The world is now dependent on technology and every process has evolved in the personal and business areas. Technology has made lives easier for people and offers great convenience due to which people are inclined towards consuming technologically advanced services.
From among a lot of technological integrations that we see today in the entrepreneurial world, experts offering assignment writing service claim that E-commerce is the most notable and important one. E-commerce is the buying and selling of goods and services online i.e. without having to physically visits a market.
While e-commerce has gained immense popularity in the last few years, the competition in this industry is huge. Considering consumer demand for e-commerce, a large number of entrepreneurs started selling goods and services from jewelry and accessories to electronics, clothing, shoes and even groceries. Under such competition, it becomes difficult for e-commerce businesses to grow easily.
In fact, a study revealed that majority of e-commerce business owners are aiming for survival in the industry because consumers usually turn towards industry giants like EBay. Small-scale businesses are therefore often driven out of competition as they are unable to offer promotional discounts like industry giants do.
Since growth is important, following are a few tips that can help you grow your e-commerce business to enable you to compete with other well-performing businesses:
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Add Variety To Your Offerings
The most prominent attraction of an e-commerce website is the variety that it offers to consumers. A survey revealed that one-stop-shops gain more popularity than individual products, unless your brand or product range is significantly distinguished from others. Therefore, try to add variety to your product line instead of choosing specialization.
Added variety also means that if a couple of your product lines are generating a loss but other product lines are performing well, the overall loss would either be very low or would not exist at all. The greater the variety better is an opportunity to grow and attract a larger market segment.
Introduce Affiliate Programs
A common, and usually successful, way of boosting sales revenue is to hire associates or sales reps for your e-commerce website. These affiliates are not paid a fixed salary by the company because they work on a specific commission rate.
Working on commission means that you are not obliged to the company to get a specific number of consumers or meet a specific sales target. You are just an affiliate who represents an e-commerce business, trying to ensure that people buy from that specific store using your referral and you earn a commission as a result. This “high performance – high pay” rule encourages the affiliates to work and earn as much commission as possible which eventually boosts the sales of the business.
Retain Customers First
In order to achieve growth, it is imperative to retain at least those customers who shop at least once a month from your store. It is true that without new customers, it is difficult for a firm to grow but if you keep on losing customers on one side and gain new customers on the other side, you might not be better off. Therefore in order to retain customers, offer discounts and promotional deals to customers buying items quite often from your store.
You can make a loyalty card or customer account and offer discounts based on the customer shopping history. You can also introduce shopping points so that customers are able to exchange those points with items after a few shopping rounds.
Customers Love Complementary Items
A good way of improving your customer base is to offer complementary items or gifts as they shop at your online store. A study revealed that majority of shopping lovers goes back to stores that offer them some kind of gifts or complementary items. It is like a gift to them for shopping and who does not like gifts?
However, this may turn out to be a bad idea mainly because customers then always expect a complementary item as they check out and in case they do not get it, they might return disappointed. So do not make this is an every-time-thing!
Social Media Marketing
While you must have been spending hundreds of bucks on search engine optimization and internet marketing, it might be a wiser idea to allocate budget to social media as well. Social media has billions of active users from all over the world and boosting posts on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat only could lead to a post reach of millions.
Users are also attracted by discount deals on their newsfeed and click the link that directs them to your online store. So make sure the headlines and offers you use are attractive enough.
Focusing On Abandoned Carts
A common problem with online stores is that a lot of buyers add items to their shopping carts and then abandon it for some reason like realizing they did not account for shipping charges. These customers might want to buy those items later so they abandon the cart and leave. In a few days, they might buy those same items from another store because they probably do not remember your store.
Hence it is important to send them reminders in a unique way every time about their abandoned cart. Remind them normally first, then try offering a discount like reduced shipment and try similar ways of tempting them to buy from you. However, make sure that you avoid spam at all costs.
With these strategies, you can grow your e-commerce business in quite a decent time. Always keep an eye on what the competitors are doing because at the end of the day, if your competitors are utilizing an efficient way of running the store and you are not, you might suffer. After some initial efforts, you can reduce the marketing and promotional strategies once you become one of the e-commerce giants in the market.
