Tips to Increasing E-commerce Sales in 2014

Do you have an ecommerce or online retail store? Have you ever thought about how to increase sales? Are you ready to reach your potentials in 2014? If yes to all then this is a must read: Ecommerce is not about the beauty of the design only, but also ensuring that sales are generated. The first goal is to make potential customers build confidence and trust in buying from your online store.

Your next goal is to ensure that your ecommerce site is easy to navigate and easy to complete an order because customers that go on your site will want not only to get the item they’re looking for quickly, but they would want their purchase to be quick and painless as well.

Below are some tips on best practices to boost confidence, trust and speed up purchasing process that will increase your sales for 2014

Show your online customers you care: Offer customers tailored recommendations of their searches while shopping on your website and send them targeted messages about deals which may interest them according to their buying patterns on your website and also remind them about abandoned shopping carts to show they are noticed and valued.

Build a mobile responsive website: With majority of internet shoppers in Nigeria on their mobile to shop on the go and accessing the web, the fact is 61% of clients who visit a mobile unfriendly website are likely to quit and go to a competitor’s website.
Keep your website updated with Pictures, Image and detailed description of products: It is essential you keep your content updated regularly with appropriate video, image-led and written content of products although it might be time consuming but it is important to be able to run successfully an ecommerce site.

Updating regularly increases your website’s visibility and it makes your site resourceful for customers and keeps them coming back.

Make Important Info Public: Customers are more likely to buy products when they know exactly what they’re getting into; how much they’re paying, when it will arrive, and what to do if they’re unhappy with a purchase.

Easily informing them of information such as the estimated shipping costs, arrival times and return policy make them more at ease with making the purchase.

Provide them with this information early and often. Anything that applies to a particular item needs to be mentioned publicly and obviously on that item’s page. Anything that would boost sales, such as a free shipping discount should be mentioned early and repeated.

Target existing customers: It is tempting at the beginning to focus attention in getting more and more new customers, however, it is evidence that retention is key to business success.

New site visitors often spend less time on websites compare to returning site visitors that often look at more pages per visit on average and are more likely to make purchases as they have built a relationship and credibility with your ecommerce site and are more willing to refer you to more potential clients.

This simply means campaigns which targets existing customers can really pay off – so don’t forget them or assume their continued loyalty.

Use Call to action: Use easily visible and very clear call to action buttons or words that would direct customers to where they are going to purchase or view products on sales or add product to basket. An example of a call to action is “Buy now” or “Click here to checkout”.

A well designed call to action button leads the customer where they need to go and where you want them to go. Make sure to enhance the most important actions; buy button, check out button, and shopping cart button.

Think and Measure Conversion Rate: The rate at which visitors are converted to sales (or to some other key objective) is called the Conversion Rate.

A small change in the Conversion Rate can make a big difference to your return on investment and turnover.
There is much that can be done to improve your Conversation Rate and, when planning your ecommerce website, you should consider everything with Conversion Rates in mind.

Using enticing action buttons, suggestive copy and banners and text links all help you to direct site visitors around your website and to your enquiry forms.

Always ask yourself when planning your website: “Is this going to drive sales?”

It should also be noted that convincing a visitor to sign up to receive Email Newsletters should be a key conversion objective.

Finally, in the business world, your ecommerce website is your number one marketing tool and everything you do online must support this.

A website is the hub of all your online marketing activity, a facility to convert interest into sales.

Much of your other online and offline marketing activity will be encouraging people to visit your ecommerce site. Once you get them there you need to convert those people to tangible sales, or at the very least collect their contact information so you can continue to communicate directly with them.

Tobi Asehinde is the founder and chief executive officer of Vibe Web Solutions Limited, a company poised to providing web solutions to meet web related needs of businesses and helping businesses grow using ground-breaking web and marketing technologies.

We help to setup your ecommerce store from planning stage to implementation stage. Vibe Web Solutions Limited has clients based within and outside Nigeria servicing both business and governmental organisations. He can be contacted via: tobi.asehinde@vibewebsolutions.com