Provide a Superior Shopping Experience
All the tweaks in the world cannot rival a shopping experience that your customer does not forget. It’s crucial that your site loads fast and has a brilliant UX, but it’s equally important to give your visitors an experience they’re going to share ahead with their friends and family.
Your branding must be on point and your suggestions that come in the shape of recommended products must be smart. You can use AI for this purpose because it ensures that your customer is satisfied.
After the order, you can deliver the products on time and make sure that you have decent return and refund policies that make the customers feel safe and want to come back for more!
Plan for Abandoned Carts
Most e-commerce store owners do not plan much for abandoned carts. According to stats from Radware, it shows that almost 70% of carts are abandoned online before they reach the checkout. This means that you’re losing out on a huge chunk of sales from what could have been. There can be plenty of reasons for abandoned carts ranging from complex processes to high load times, etc.
However, you can plan ahead and ready incentives for people who abandon their online carts on your store or showing them how easy it is to place the order can ensure that your abandoned cart rate remains low. You can even use better calls-to-action that prompt people to reach the end-point!
Enhance Trust with Customer Reviews
Whether you like it or not, customer reviews can turn your online store into a powerhouse. How? Well, by simply enhancing the trust factor for your customers. Of course, it wouldn’t help if the products you provide are not the best quality, but if another customer has given it a 5-star rating, others are more likely to buy it too.
This improves your website’s credibility and trust factor which can in turn increase conversions on your online store!
These are tips that most online store owners do not pay much attention to. Hence, you can use them to your advantage this holiday season and ensure that you capitalize on the coming holidays like Halloween, and next month’s Cyber Monday and Black Friday, etc.
