Top 10 Ideas to Double your E-Commerce Sales in 2018!

Starting an E-commerce business is easy but surviving is difficult. Do you know which was the first E-commerce business to achieve success? It was back in 1995, Amazon was launched but achieved its first profit in 2001. New E-commerce businesses are launching and shutting down each and every day. Sometimes all you need to achieve success may be a few things. Today’s E-commerce is quite different from what it was 5 years ago. To survive you must know how to grab and retain customers. Using an opensource software like Magento as the e-commerce platform you can easily launch and work well with selling online. This article is focused on the top 10 creative and must do marketing strategies to achieve success in your online sales in 2018.

1. Keep your store design professional and clean.

Use a clean and professional design that gives prime focus to your products. Your web-shop is your showroom, the better the showroom is, the better the trust the customers have on you. As we make it easy to walk through a showroom make the best user experience so users can browse through your products and categories easily. Use large and high-quality images that convert your visitors into shoppers. Complex designs may make your customers distracted. They may find it difficult to find what you sell.

2. Make it easy to call and chat you.

Display your phone number on all pages easily accessible, especially in mobile view. This helps them easy to ask any queries about products right away. This increases the credibility and makes customers buy your products confidently. It also creates an impression that you are a cell phone call away to answer their queries and you care for them. Some customers do not prefer to call but would want to chat. There are very good chat applications available that we can use for small e-commerce stores and big ones. These chat applications are free for basic one user usage. And for multi-user accounts, they might ask for payment. Zopim.com is a good example.

3. A super easy and error-free checkout process.

Make the checkout process super easy for the customers with a minimum number of fields to fill in. Add a sign in / sign up with facebook/google option to make it easier. Broken links and slowly loading pages are a hindrance for customers to buy your products. Even a minute spelling error may create a negative impact among them. There shouldn’t be any errors that make the users navigate away unless it’s a payment fail.

4. Include Reviews and Testimonials.

Allowing product reviews has a great impact on your online sales. Product reviews and testimonials are considered as an important purchasing factor. It is said that 30 % of the online customers buy products according to the reviews. Ask your existing customers for testimonials and showcase the best among them in your homepage. This can also build credibility among your customers.

5. Make your website Trustworthy.

Make sure you have an SSL certificate installed on your website. E-commerce includes payment online and working with a secure site is always something customers can trust. Include trust marks/logos on your website. One example would be to show the logo of the trusted payment gateways to show in your page, like PayPal, stripe, visa etc. Recent studies claim that 75% of the buyers consider the credibility your website before making their decision to buy. Customers actually recognize and trust the logos in our site.

6. Promo on your Homepage.

Including promotional offers on your homepage is an effective way to gain new customers and make existing customers buy more. Everyone, especially new customers will be finding it lovely to get deals and offers from you. The promotions can be shown in the home page banners and can link to the products or categories that are on sale/offer.

7. Follow up with abandoned cart emails.

Whatever we do, there is a group of customers who abandon the order after reaching the checkout. Sometimes thinking whether they really need it and sometimes because of the unexpected shipping rate or tax rates that they notice at checkout. Most e-commerce applications especially Magento has plugins to get a list of abandoned carts and even send them transactional emails to remind them about the items left out in their cart. You can set this up to send reminders to purchase these items at specific intervals. The best would be to set it to send after 1 day, 3 days and after 2 weeks. Do not send reminders more than 2-3 times because it can get annoying for customers.

8. Make the site search engine friendly

Make your e-Commerce website SEO friendly. Create a sitemap to make sure all your products are indexed by Google. If your website has an easy HTML navigation structure, search engines find it easy to index all your web pages. E-Commerce websites should provide great importance to the sitemap, avoid image links, exceptional site navigation etc. Make sure your products have proper keyword rich descriptions added and also meta keywords and descriptions populated.

9. An ‘About us’ page.

About us, pages are usually the one important but the most undervalued pages in a website. About us, a page must reflect what your business is and what your story is. It’s the place to tell your visitors about your exciting story. Before creating your sites About us page thinks about what makes it more interesting to your visitors. It’s motivating and compelling for them to associate with you and be a part of your success.

10. Social Sharing buttons and customer engagement.

Having social sharing buttons increases customer engagement. Customers would want to share on social media about the products that they are excited about receiving. Always consider placing the social sharing buttons on the perfect place which people may recognize easily. Twitter’s Tweet buttons and Facebook’s like button have gained huge popularity in the market. Make use of social sharing buttons on your website to boost brand awareness and sales.