Author: Rodney Laws

How green is ecommerce? By most accounts, customers who purchase online do less damage to the environment than those who drive their own cars to a bricks-and-mortar store. But being greener than somebody else doesn’t necessarily make you green.

Ecommerce comes with a number of challenges. Managing sustainable packaging and carbon emissions are huge environmental challenges for ecommerce businesses of any size. So, how can you as an ecommerce retailer ensure that your business is as environmentally-friendly as possible?

Here are 5 ways to make your ecommerce business more eco-friendly.

1) Switch to electronic-only receipts to reduce paper waste

American bricks-and-mortar retailers hand out 228.7 million pounds’ worth of paper receipts every year. If you’re wondering how many trees that is, it’s 3.75 million. When online banking apps can show our full transaction history in a matter of seconds, this enormous waste of resources is almost entirely avoidable.

And ecommerce is part of the problem too. Are you still sending paper copies of receipts and return slips with your orders? The vast majority go in the trash – just like the 11% of all receipts from physical stores that are thrown away immediately.

An online purchase calls for an electronic receipt. You’re already sending order confirmations by email, and for most customers, that’s enough. Why not make your returns slip digital too? Customers who need one can easily print it, and you’ll cut down on your paper waste.

2) Find a packaging solution that fits and recycles easily

In a recent UK study, 72% of consumers said they think online retailers use too much packaging. Huge boxes for tiny items, plastic mailer bags that aren’t recyclable, mountains of foam peanuts – consumers are becoming increasingly frustrated with poor packaging.

Almost two-thirds of online shoppers say they would have a better opinion of a retailer who made a greater effort to use less packaging. So sustainable packaging choices aren’t just an environmental win, they’re a reputational score too.

Does your packaging have a high recycled-material content? Is it easy for your customers to recycle them again? Do your boxes match the size of your products?

If it’s a no on all counts, find a provider like Fantastapack. They offer fully-customizable packaging, made with responsibly-sourced and widely-recycled materials. Plus, they donate a portion of the proceeds from every order to help fund the planting of new trees.

3) Partner with a green courier for the crucial ‘last mile’

The final leg of a parcel’s journey from you to the customer is where it goes from a local distribution centre to their front door. This ‘last mile’ (in reality, it’s often much more than that) presents an enormous environmental problem, and the search for a more sustainable system is very much underway.

The recent rapid growth of ecommerce has sent more and more trucks into urban areas, pumping carbon emissions into city centres at unprecedented rates. With this comes increased traffic congestion, more noise pollution, and drastically-reduced air quality.

Low-emission options for this last mile are the solution. Does your courier use electric vehicles or pedal-powered cargo bikes? What about parcel lockers? Could you offer your customers the option to collect their parcel from a secure locker in a convenient location near their home or place of work?

4) Invest in your product descriptions to reduce returns

Ecommerce will never be able to compete with in-store retail on one very important front: touch and feel. And this inability to see the product influences the way online shoppers behave — 19% admit to buying multiple versions of the same item, fully intending to return those that aren’t right.

More returns means more trucks on the road. And it’s not just the environment that takes a hit, businesses suffer too: 57% say returns have a negative impact on their day-to-day operations. But here’s the dilemma: consumers frequently cite free and easy returns as a major influence on their decision to buy. So what’s the solution?

It starts with the old sales mantra, ‘The more you tell, the more you sell’. Only in this scenario, it’s about the quality of sales rather than quantity. Detailed product pages create confident customers, helping to reduce both the rate and environmental impact of returns.

So, how’s your photography? Can customers zoom easily? Do you use video? Are you giving a clear picture of the product in use? Do you go into detail about materials, fabric, sizing, care? Ecommerce giant ASOS is leading the way here. Take a leaf out of their book and invest in your product pages so that customers can make fully-informed choices.

5) Incentivize the customer to choose a slower delivery option

Next-day delivery is a sales and marketing dream, a deal-breaker for customers who can’t decide between you and your competitors. But for the environment, it’s all bad news. As is often the case, there’s a price to pay for the convenience.

Data analysis by the University of California, in collaboration with Vox, found that express delivery options don’t just wipe out the eco-benefits of online shopping — they actually create a higher carbon footprint compared with a customer driving to the store.

That’s because the need for speed puts more half-empty trucks on the road, massively reducing their energy-efficiency. The solution has to be education and choice. Customers need eco-friendly delivery options, and they need encouragement to choose them.

