eCommerce 101: 5 Trends to Boost Your Amazon Business in 2021
When focusing on your eCommerce sales, you have to look at sales channels, for example boost your Amazon business, boost your online sales, let’s take a look.
Global eCommerce has been seeing all-time highs for quite some time now. And as years go by, new technologies and trends replace old and obsolete ones. When judging eCommerce’s potential, the numbers speak for themselves.
Considering the ever-increasing number of users worldwide, currently 3.4 billion, some estimates suggest that eCommerce will enjoy 95% of all purchases by 2040. In fact, Amazon reported 3.67 billion monthly website visits in 2020 alone. This new market opportunity invited in a lot of new businesses competing for a piece of that digital pie.
With new competition emerging in almost all fields, it is essential to study the industry trends to stay above the game and protect your business interests. These top 5 eCommerce trends can help you tackle the growing competition and boost your Amazon business in 2021.
1. Sustainability is the next normal
Considering the global pandemic and the harm we are doing to the planet, it isn’t a surprise why an increasing number of people are leaning towards a more sustainable future. Consumers today look for products and brands that are actively working towards making sustainable choices.
As a business, it is not only your responsibility to protect the environment, but also a great way to build customer loyalty for your online store. Customers are more likely to remain loyal to a brand that cares about their personal beliefs and acts for the betterment of its local community.
Rethink packaging
While packaging materials like cardboard and metal can be recycled quite easily, plastic and other non-biodegradables remains a major problem. About 350+ million metric tonnes of plastic waste in produced every year. 91% of which is not even recycled.
With more than 3/4th of global eCommerce customers opting for sustainable products, sellers are motivated to rethink packaging to retain consumer interest and maintain sales. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Minimizing packaging size
- Reusable and multifunctional packaging design
- Shifting to biodegradable materials
- Recycling packaging waste
- Better waste disposal planning
Focus on ethical manufacturing
The consumer of today is an educated one—aware of the influence of their purchase. They know sustainability doesn’t just end after buying an organic product, but also considers how the products were actually manufactured.
Ethical manufacturing follows a more holistic approach that ensures wellness for all involved including the workers, customers, the environment, and everyone in between. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Offering only safe and healthy products
- Minimizing waste and recycling disposables
- Fair compensation to the workforce
- Taking environmental impact into account
2. New techniques for web traffic emerge
We live in an attention-based economy and more traffic means more sales. This is Marketing 101. But as new sellers enter the market and compete for the customer’s attention, a strategic plan is needed to withstand this rising competition.
Traditional methods to extend reach don’t offer as much leverage as they used to. Now is the time to adopt new tools and strategies that will increase sales. To do so, the implementation of a more holistic marketing approach is essential to diversify investments. They can include:
Refining social media marketing
According to Manaferra, as of 2021, over 3.96 billion people worldwide use social media making it one of the best places to market your Amazon products. About 87% of shoppers research online, while 74% of all consumers get informed on social media about the best purchasing options. But just making posts and stories is not enough. Posts with images produce 650% higher engagement than text-only posts. Visual content is 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content. Here are some ideas we thought of:
- Sponsored video ads for better reach and engagement
- Meme marketing to stay relevant with a younger audience
- Influencer marketing for greater trust and credibility
- Interactive stories (polls, stickers, countdowns, etc.)
- Instagram LIVE Product Launches for small businesses
Using PPC Advertising
Pay-per-click is an advertising method in which the seller pays for each click they get on their ads. This motivates the third-party agency to incur as many visits to your website/page as possible. The more visits you get, the more commission they earn. This increase in views automatically promotes an increase in sales.
3. Amazon SEO becomes a priority
Although Google SEO remains to be the best choice to drive traffic to your website, it might not be as relevant to an Amazon business seller. To drive more traffic on Amazon, you need to learn how A9 (the algorithm Amazon uses for product search) operates, how it categorizes products, and how it prompts product recommendations.
- Research extensively for the right keywords. The more relevant the keywords in your product listing, the higher the chances of getting a click. The Ubersuggest Extension can help search for the right keywords.
- Then rewrite and optimize your product title and description according to the findings from your research.
- Amazon’s style guide recommends to put the brand name first in your product title to establish credibility. Next, inculcate the most relevant keywords in your title first. The faster and more accurate your title can explain the product, the better.
- Add product videos. Video ads and tutorials to use your product are much more likely to incur higher engagement. This directly translates to higher sales potential.
4. Automation strengthens
Automation can prove to be a game changer for your Amazon business. Setting up automated actions for recurring business activities and problems can help you save time and resources. This helps free up room to invest in other projects like R&D and making important business decisions.
- Use of chatbots for recurring customer queries
- Send real-time sales alerts to new customers
- Minimizing delay in delivery by faster order-tracking
- Automate pricing according to competitiveness
- Automate repetitive tasks and reduce human-error
- Automate restocking to avoid empty inventory
- Tracking visitors to study their behavior
- Sending feedback forms after purchase
5. Omnichannel selling
Omnichannel retailing or selling is a tightly-integrated approach where a buyer receives a unified shopping experience across all channels of commerce. This means integration between brick-and-mortar stores, social media platforms, online marketplaces, mobile-browsing, and anywhere else your customer may be.
Essentially, omnichannel is about offering the customer the right product, exactly when they need it, on any device they are, and at any location. As good as this sounds, omnichannel is hard to do right. It requires ample resources and a complete understanding of the buyer experience and psychology. Omnichannel helps:
- Unify the customer shopping experience
- Helps add to customer lifetime value
- Increase sales and inventory turnover
- Provide personalized services and offers
- Maintain customer interest in brand
eCommerce is a tough journey and for many small and medium scale companies, scaling your business can be really difficult. But with these 5 trends, you can make sure that you are ready to face the uncertainty and grow your Amazon business in 2021.
