Ecommerce sales are rising rapidly as more businesses join the online market. To be successful it is important to get that competitive edge. We are going to discuss a few tools and ways that will help make your company stand out.
What is Ecommerce?
Ecommerce is also called electronic commerce. It is the buying and selling of services or goods over internet and the transfer of data and money to complete these transactions. The field of ecommerce has become very competitive these days with the customer base increasing each day. You can’t expect the customers to just flood right after you build an online store. You need to constantly learn, measure, test and optimize.
Businesses that regularly study their analytics and optimize their methods improve sales and get good user experience. Such companies can get the competitive edge when they sell to their consumers directly. The optimization could be as simple as changing the color of a specific action button on your website. Other times it could be something big that will keep your web development team busy for weeks or even months. Sometimes it is easier to put a SaaS (software as a service) app in place that will make your job easier.
The following are a few tools and ways that your ecommerce company can use to gain that competitive edge and attract more customers.
You can know more about the author of this post, Hanna Schnaider, who is an expert in this field here.
Reduce Fraud Risks
Online security should be the first priority of every ecommerce business. Whenever you receive or collect information or payment online over internet especially from customers across borders, you put the company and your customer at risk of cyberattacks. When you start accepting payments as merchant you are held responsible by banks for chargebacks and disputed orders. If your chargeback rate goes above 1%, you can get penalties. You may even get banned form the Visa or Mastercard schemes.
Buy or develop software programs that give you both transaction and account security. These software programs do that by detecting frauds in real time through machine learning. Thanks to such tools you don’t need a special team of fraud analysts or data scientists. The risks may not be totally eliminated by they will be reduced significantly.
Cart Abandonment
Stats say that above 69% of the shoppers abandon their products in carts. While on one hand this number is too big and depressing on the other hand it also means that there is a great potential for growth. By improving your shopping carts you can increase your buying customers. Make your shopping carts feature rich and high performance, which will increase your ROI. There are tools to help with that but hiring help from custom software development companies would be much more beneficial. One such software development company is Fortyseven software professionals. The fortyseven IT team presents many more solutions and will revolutionize the online shopping experience for your customers in true sense.
Simple Marketing Analytics
When you are running ecommerce business, you have to consider various data points. Just form the marketing point of view alone, there must be multiple sets of data that you have to overlook and manage. Collecting and then analyzing this continuous onslaught of information can get tiresome and time consuming.
There are ready made software programs or you can get a custom-made software that fits your requirements in order to help you this. These programs compile your marketing data and turn it into graphs and pictures for you to quickly go over it. They will improve your conversion strategies and increase your profitability.
Website Design
If you are not getting the response that you want then perhaps your website is not performing as it should. Make your website as engaging and attractive design-wise as possible. Everything should be visible, simple and within reach. This will attract visitors, increase the time they spend on your website and as a result the potential buyers. Again custom software development firms, such as fortyseven can help you that.
But it is also important that you understand the behavior of your online users if you want to convert more of them into customers. Try to understand where your customers are spending more time and where they don’t engage. You can buy software programs that will help you understand that.
Operational Costs
Just like any other business if you want to grow and make profits, you must reduce your operational costs. Especially, small companies with limited staff and budget must find ways to reduce the costs before, during and after processing. This will ensure that you have enough ROI for your ecommerce investment.
Time is money in business. Manual data entry is very time consuming. Use integrated ecommerce solutions to send orders back and forth between the ERP and the web directly. This will free up your resources and the time consumed in tedious tasks.
Brand Awareness
There is almost a 100% chance that whatever services and products you are offering online are sold by another company too. They might be more experienced and competitive than you. These conditions make it hard for you to stand out in the crowd. If you want to remain in the game and make profits then it is essential that you promote your brand.
SEO is a tool that it necessary for every business’s success. Find title tags, keywords and site elements that will improve your ranking. This will allow you to target your potential customers easily. The importance of social media can never be underestimated when it comes to online marketing. You should regularly post on your company’s blog and engage with your customers online. This will ensure widespread recognition of your brand.
Final Words
Ecommerce has evolved so much and it continues to do so. To make profits companies need to adopt policies and implement tools that will give them an edge over their competitors. There are so many ecommerce companies so standing out is not as easy as one may think. In this article we have presented a few tools and ways that will help your ecommerce company in one way or another.