Do you offer a ‘green delivery’ option at checkout? Do you tell customers about the environmental cost of next-day delivery? What incentives could you offer to persuade them to choose a slower, more sustainable method?

As concern and activism over the climate crisis grow, the pressure on ecommerce retailers to become more eco-friendly will grow too. Consumers are already showing their frustration with packaging, and concerns around carbon-emissions and transportation will undoubtedly become mainstream too.

As a retailer, you have a great opportunity to educate your customers and influence their behaviour. Making green choices in your supply chain, providing the right information during the purchasing process, and offering green delivery options are a great start.

The last few years have seen ecommerce explode, with all manner of creative methods to hold our attention, convince us to buy and make the payment process as seamless as possible.

For ecommerce business owners in 2020, the challenge is staying on top of technological advancements, a changing consumer base more environmentally conscious than ever and increased competition.

To prepare your website for a new year take a look at these five ecommerce trends you need to know before 2020.

Interactive product visualization

Customers know there’s an element of pot-luck to shopping online. It’s hard to be sure what you’re ordering online is exactly what’s going to turn up at your door. This has led to customers becoming interested in seeing products in increasingly more detail online.

Customers want an idea of how it feels, looks and exists in their reality, rather than just in a stylized photograph. This trend is particularly pertinent in the fashion industry, where many of the bigger brands have begun to offer 3D interpretation of their products.

Interactive product visualizations are the online equivalent of going into the shop and picking up the product. This kind of presentation goes beyond what a shot of a model or a well-written product description can achieve. With new visual methods such as virtual reality on the rise, consider the detail in which customers want to see your products before buying.

Chatbots and private messaging

Chatbots and AI have become commonplace in our web-browsing experience, and there’s no reason that can’t translate into ecommerce. In the world of online sales, there’s no time to waste. If your customer is frustrated on your website and there’s no customer service rep on the other end of the phone, you’ve likely lost the sale. What does this mean? It’s time to invest in multiple communication channels.

Chatbots are a solution you can implement any time of day. They can be used to answer customer queries and save you money on hiring people to be on the other end of the phone 24 hours a day.

An important element of how this trend will develop is personalization. People are comfortable with the presence of AI while online and have no problem using them to solve a problem, but they still prefer a more personalized experience.

Personalized email targeting and recommended products have been extremely successful marketing tactics in the last few years, so a chatbot that can assist and recommend based on browsing habits is the next logical trend.

Second-hand commerce

Re-commerce, second-hand commerce — whatever you want to call it, it’s a developing trend within ecommerce set to explode in 2020. A focus on sustainability in our culture has lead to an increase in demand for used clothes. While charity shops are booming ecommerce has yet to really take hold of this cultural shift.

There is a huge market for vintage and used clothing, especially amongst economically-poorer and environmentally-concerned younger people. Some people just love finding a bargain too.

Tailoring your ecommerce store to re-commerce opens a wide scope for attracting a strong shopping demographic, while not being beholden to reinventing and reimagining for each season like regular fashion retailers are.

It also lends itself to a strong existing community of influencers, looking to delve deeper into sustainability themselves. Just make sure you have a solid returns strategy worked out.

Increase in social shopping

Social selling has been a huge trend in the last few years, with Facebook alone taking huge revenue from advertising by ecommerce businesses. Paid adverts and marketplace features have turned our social media channels into shopping platforms seamlessly integrated into our everyday life. It’s not enough to just sell now though — social shopping should be an extension of your brand and appeal to user habits.

Online retailers are only going to get more creative in their marketing on social platforms. To combat this a focus on further reduction in effort and time from first contact to sale is needed. To properly take advantage of this trend and shopper’s preference for social media, the process needs to be as simple and instantaneous as possible.

New payment/buying options

How your customers buy is just as important as what they buy and how they get to the checkout. People have become accustomed to paying in their preferred method. Think about how commonplace contactless payment is. People are less willing to accept a less advanced method of buying.

Whether it’s using their Apple Wallets, PayPal or even Bitcoin, customers of the future will want to use the method they’re most comfortable to get through the process as fast as possible. The payment methods you offer can help push a sale over the line or completely kill it, so make sure this is a trend you’re following.

