Skip to main content

5 easy fixes to double the sales of your eCommerce store in less than a week

A couple of years ago or more, I was toyed with the idea of setting up my own e-commerce website. It was a good business plan which never saw the light of day. But my interest in e-commerce never really popped off. I have tried to keep myself abreast of the latest developments in the e-commerce space and expressed my opinions from time to time. Here I have spoken about some easy fixes to increase e-commerce sales in very short time.

With most businesses foraying into the online space to market and sell their products, it becomes essential for every organization, especially e-commerce centered businesses to harness its power even better than before and explore all possible strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of running an e-commerce website in times to come. It is crucial for every online business to chalk out action plans to meet its immediate demands in times of crises. And there can be no bigger a crisis than having to shoot sales up by a fair margin in very short time. Statistics suggest that the number of Internet users globally will increase by almost fifty percent next year reaching a total of 3.3 billion users worldwide from 2.2 billion in 2011. Hence it becomes all the more important to focus on ways to boost e-commerce sales. Most of the technical changes can occur from a developer standpoint while keeping in mind valuable inputs from the design and marketing team to reach out to the customers as per a viable strategy from the outside. Surprisingly you’ll find that the nitty-gritty of your sales crusade lies in improving the UI features alone. Let’s look at some of the best possible strategies that can be executed to promote quick sales.

Appearances are not deceptive, clean up clutter:

One of the biggest barriers to increasing sales on an E-Commerce website is lack of visibility, of the targeted products thus adding to confusion in the minds of your visitors and to a great extent, buyers. Below is what you don’t want your website to look like.





What really converts a regular visitor to a prospective buyer is drawing his attention to your best deal. To win over prospective customers you have to remove distraction and increase visibility of  key products, especially those that are seasonal and come alongside best deals. One way to do so is through keeping in place good navigation features such as hierarchial menus at different levels throughout the webpages along with bright and distinct colour to increase distinguishability. Another way to make customers focus on key tasks.


Call to action elements should stand out:

Elements on your e-commerce website that are call to action objects such as those that actually require the visitor to click on them to be able to successfully complete a process should stand out in a pack of elements on a webpage to increase the response rate. The response rate is a rate at which successful clicks are made to that element which is declared to be call to action, for example a response rate of 5 percent would mean that out of 100 visitors 5 have actually clicked on the element to be able to complete the process successfully. In an e-commerce website, Shopping Cart is one such call to action element. To ensure more visibility, A/B testing to compare the response time of an element for two different versions of a webpage is one way to go about it. Multi-variate testing can also help where best combinations for call to action elements are to be determined on a website.


Readily available and active customer support:



An active customer support such as a 24-hour telephone/email system can attract more visitors to seek information about products and as a result boost sales. A pro-active team can help answer visitor queries more effectively and also convert them into prospective sales opportunities thus leading to successful purchases within a short time. An additional chat service would also enable a user to effectively browse through the e-commerce website without any hassles by providing online chat facility with a customer service representative. It would also mean that the customer would be encouraged to purchase products from the website owing to better accessibility and support services.


Best deals be displayed through images and videos:

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. It's always easier to identify best deals by placing images on a website. A picture is visually appealing and can often serve as the most effective call to action element.

Apart from pictures, videos can serve as better means of communication and consequent promotion of products. Further, better description of links and buttons on the webpage can lead to making the message more apparent and obvious to the user.


Install sharing tools and submit to search engines & social networking sites:



Sharing of knowledge about products on sale over social networking sites such as Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook etc. can lead to greater popularization and online promotion through generating referral traffic that is observed to be more serious about online purchasing. Also, installing sharing tools such as AddThis and ShareThis on e-commerce websites would further lead to sharing over a large number of other platforms. Going by statistics, shoppers coming from such sites are ten percent more likely to make purchase than others and the amount of purchase made by referral traffic from Pinterest, Twitter etc. is also more than the usual amount. Also submitting to a search engine and carrying out search engine optimization for the ecommerce website would significantly help in increasing the chances of successful search for the product thus directing to the ecommerce website.


Boosting sales of your e-commerce store in very quick time might be a greater pain if you were to bring about changes in the back-end. It would involve use of development resources and also require sufficient time for re-factoring. However, these fixes could work well to boost your e-commerce store sales since they involve setting up and rendering features that are smart, trendy prompt and require little effort on your part. At the same time, with increasing number of e-commerce stores worldwide, businesses have now started to look at such opportunities at the very start of their launches. A/B testing is now a common phenomenon so is sharing and submitting to search engines, SEO is the way to go online anyway and every website spends time to cater to the aesthetic sensibilities of its visitors. In times to come, we can expect even greater penetration of companies in the e-commerce sector and it is predicted that global business-to-consumer e-commerce sales will pass the 1 trillion euro ($1.25 trillion) mark by 2013.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Material Musings

At a Flower Store As we travel into time, we bead our little moments and they hookup to form a garland that engulfs us completely when time stops, the fragrance continues however. Whether it smells of dry hay or lilac, we render through our Karma. In a Boat on a River Picture yourself in a boat on a river with your beloved, as you hold the oars in your hands. You want to hold her but if you do, you lose control of the oars. What would you do? You don't drown, the waters are still. It's a river afterall. Save a little for yourself. Our passions grow on us, time doesn't. On my Way Back Home Others expect at work, but my home demands. If I were to size down demands, would others' expectations out of me lower equally? We belong to our homes as much as homes belong to us! On Country, Geographical Barriers and More If God created Oceans to curb the intensity of the Sun, would landlocked countries be left to punish in Hell? God created Divide, so we may...
1 comment
Read more

10,000 Years: Going Home Alive

Gold, silver and purple streaks of light, Strike my chest and rebound, all so bright, I am traveling home finally, far far away, As I wade across the galaxy called Milky Way. I was once a little piece of dot, A shelter in a cold galactic place I'd sought, Among Neptune, Pluto and Jupiter, I found this Earth, to be the most near. I am done with my worldly duties, Sometimes a son, at other times a sister, At times an angel and rarely a sinister, Today as I am released of my worldly ties, I am no longer indebted to the aborning sunrise. My journey so far has been fruitless, The day I split, I knew I'd become worthless, Somehow I knew I had to live through it all, Tasks they all came, big or small. Still deep down inside, there was loneliness, Although in the world, there was vast openness, In the early stages, I assumed a blacksmith or cobbler, Towards the end, I became a generous struggler. When the time had come to clear off my karma, Since I ha...
1 comment
Read more

My Saddest Tale, Ever So Pale

Every year in the month of March,  I'd bring home, a bagful of books and the scent of familiar starch,  Once I'd masked with plastic sheet, I'd sense my heart beat,  As labels and stickers would summarize my yearly feat.  A burst of energy swiveled across my body,  In a few days, I was to become a scholarly somebody.  Samuel Adams and Christopher Columbus,  They may all wait, with them would Oedipus.  With what I read back then,  I would mostly outperform my peers,  Now as I begin to write, I sit amidst a cesspool of tears. Very soon you will, dear readers if any, Be introduced to a gargantuan globe hinged by many. During later years at crossing vectors and dotting differential equations, My History, Geography and Economics, floated across vesting nations. I drew the world map, this time I was twenty four, Sat with a histogram and outlined to each its own score. That's when I found my country, pleading for ...
3 comments
Read more