The eCommerce world is booming. After one year in business, the average online store enjoys a monthly revenue of almost $330,000. That’s pretty amazing, and it proves that we’ve known for a long time: the number of shoppers preferring to purchase online is growing and you’ve never had a better chance to run a successful eCommerce business.
We have to stay a tad grounded here. As Forbes points out, while there are a lot of winners in the eCommerce world, there are also a lot of losers.
What separates the winners from the losers? Why do some stores succeed while others crash to the ground? Use the following tips to outsmart your rivals in 2019 and give your customers exactly what they want.
Create Ads
If you’re on social media, you’ll surely have seen self-claimed eCommerce gurus tell you how they’re acing eCommerce without having ever spent a dime on ads. Are they being truthful? Hard to say. But the fact is that most of us have to pump some of our budget into ads. To meet those sales targets, we need conversions and conversions come from ads.
The likes of Facebook are major conversion zones. To get people’s attention on Facebook with an ad, be specific with your targeting and structure it like this:
- Use a picture to grab users attention
- Spark their interest with an amazing deal
- Tap into their desires with the benefits of your product
- End with a Call to Action. This needs to be something with extra spice, such as “Free Shipping” (more on this below)
How much will ads cost you? They don’t need to cost a lot. Start with a $5 ad, and if it works, scale it. Increase your spending to $10 and then $20, but only if the ad is working.
Offer Free Shipping
No, you don’t need to offer free shipping all the time, and you should definitely perform a test between free and paid shipping. But if you’re new to the eCommerce game for 2019 and no one knows you yet, it’s a good idea to offer free shipping as it gives people an incentive to buy from you.
Free shipping just takes the edge off things for new, wary customers. It improves rapport and trust and makes them feel good about you.
Moreover, lots of eCommerce stores just like yours are already offering free shipping which means that until you offer it too, you’re at a bit of a disadvantage to your rivals.
Use Popups
About a decade or so ago, no one liked popups. Remember the Internet in 2002? Popups were the bane of our lives.
However, popups are back—and they’re working. In fact, they have a conversion rate that averages just 3.09%. That’s pretty darn good and it means you need to take advantage of them. Here are some ways to use popups in your online store to boost conversions:
- Get your timing right: Unbounce experimented with timings and found that the best time to present a popup to the site visitor is after a minute. A minute makes sense because a visitor is clearly interested in your store. If you strike too early with your popup, on the other hand, you risk annoying people. If you are a beginner at creating your website, we recommend using a WordPress website builder to help with creating popups.
- Make sure the popup is relevant: Imagine if a customer has placed a few items in a cart but, at the last minute, decides to bail out. Would you hit them with a free eBook? Nope, you’d hit them with the offer of free shipping to bring them back in the game
Implement Cloud-Based Inventory Management
Those who win in business tend to be those who are the most organized. In the eCommerce world, this means managing your inventory so that you aren’t left with too much stock—or too little.
And when you’ve got less stock than you thought, a customer will try to purchase something you no longer have in store. This means they will leave disappointed and empty-handed while you’ll miss out on a sale and a potentially loyal customer.
There are plenty of cloud-based inventory management software applications that take care of all this for you, streamlining the process so that you’re free to focus on other aspects of your store.
However if you don’t quite have the resources to invest in managing inventory in 2019 but still want to have a successful eCommerce store, there are lots of low investment business ideas to choose from.
Create an Awesome Upsell
Where eCommerce is concerned, the money is in the upsell.
The trick is to get your customer interested with a low price product before enticing them with an upsell. If you don’t have an upsell on all your products, you’re missing a very important trick, because upsell’s increase your profits per customer.
Pick a product of yours and then think about how you can create a related upsell.
Conclusion
All in all, there’s a fine line between success and failure online. All you need to do is take these tips, dedicate time, maybe hire outside help—and execute. Good luck.
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