Alternative payment methods don’t just cover what cards or online wallets you take. Buying through home devices such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home is becoming more common and likely the next ecommerce battlefield. Meanwhile options such as Klarna which allow users to buy now, pay later attracts a customer base that previously couldn’t be reached at all.

Predicting the habits and preferences of customers in the future can be incredibly difficult, especially as new technologies completely change the game. But staying on top of making your website and buying process as personalized and considerate as possible will give you the best chance to stay ahead of the trend in 2020.

It’s true what they say — when you try to sell to everyone, you sell to no-one. But identifying your customers (and the products that will appeal to them) is arguably the hardest part of selling online. Try these five simple strategies and you’ll find your niche in no time.

With thousands of online marketplaces, billions of potential customers and a near-infinite supply of goods to choose from, it’s easy to get overwhelmed when it comes to setting up shop online.

Your best strategy is to find a niche – a subset of a larger market with identifiable problems or desires that you can meet.

The best niches have:

• an audience with plenty of disposable income.
• an audience with a big online presence.
• products that are consumed quickly (so your audience returns to you more often).
• dedicated online communities, such as forums and social media groups.
• infrequent product turnover (so you’re not constantly updating your stock).
• an audience with an appetite for harder-to-find products (so they require a specialist).

For example – within the wider market of the DIY industry, a successful niche could be an online shop catering specifically for left-handed hobbyists who struggle to use regular tools.

The home improvement market has year-round appeal, a younger audience with money to spend, an infrequent turnover and plenty of DIY forums to populate with ads. Add the left-handed specialism to the equation and you have a solid niche to target.

Beyond these factors, the key to success is carefully researching potential audiences and trying out different approaches to find a viable angle.

Here are five tried-and-tested strategies to get you started.

1. Follow the fans

The best way to find out which products have appeal is to work out what your audience is recommending themselves. That means spending lots of time reading and searching through forums, message boards, and social media groups.

First, you’ll need to work out where your audience is gathering. Try searching Reddit threads, Facebook groups and the message boards of dedicated publications and websites. Make a note of the problems that are mentioned again and again — and what solutions are being offered in response.

You might also want to keep tabs on what industry or community figures, prominent hobbyists and influencers are recommending. But be wary that reviews might have been paid for, and that recommendations might have been written by other online sellers.

2. Pick for customizing potential

To make your offering stand out, consider choosing products that can be customized or altered according to the customer’s preferences. More freedom to personalize could be what sets you apart from the competition.

Alternately, you might apply your own logo to the products and work on building a name for your brand. It lends credibility to a newer seller and it’s a sure-fire way to stand out if your market gets more saturated down the line.

Lastly, you may want to think about picking items that accessories can be added to. Customers are far less averse to splashing out on accessories if they’ve already committed to a larger item, and if you find a niche with a lot of desirable accessories, you’ll enjoy higher profit margins overall.

3. Find the gap

Does your audience wish that a better product existed? Or that an existing product was more readily available?

If your audience is lusting over a range of products online, but shipping individual orders is prohibitively expensive or unavailable, could you contact the manufacturer and be the seller that bridges the gap?

Pay attention to what your audience wishes they had and you might well find your niche.

As you go about your day, make a note every time someone around you encounters a problem they can’t easily fix. Every time you get frustrated with an object you’re interacting with, write a memo so you can search for solutions later.

People will always be willing to spend money on products that can eliminate persistent problems or fulfill a desire — if you can make people happy, you’ll have a profitable niche.

4. Combine into kits

The explosion in monthly subscriber boxes in recent years just goes to show — niche audiences like to be understood and catered for directly.

Whether you’re selling beauty boxes, a coffee subscription or collections of geeky memorabilia, creating kits allows you to build a whole new product out of existing ones and market it directly to a specific audience. It also helps you tap into the lucrative gifting market, where gift-givers often base their searches around a loved one’s hobbies or interests.

And you don’t always have to theme a kit around an interest – life events such as ‘back to school’ or ‘hen do’ also provide opportunities to group products. Brands that make regular deliveries of quality everyday items such as razors or vitamins make shopping less of a headache for their customers, and often gain a loyal fan base.

When you start thinking laterally, the possibilities are endless.

5. Try, try and try again

Of course, you’ll probably have to adjust your inventory and marketing plan several times until you hit on a combination that works.

