6 Ecommerce Success Factors You Should Be Using

Want your Ecommerce store to be successful? These 6 Ecommerce Success Factors are the key to growing your online business and building revenue.

Ecommerce Success Factors You Should Be Using

If you are the proud owner of an eCommerce site, it’s only natural to want to achieve long-lasting success. There are many ways you can not only survive as an eCommerce owner but thrive.

There is certainly no shortage of Ecommerce tips to be shared online, but which Ecommerce Success Factors should you be paying attention to?

With that in mind, below you will find a list of six key success factors for your eCommerce site to generate revenue and deliver value for your customers.

1. Have Great SEO

The foundations for any successful website is great SEO.

Without it, it’s unlikely your website pages will be found in the search results of any of the major search engines. This means that you won’t receive any organic traffic from people searching for terms related to your website or products and you will have to spend a lot of money on marketing and advertising to drive people to your site.

Your eCommerce SEO plan will need to take into account the whole of your website, not just a few pages. Every product page will need around 300 words in the product description and will need to be in an SEO friendly format with headings and alt tags. You will also need to write appropriate meta headers and descriptions.

Another way to drive organic traffic to your eCommerce website that’s not through the product pages is through a blog. Use a blog to target long-tail keywords and capture low-hanging fruit – people that are ready to buy or who are close to being ready to buy.

2. Product Pictures and Product Information

If you were to walk into a shop where the products on display were disorganized and there was no information about them, or no-one to ask, would you buy anything?

Probably not.

ECommerce is no different. Your website is your virtual storefront, and this means you need to make sure it’s appealing for your visitors. Product information plays a vital part in this.

Keeping your digital shop neat and tidy isn’t difficult, and you can put a few things in place to ensure its appealing to your customers.

  • Consistent naming conventions can really make a difference, especially if your products are in a list view. It makes products easier to compare and will help with SEO.
  • Good quality product pictures are so crucial because if people can’t clearly see what they are buying, they’re unlikely to purchase.
  • Detailed product descriptions should give the customer everything they need to know, whether it’s technical specs, measurements, or material. Bad or inaccurate product descriptions are one of the main reasons online stores can suffer from high return rates.

3. Use Targeted Digital Advertising

Digital advertising platforms allow you to directly target people who you think may be interested in buying your products or services. If you are not familiar with leading platforms, such as AdWords or Facebook advertising, you could find some advertising courses to help you learn the basics.

Once you know the basics of how to set up campaigns, you can begin to look at more advanced tactics, such as advanced targeting and remarketing. Within Google AdWords, you are able to use all kinds of filters to target ranges of people based on their age, location, or gender. You can also target people based on their interests and choose which types of websites you want your adverts to appear on.

One of the most effective types of digital advertising for an eCommerce website is remarketing. This is where you target people who have visited your website or specific pages on your site. Once you have the data, you can serve very specific ads based on products they have looked and try and get them back to your website and make a purchase.

4. Expand Product Range with Dropshipping

If you only have a small product range at the moment, then a great way to expand your range and make your eCommerce store applicable to more people is by adding more products. Dropshipping is a great way to do this because it requires very little up-front investment, if any at all. It also means that you don’t have to hold stock or ship orders out. That’s handed by the dropshipping company, making the whole process very low-touch and low risk.

Another way that people use dropshipping in their eCommerce store is to test their customers interest in new products. One of the downsides of dropshipping is that the margins can be quite low, which means you will need to sell a lot to make a decent profit. To combat this, you could choose to trial some products on your site to see how they sell then make a bulk order for the best sellers. This way, you know there is demand for the product, and your margins will increase not having to go through a drop shipper.

5. Offer Free Returns

Easy and quick returns are often expected now, and it can be a real turn off for people when an eCommerce website doesn’t offer them. The next step on from that is free returns, where you as the seller agree to pay for the return postage, usually with a pre-paid returns label.

Offering this service can have its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it can increase buyer confidence, knowing that they are essentially making a risk-free purchase. This is likely to have a positive impact on your sales and if your product descriptions and product pictures and accurate and up to date, you should have very few problems.

The other scenario is that people take advantage of this and buy 4 or 5 items knowing that they will just return ones that don’t fit or that they don’t like. Although customers have every right to do this, it can cause problems with cash flow and lead to high costs to re-stock items in a warehouse.

6. Use Email Marketing

Along with targeted advertising, email marketing is one of the most effective ways of generating sales for an eCommerce website. One of the most popular uses of email marketing is abandoned cart emails. These are sent out to people anything from a few minutes to a few days after they have put something in their cart and not made a purchase.

One easy way to collect people’s emails so you can begin creating and implementing your own email marketing strategy is to offer a discount in exchange for people’s email addresses. Usually, something like 10% is enough of a draw to get people to sign up. However, it’s important to remember not to bombard people with emails because they will unsubscribe, and you could lose them as a customer.

 

These 6 Ecommerce Success Factors make up the foundation of every successful online business. If you have found success using other factors, we’d love for you to share them in the comments below.