If you’re the top seller in your category on Amazon, eBay, or other marketplace, you can take a break from this post. But for everyone else, we’ve got ten solid tips on how you can increase the value of your ecommerce business. After all, who doesn’t want to streamline operations and enjoy more profits?
1. Get in the Mobile Mindset
This should be a given. But in case it’s not, add a mobile version of your site so smartphone and tablet users can shop easily and more conveniently. If you don’t have the coding chops to do it yourself, there are plenty of widgets and mobile payment processing tools to do it for you.
2. Upsell and Cross-Sell Products
Unless you sell very niche products that don’t really pair with anything else (and this is highly unlikely), you should be upselling and cross-selling like there’s no tomorrow. If you’re stuck on ideas, google how to use that product and read what other items belong with it. For example, if you sell guitars, you can upsell more expensive/better quality guitars. You can also cross-sell them with tuners, strings, capos, cases, songbooks, and straps.
3. Improve Your Traffic Numbers
You might have the most competitive prices and best-quality photos, but if your listings aren’t optimised for searches, you just won’t get more value out of your ecommerce business. Start tracking your numbers with Google Analytics to see where traffic comes from, then optimise for those sources.
4. Make Abandoned Carts a Thing of the Past
Start looking at abandoned carts as sales that just haven’t happened yet and require a bit more legwork to earn the conversion. These are people that were thisclose to buying it, which means you’ve already been successful with the product listing, marketing, advertising, and more. Usually, it’s the pricing that holds them back from completing the sale, so reach out to them and sweeten the deal by offering discounted/free shipping, a one-time coupon code, or some other perk.
5. Look Into Retargeting and Remarketing
Both are ways of reaching the same person/audience twice, but in slightly different ways. Retargeting means dropping browser cookies that follow the user (one who has already shown interest in your product) from site to site so they see the same ad in different places. Remarketing, on the other hand, usually uses email to send them ads.
6. Implement Security to Build Trust
One of the worst experiences for a buyer is to get ripped off during a sale. This will make them fairly snakebitten in trying again. But if you take steps to reassure them that everything will be fine if they buy from you, they’ll trust you. You can do this by showing them your site is secure, such as displaying badges from trusted sources like PayPal and McAfee.
7. Use Pareto’s Principle to Your Advantage
Pareto’s Principle says that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your products. Or, in layman’s terms, put the most energy into your best sellers. They should be your top focus in terms of things like product writing, high quality images, SEO optimisation, marketing, repricing, and user feedback.
8. Make Yourself Known on Social Media
If you don’t already have accounts set up on the likes of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Pinterest, or Twitter, remedy that right away. Test the waters by starting out with non-paying methods, then start spending money as you learn which sites deserve the most attention.
9. Invest in Affiliates
Affiliates are people with a strong web presence you pay to include your links on their sites/accounts. If a sale is made, the affiliate receives a portion of the money. It’s great for you because you only pay if you get a sale, and you get to take advantage of someone else’s network that may have different internet tentacles than your own.
10. Make the Checkout Process as Simple as Possible
The easier and faster you can make it for a person to purchase an item, the greater your chances of earning that sale will be, and the more you can drive up the value of your ecommerce business. For example, try having a ‘guest’ option so people don’t have to sign up just to buy something. You can also include checkboxes that will duplicate information, such as making the billing address the same as the delivery address.