So, cash and time allowing, why not try a few different angles at once? It’s easy enough to set up an online shop on an existing marketplace or create a basic ecommerce site. You could then choose two or three of your strongest product lines (or combinations) and replicate your set up, setting clear goals and monitoring sales and engagement.

Testing your ideas this way means you reduce the chance of consecutive failures. If one shop begins to outperform the others, that’s a real-world confirmation of which product line to put your weight behind.

Hopefully, you now have some angles to explore when you get down to doing your research. Finding your identity as an online seller can take time, but it’s worth remembering that even ecommerce titans like Amazon grew out of one small, successful niche.

Every ecommerce startup seeking growth in 2019 should look to social media. It’s a popular and functional channel that provides an array of sales and marketing features to help you grow.

The latest social feature that startups should use is shoppable video. The perfect blend of ecommerce and visuals, it’s ideal for connecting with customers and selling products in an organic, accessible medium.

Read on to learn more about shoppable video and how your ecommerce startup can use it to scale fast in 2019 and 2020.

What is shoppable video?

In late 2018, Instagram released a variety of features to augment its existing array of ecommerce offerings.

The platform already provided a number of functions for online merchants, including product ads and shoppable Stories. But this new wave of features included even greater functionality, spanning more comprehensive business pages, saveable product posts and, of course, shoppable videos.

As the name suggests, shoppable videos let users purchase products from videos, directly in their Instagram feed. It combines social ecommerce with video content to give digital merchants a valuable sales channel, and one that ecommerce startups can capitalize on to scale fast in 2019.

But shoppable video isn’t just tied to Instagram. Technology exists that lets you make any video shoppable, regardless of the social platform it’s on.

Why does it matter for scaling ecommerce startups?

Social media is a crucial channel for startups to occupy. Each platform boasts hundreds of thousands and even billions of monthly active users. Consequently, social media is a thriving hub where your customers are active the most.

Video, photo carousels, Stories, live video, and more provide a wealth of ways for merchants to market their wares. But what really makes social media such a valuable channel for ecommerce startups is the seamless integrations each platform offers for online retail. Instagram especially has a great video ecosystem for ecommerce sellers.

Shoppable video will help you overcome the challenge of generating more leads, creating a buzz around your products, and being where your target audience hangs out online.

How can I use it to scale fast?

You know why shoppable video is so valuable for ecommerce startups. Now let’s break down how you can use it to scale faster in 2019.

Give your customers a reason to engage

Your shoppable videos aren’t a passive thing. They can and should be interactive, encouraging participation from the viewer. But it’s not enough to simply give them the option to engage — you need to compel them to do so.

Immerse your viewer in your story and use your narrative to drive your viewers to click. Combine interactivity with your story, making the narrative twists of your video decisions to be taken by your customers.

A good story engages your customers, compelling them to act. To that end, create a story around your product and put your customer at the center.

The best way to do this is by placing your product naturally in the video — no clumsy product placements here! This helps your customer connect with the story itself, which then leads them organically to your product.

Use overlays to inform the viewer without distracting

Video overlays are an important part of shoppable video. They guide the viewer to products and interaction opportunities, shaping their experience of a video’s narrative.

The key to a good overlay is to keep it useful but unintrusive. They should complement the video content, not detract from it completely. For instance, you might offer style advice for a dress, or color matching tips for interior decor.

Shoot for subdued overlay colors where possible. If your video has a specific hue or filter, select an overlay color that matches it. Alternatively, opt for branded colors to reinforce your branding through your video.

Keep it tight and concise

Millions of photos and videos are posted to social every day. As such, it’s a busy channel with a lot of content, and users see countless photos and videos whenever they scroll through their feed.

This means that vying for user attention can be a struggle. With so much content to browse through, your customers spend only a few seconds on each post before deciding whether to engage or move on.

That means the pressure is on to hook your audience quickly. You can achieve this through speed and concision.

The specifications for social video vary depending on platform and format: IGTV, video, Story, and so on. But the optimum duration for most social platform videos is no more than 15 seconds.

However, this is just a rule of thumb. It’s possible to create a short, snappy video that hooks in just a few seconds — it just depends on the strength of the content. If you can create a video that is concise, witty, or simple enough to be effective in just a few seconds, then there’s no need to fill the full 15.

Stand out by blending in

The most successful social media users are those who have nailed a unique creative angle. Look at the posts that rank highest in Instagram’s search tool, and you’ll see only high-quality, creative, original visual content.

