Image by: SunKing2
With most businesses foraying into the online space to market and sell their products, it becomes essential for every organization, especially e-commerce centred 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 per cent 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, your prospective buyers. What really converts a regular visitor to a prospective buyer is drawing his attention to your best deals. 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 hierarchical menus at different levels throughout the webpages along with bright and distinct colour to increase distinguishability. Another way is to make customers focus on key tasks. The information should be arranged such that the user can get to the heart of the matter without having to sift through loads of information.
In one of the case studies featured on our blog, we have focused on how removing distractions from the path of business visitors helped increase the click-through rate by 7.65% with 99% significance and the engagement rate improved drastically by 4.98%. A test was conducted by removing unnecessary and distracting information in the variation and results were recorded.
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 per cent 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.
In another case study featured on our blog, we have looked at how changing the text Call to Action increased the conversion rate by 37.5% than the previous version. This further led to increasing sales by 22% without a single dollar spent on advertising.
Readily available and active customer support:
Image by: Garvid
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 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.
Image by: Garvid
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:
Image by: Shareaholic
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 10 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 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.
