In 2021, retail e-commerce sales amounted to approximately 5.2 Trillion Euros worldwide. This figure is forecast to grow by 56 percent over the next years, reaching about 8 trillion Euros by 2026 (source statista.com). This is a result of various factors but mainly attributed to:
— Localisation of Internet content
— Growth in mobile commerce
— Growing usage of debit/credit cards
— Growing investment in logistics and warehouses
— Covid-19
There has been an exponential increase of eCommerce websites over the past years. Sites sprouting out from all industries - even the traditionally brick-and-mortar and very digital unfriendly. This means that competition has also moved to online platforms, where companies within the same industries are battling out to achieve the largest slice of the pie with the difference that now, audience reach has also grown colossally. Establishing your eCommerce site is only the beginning of the journey. Like a plant, your eCommerce is alive. It needs care, maintenance and love put into it. Here are 5 very simple ways how you can improve your eCommerce store:
Lifestyle Images
The amount of websites across different industries that we come across and that exhibit the same images is uncanny. You can enter a Life-Insurance Website and notice that you've seen the very same "Meet the team" photo on an online perfume-store around a month ago. You need to fix this as soon as you can. Yes you might be using professional images on your website, but with the social media boom, just showing a professional image will simply not cut it. Personalised images of people using and enjoying your products/services will surely improve your conversion rates.
Colour Scheme/Brand Guidelines
Limit your colour theme of your website to 3 or 4 colours. Doing this will make your website look more professional and polished. Our team of in-house designers make sure that the colours chosen for the eCommerce store make sense for the personas identified to be visiting the store and also that they represent the brand perfectly.
It is by far much easier and cost-effective to resell to existing customers rather than acquiring new ones. If your eCommerce store does not have modules/plugins specifically to cater to upselling and reselling, then you are missing out on a large portion of that pie we mentioned earlier. For example adding some sort of a subscription model to your product will be a game-changer. Tools such as Klaviyo will help also automate offers and up-sales to your clients. Our integration experts can set up drip campaigns and automated optimised emails to help to up-sell or even remind them about your eCommerce store.
Up-sell/Resell to Existing Customers
Increasing the AOV (Average Order Value) is also a key factor in getting better results from your eCommerce store. Increasing the AOV by a small percentage especially if you have a store which is already driving conversions can be a perfect strategy for you. This can be done by bundling products or recommending add-ons (which make sense) to a product which has been added to cart.
Optimise your eCommerce Store
SEO + Digital Marketing = More Traffic = More Conversions. Optimising your store for keywords in relation to what you’re selling is fundamental. SEO starts from Technical Optimisation and our team of SEO experts can run an audit on your store to make sure the technical side of things are on point. Think of it as if you were hosting a party at your house and you're expecting 30 guests. For a nice experience, you'd make sure your house is in order before guests enter your house.
Once this is taken care of you will need to focus on your On-Page and Off-Page Optimisations. On-Page is related to content on your site making sure your product descriptions are on point, blog articles linking to your products are published regularly, FAQs are in place, UGC (user generated content) and maybe also translations are done to target different personas from different parts of the world. Off-Page refers to sharing of your content outside of your website on other digital channels such as social media sites, news sites etc. The more you do of this and the more consistent you are the better you rank in popular search engines such as Google.
Your ugly and inefficient website is costing you sales. The world of Ecommerce has changed a lot in the past few years. It wasn’t long ago that you could build a website in a few hours and start selling online. Nowadays, competition has grown and thus standards have grown along with it. This doesn’t mean you need to spend a fortune on a custom developed website, we at ANCHOVY x NIU can help you get an eCommerce site done, hand hold you to get funding for your project and also help you market your online shop digitally once it’s launched. Contact us so we can help you build a clean, attractive and professional site. Get in touch today.