If you want your shoppable videos to get noticed and engaged with, you should strive for the same. They should blend seamlessly into the rest of the beautiful content on the platform.

Such a tactic delivers a high-quality video that reflects back on your brand. Beyond this, it also prevents it from repelling customers who might switch off if they see a forgettable ad appear in their feed.

The key to getting this right is by striking a balance between natural and professional-quality. Rather than shooting your video entirely in a studio, find a suitable natural location to record in, eschewing the unnatural glare of artificial light for sunlight instead.

This approach makes your shoppable video blend into the other content on your customers’ feeds, consequently boosting their engagement.

Shoppable video blends a popular content format with strong ecommerce functionality to give startups a powerful growth channel. Follow the tips above and create engaging shoppable videos that get your products noticed and your brand scaling into 2019 and beyond.

Picture the scene.

You’ve invested significant resources and a lot of hard work into reaching your target audience. You check your website traffic and you’re pleased to see it’s paying off. Your customers are flocking to your ecommerce site.

Now all you need to do is show them what life would be like as the proud owner of your product. They’d be mad not to buy from you, right?

But are your product pages up to the challenge?

20% of purchase failures are potentially a result of missing or unclear product information. If your product pages don’t convert, the traffic you’ve worked so hard to capture will be wasted.

No one wants to fall at the last hurdle. So, if you want to improve your conversion rates and sell more of your products, try these actionable tips for writing ecommerce product pages that sell.

1: Know your audience

Whatever you’re selling, your customers are the cornerstone of your business.

So the best place to start when you’re writing product pages is to understand the people who buy from you.

Whether you’re selling state-of-the-art camera accessories, colorful leggings for kids or the latest eco-friendly, planet-saving bar of soap, knowing your audience means you can establish the features and benefits that are most important to them.

This will help you position your product as the answer to their question. It will also help you to make sure that the features and benefits that are most important to your customers are front and center in your product description.

2: Features vs benefits

If you want your ecommerce product page to sell, you need to include information about your product’s features and benefits.

How you choose which features and benefits to include will depend entirely on the needs of your audience.

If your audience is professional photographers and you’re selling the latest camera lens, a list of technical features is entirely appropriate. Your customers will know exactly what they’re looking for and don’t need to be sold on the benefits. It’s also likely that they’ll be searching for a new lens by specific features, so having the features clearly stated upfront lets them know your product does what they need and will help your product get found in search results.

However, generally speaking, the best way to write product descriptions that sell is to list, in order of importance to your customer, the features that provide the biggest benefit to them. As you list the features in order of importance to your customer make sure you explain the benefit of each feature as well.

This way your customers know exactly what your product does and how it will make their life easier, in order of what makes the biggest impact on them.

3: Optimizing for SEO

You work hard to make sure people find your website and your product pages have an important role to play.

To optimize for SEO, make sure you use specific product names and long-tail keywords that match what your customers are likely to be searching for.

This will make it even easier for your customers to find you and your products. It will also give them confidence, once they reach your website, that they’re in the right place.

To make the most of optimizing your page add relevant keywords to your page title, meta descriptions, image tags, and product descriptions. Your H1 and H2 tags should also describe your products using keywords.

Your page title and meta description are arguably the most important things to get right, as these are what your customers will see and click on from search engine results pages. Make sure your meta description includes what your product is, the benefits, your keywords and why your customers should buy it.

4: Make it scannable

Your customers want to quickly find out whether your product is what they’re looking for. That’s why it’s important to make your product description easily scannable.

You can do this by making sure the key benefits of your product are listed upfront and the information your buyer is looking for is easy to find.

Use short paragraphs, include bullet points and don’t be afraid of white space to make key information easy to find at a glance.

5: Words matter

Written information that’s difficult to process generates a negative emotion in the brain. Your brain then attributes that emotion to what you’re reading. That’s why it’s so important to make your written content easily scannable and easy to understand – so your customers don’t get a negative impression of your brand and products from your writing!

A good place to start is by using normal, simple language. Again this will depend on your audience, but a general rule of thumb is not to use long, complicated words and make simple, clear statements. If you wouldn’t say what you’re writing in casual conversation, chances are your product description will be less effective.

Once you’ve simplified your writing add in some good descriptive words so your customers can get a clearer sense of your product. Words that describe how your product looks, feels, smells, sounds, and tastes will help your customers to imagine owning and using it. Imagining buying your product is half the battle.

