The Importance of Your eCommerce Site for Your Business
It is plain to see why a poorly designed website can be a major problem to online businesses, most especially during the holiday season, which covers 20% to 40% of the yearly sales.
In this regard, those who need data validation can refer to the stats that explain the importance of your brand’s presence on the Internet:
- Before people shop at a physical store, they often check websites of online stores.
- Customers search online for the prices and availability of goods so they would know whether to shop online or at physical stores.
- During an economic crisis, consumers exercise caution when shopping online to stretch their budget, resulting to an increase of website traffic.
- Shoppers that tend to purchase downloadable gifts like eBooks, music and FB credits, among others, will likely buy more.
Optimize Your Online Site Immediately
Now that you are aware of your site’s importance, what should you do before the holiday season approaches? It is never too late to try some of these strategies:
Prepare for unexpected traffic.Plan ahead of time to make sure that your site can manage all the orders. Anticipate peak loads, observe the responsiveness of your site and assess application performance way before Cyber Monday.
Increase the speed of your site. Use a CDN (content delivery network) for a speedy delivery of relevant content with videos and images to your consumers.
During the holidays, most shoppers use their mobile devices to search online before heading for the stores. Therefore, it would be wise to incorporate an in-store experience with info regarding your well-timed and relevant personalized website and mobile apps.
Find ways to let the customers easily find your products on the web. To improve exposure, submit a feed to the top online shopping comparison engine, Google Product Search. Try the Amazon Marketplace or add pay-per-click ads to Amazon Product Ads’ product and category pages. This way, shoppers will be able to view your ads when they find products that are similar to yours.
Though social media is not the main channel for searching, it has targeted the mainstream and has therefore gained importance, specifically to GenY shoppers. Transform visitors into sales channels by including social sharing in product pages. Display good customer service in public by resolving issues with customers on networking sites like Facebook or Twitter.
People who are low on budget usually search online before buying, so it is a good idea to follow the example of various sites in making it fun, simple and efficient to shop on the web. Provide product filters, rich product details, comparison tools, well-designed navigation and recommendations. Enhance the images of your best-selling products, emphasize your value propositions and make sure that shipping and return policies are clear.
Fix your leaky conversion funnel immediately by adding simple and cost-efficient website usability and feedback tools.
Whenever possible, ask for the visitor’s email address and try to squeeze a lot of value out of each sign-up.
Try to employ remarketing campaigns so you can target consumers who take time to buy.