A more subtle way to use words is by choosing words that describe the product and the buyer. Words like sporty, elegant and clever can apply to your product and your customer, tapping into how your customer views themselves or how they’d like to be viewed by owning or using your product.

If you follow these five tips you’ll improve your product description writing and increase conversions on your product pages. Ask yourself the best question for assessing your ecommerce product page: does it give your customers what they need to know? If you apply these five tips chances are it will, and you will have written an ecommerce product page that sells.

If you’re an online store owner that may not be familiar with organic traffic and the potential this kind of visitor presents for your sales and marketing success, then you definitely need to get yourself tanked up and in the race.

What we can tell you is that organic traffic has nothing to do with organic farming, food, clothing or beauty products. And, not to stretch the metaphor too thinly, imagining organic visitors as cyberspace vehicles on the internet highway, is an excellent way to visualize how you, as an ecommerce business, can potentially capture more organic traffic.

Organic visitors are more than their names. They possess a real cache and power that can be very useful from an ecommerce SEO perspective. But where does organic traffic originate and, as an online store, what should you be doing to actively attract this organic flow of visitors so they plot their journey onto your freeway, and aren’t sidetracked or distracted by other routes or road signs?

Organic traffic versus direct traffic

As a broad rule of thumb, direct traffic arrives at your site by typing your URL directly into their browser. By comparison, organic traffic is those visits which are tracked by another means or method, usually because they’ve arrived through search engines, but can also come from other sources.

The important point to make is that organic traffic is free. It’s not cost you a penny to get the hit. There are no paid ads or stealth clicks going on here. This kind of traffic is genuinely interested in reading your SEO content because they want to. But what are the SEO secrets of success when it comes to capturing organic traffic and keeping it in your domain?

SEO or PPC: the battle of the acronyms

81% of users find their desired destination via a search engine. So it stands to reason that SEO is the driving force that all ecommerce companies should be locked to. Pay per click (PPC) is all very well, but will they drive organic traffic across town and into your ecommerce parking bay where visits convert into sales?

“Organic results are 8.5 times more likely to be clicked on than paid search results!”

It’s a pretty big disparity in figures, which we can likely put down to searchers and/or visitors gradually learning the difference between organic and sponsored results, and recognising that organic results are typically the more respected resource. Actual news versus fake news, if you will.

To bolster this finding, researchers discovered that by using heat-sensitive map technology, they were able to prove that most people’s eyes lock on to the central content on a page. This is instead of focusing on ads and PPCs situated to the right or elsewhere on a web page.

SEO: simplicity or duplicity?

The SEO process may seem simple in theory, but there’s always a catch, right? SEO is a bit more complicated than just writing great content and making sure your keywords match up and flow naturally.

Let’s put aside for a moment the basic aspects of SEO such as publishing quality content and social media reach – ecommerce and online stores also need to implement and stick with specific and unique strategies that maximize organic search traffic, sales, leads, which all, ultimately, contribute to the growth of your business and sales.

The golden rule of SEO is never to write for a faceless search engine. In the real world, there are actual people with actual personalities. They have likes, dislikes, attractions and repulsions. Having a strong idea of who your ideal buyer or customer means you’ll already be writing content that they are going to want to read, which in turn will influence where they go and what they want to do.

By creating engaging and educational content that resonates with your ‘dream scenario’ buyers or visitors, your SEO will improve organically! By tapping into the main issues of your buyer personalities and the keywords they might use in search queries, you’ll be optimizing your content from the get-go.

However, doing it the other way around and writing to a rigid keyword format could leave you with a jumbled mess of try-hard nonsense. But enough of the theory. What about the practice? Here’s our rundown on some ecommerce techniques we would suggest adopting as an online store looking to capture more organic traffic:

Write unique product descriptions

Cutting and pasting your product description from the manufacturer’s catalog is an immediate no-no. Whilst it may take longer to do, writing unique descriptions of your online products means that your SEO campaign already begins life organically.

Try using what are called long-tail keywords – namely those three or four keyword phrases which are highly specific to whatever you’re selling or marketing. Whenever a customer or potential visitor uses a longer, more specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they want to buy.

Treat your meta better

The meta title, URL and overall description are three key ingredients for any optimized web page or blog post. This is a complete no-brainer and, if you’re not sure how to do it yourself, then there are plenty of plugins to help you.

But don’t rest on your laurels yet — it’s not enough to just add the plugin. You’ll still have to work on each page in turn to make sure your meta is polished and in tip-top condition.

Create, share and link

If you’re going to spend time creating unique, quality content about how fabulous your product or services are, then make sure this content is shared far and wide.

Quality content has a shelf life far beyond a tweet, so make sure you build your presence on the social platforms your audience are most active on, remembering to add share buttons on your site so that visitors can easily share your content on their social platforms too.

Exploit the analytics

And finally, exploit those metrics. Use Google Analytics to track visitors to your site and get your blog up and out there. Being able to see where your organic traffic has come from and what keywords they searched for allows you to continually fine-tune your content, thereby continually improving on your ability to entice and capture your own fleet of organic traffic.

Organic traffic is vital for growing your online store — it’s free and achievable, as long as you know how. Follow the tips above and increase your organic traffic slowly but surely in 2020.

As we float through the ecommerce wave, we know how much momentum it has gained in the past decade. For your ecommerce business to succeed, let’s talk about some ecommerce UX best practices in 2020.

Did you know that 44% of buyers abandon their shopping cart because of the high shipping costs? Well, that is just one survey, but more than 5% of the people leave the site if they see that the website takes a long time to respond or keeps crashing.

This is where the best ecommerce UX and UI design steps up. As we know, ecommerce provides excellent opportunities for people who want to trade online and sell their products globally. Thus, we take considerations of how well we can improve our ecommerce website.

This is where the UX design store comes into the picture. You need to build a great experience for your customers to tell it out. The quality of the product you serve or the quality of the site they shop from are the two things you should never compromise on. Thus, here are 10 essential things to follow in eCommerce UX design.

Keep the experience refreshing

Website usability is the most important factor in ecommerce. Then if there are any minor changes to do, the UX designer of the ecommerce site needs to make sure that happens regularly along with general maintenance from time to time. Hence, you need to maintain the website without breaking the visual consistency.

Check the solutions you make

Some of the ecommerce best practices are that user testing that can have a great impact on how the conversions can be boosted. Ideally, you need to apply the solutions of user testing and UX design in the design process only. Still, after the launch of an ecommerce platform, there might be some trouble that can arise with UX.

Always respect your customers

You need to remember that your buyers are the ultimate, and every figure in conversion is about people you serve. Build the right interface that respects their time, and they will start bringing the positive experience of shopping on the sides.

Invest in speed

When designing for eCommerce, you cannot make the consumer wait on your website. Hence, you need to speed up your site. If that is not possible, then you can get creative on the loading screen and bring in some character with an animation on it to keep users distracted while they wait.

Make your logo clear and visible

According to ecommerce UX research, your company’s logo needs to be prominently displayed on the top left corner. It must also link back to the home page.

Use big featured images

One of the ecommerce UX best practices 2019 is that you put out clear, more extensive and detail images for each of their products. Customers need to see and gain information from your website from visuals, not just copy.

Make the design customized

Often the store UX design needs to make the website personal and customized so that it suits the personal needs of the visitor. 74% of customers are dissatisfied when websites do not have personalized content.

Give clear feedback with the website

One of the ecommerce homepage best practices UX design involved is that you need to give a clear website. It needs to cover a lot of ground, and then, the original link needs to be linked to some random link on the site. What we are trying to say is the ecommerce navigation best practices are to making use the adding product to the cart is simple.

Always have a user-friendly checkout

There is a need to make the whole website user-friendly so that customers can easily check out. You need to make sure checking out is very easy and that should not involve any frustration from the user side.

Conclusion

Thus, for the best user experience eCommerce you are going to offer, you need to know the buyers. Proper user research will help you to get the results you are always expecting. For the best shopping cart experience, keep them informed. You also need to take care of the design, so make sure it is consistent throughout. You can do it through social networks, print media or POS appearances.

Manan Ghadawala is the founder of 21Twelve Interactive which is one of the best mobile app development companies in India and the USA. He is an idealistic leader with a lively management style and thrives raising the company’s growth with his talents. He is an astounding business professional with astonishing knowledge and applies artful tactics to reach those imaginary skies for his clients. His company is also recognized by the Top Mobile App Development Companies. Follow him on Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn