Category: Ecommerce

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

Ecommerce is a trillion-dollar industry and Chinese companies and customers account for a huge part of that. Retail came to China much later than it did to America, but the Asian titan has taken on the Western powerhouse and may soon topple it.

China’s economy lays foundations for ecommerce success

Although U.S. tariffs have taken a bite from its growth recently, China’s economy has been one of the world’s success stories. Asia’s most populous nation has seen incredible economic growth since the 1960s, peaking at nearly 20% of GDP in 1970 and frequently making it into double figures.

China has smashed the growth of the U.S. economy for over half a century, to the extent that 2018’’ growth of 6.9% is considered “paltry.”

Credit World Bank

Economic growth in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has laid the foundation for its ecommerce success – with more money in the country, and greater business confidence than other nations, supply and demand has allowed online retail to thrive:

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The Red Dragon is the world’s biggest player in ecommerce

Retail exploded first in the USA, with the mall culture and Hollywood lifestyle spreading across the globe. As retail went online in the 1990s, American brands and customers took the lead – Amazon was a pioneer for the success of ecommerce brands and their immersion into people’s lives.

Despite U.S. success, ecommerce in the second millennium has been dominated by China. The country is now the world’s biggest player in the ecommerce space. Its total market worth stands at US$1.568 trillion and is expected to rise to US$1.8 by 2022, making it more than ten times the size of Japan and over twice that of the U.S.

Why shoppers in the Middle Kingdom adore online retail

The consumer revolution happened much earlier in the Western world than in China. Countries like U.S, U.K, Canada, and Australia embraced retail in the early part of the twentieth century. Asia’s most prosperous nation opened its economy to commercial activity at the close of the 1970s, creating a new generation of Chinese shoppers – imaginatively called Generation 2 (G2).

G2 is China’s version of millennials (starting work as the internet and ecommerce began to take hold in the marketplace). Like their Western counterparts, G2s are more fond of spending money than saving it and they love to shop.

Chinese ecommerce is a success story with global appeal

Ecommerce makes up 35% of Chinese retail sales, and startups have so many options for setting up a national or international ecommerce brand.

Ali Baba is the most popular Chinese provider, with the company and its founder, Jack Ma, known across the planet. Ali Baba has 17 million monthly mobile users, along with 552 million users on its online retail sites Taobao and Tmall, meaning it has 80% of all online Chinese retail sales.

Credit Statista

Ecommerce in The Red Dragon is a success story with global appeal that is just as enticing to Western customers and companies as it is to their Chinese counterparts. Popular international ecommerce platforms accept Chinese payments and will work in the country, but you may face some government restrictions. As an alternative, Alibaba, Jingdong and JD.com are solid national platforms.

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Ecommerce may have been invented in America but China is becoming the industry’s dominant force. The Middle Kingdom has the largest national online retail market and two of the three largest ecommerce brands in the world. If any nation is equipped to take on the might of Amazon it’s China, the only question is whether it will be Aliba, Jingdong, or a new brand – we’ll have to wait and see.

If you’ve been following the SaaS world in recent years, you’ll have noticed that tier systems have become much more popular. The reason for this is simple: while it’s become much easier for beginners to start their own stores, companies across all industries have been forced to move online, taking their enormous budgets with them. A smart SaaS service will cater to everyone from the budget user to the giant conglomerate.

And with this growth of tiered systems has come a strong focus on enterprise solutions. Across the internet, far more thought has been put into what constitutes “enterprise” ecommerce than is necessary. It’s actually quite simple: if you sell various products and services, cater to different audiences or situations, or simply need a system that can do more than repeat the same basic process every day, then there’s a decent chance you need enterprise software.

Not there yet? Are you taking your business completely seriously? Dedicating almost every day to pushing it to the next level? Determined to exhaust every last drop of potential? If so, you’re aiming for the enterprise level — the level of limitless ambition and the willingness to invest everything you have for a shot at wild success.

These enterprise solutions are custom-made to support high-level business, and if you truly aspire to reach that level, you should seriously consider investing in one. To give you some broader context, here’s what you need to know about enterprise ecommerce solutions:

They focus on scalability

Scaling is one of the greatest challenges for a new business. It’s a common scenario: you’ve done all the hard work to get your store off the ground and start bringing in enough revenue to account for your costs, but now you need to get bigger, and you’re not sure how to go about it. Plenty of standard ecommerce platforms don’t scale very well — they’re designed to handle certain amounts of traffic (and certain numbers of orders), and will simply stop working if you try to use them beyond their clearly-defined limits.

One of the central tenets of enterprise-level software is that it can scale near-indefinitely. The more performance and/or storage you need, the more you can provide for your customers. This allows you to concentrate on growing and developing your business without wondering what you need to be paying for that particular month, or figuring out how to respond to a sudden rise (or fall) in demand.

Think about the prospect of something like BFCM looming over the horizon. Without a scalable platform, you’ll have to calculate approximately what you’ll need to handle the traffic, and you might get it wrong. Enterprise software relies on a basic premise: when you need something, it’ll be there for you. You may need to pay more for it, but it’ll be there.

They’re built for flexible integration

Multi-channel retail is rapidly moving from an advantage to a requirement, and if you want to run a business capable of selling across myriad platforms (including new ones as they arrive on the scene), then you need integrations. Integrations connect your store to new pieces of hardware or software. For instance, a Twitter integration can allow you to quickly promote your products through Twitter posts.

When reviewing ecommerce software tiers, you’ll see that integrations get more varied and numerous as the cost goes up. Smaller businesses don’t need to leap on new possibilities — they can stick with regular channels and rely on core integrations to get by — but enterprise-level businesses have to be more advanced.

With an enterprise solution, your store can cleanly spread its sales and promotions across all kinds of channel, and you can be confident that whenever a new tool or channel achieves some success, the development team will start working on an integration for you.

They’re generally cloud-based

Cloud-based ecommerce just involves all the digital assets being hosted across numerous data servers instead of on your personal server. When someone visits your store and places an order, all of their details will be made accessible through an admin dashboard you can view from anywhere with internet access. This largely avoids the need to take backups, and hugely increases the level of convenience.

There are plenty of self-hosted solutions for small or medium businesses, but it’s hard to find self-hosted enterprise-level solutions because SaaS companies need a lot of access to maintain a high level of service quality. By using their own storage options and processing power, they can handle the foundation of your store on your behalf.

You can run a self-hosted enterprise-level store using something like Magento, but would you really want to? Unless you need a highly-customized store design, there’s little benefit to it. Going with a cloud solution is simply going to be easier overall.

They’re quickly getting more accessible

You might like the sound of everything we’ve run through thus far, but have reservations about the potential cost. After all, I did stress that enterprise ecommerce demands total commitment and investment. Perhaps you’re not sure whether you’re ready to take that step — but something that might make the decision easier for you is the rapidly-rising level of accessibility.

Ecommerce in general has seen a pattern repeat over and over again: new options and features enter the scene, expensive and unintuitive, but are steadily polished until they become everyday standards, just part of the mainstream-level online selling package. This is now happening with enterprise ecommerce. For instance, Shopify Plus is a scalable platform aimed at the enterprise level, attempting to do for that tier what regular Shopify has done for SMEs.

Is it something that the average beginner seller should go for? No, of course not. Shopify Plus is going to cost upwards of $2000 per month, and that’s at the cheapest. It isn’t something you should consider until your revenue justifies it — but the main takeaway is that enterprise ecommerce solutions are becoming extremely intuitive, ensuring that the main challenge you face is earning enough money (not getting your new scalable system configured).

So, there you have the basics of software for enterprise-level ecommerce. They’re wonderfully scalable, flexible, and convenient — and with each passing month, they become more accessible. They’re far from cheap, of course, but if your business gets big enough, you should strongly consider taking the leap.

For more information on starting your own ecommerce business, don’t forget to check out my guides or blog for the latest news, tips and advice.

Ecommerce can be a rewarding industry. Launching an online business gives you the freedom and control to carve your own way in the digital sphere.

But ecommerce is not without its headaches. There are several issues that every digital entrepreneur faces at some point during their business journey.

Thankfully, there’s a solution: automation. Such technology turns all your ecommerce headaches into an ecommerce breeze — read on to find out how.

Crush your customer service

A happy customer is a loyal customer. But an unhappy customer? They’re anything but.

Managing customer complaints and queries can be time-consuming. But it’s an important part of growing a successful ecommerce business, so it’s not something you can avoid.

Thankfully, automation lets you provide better customer service. It mitigates the time spent on mundane or repetitive queries and lets you focus on the most pressing complaints and issues.

Chatbots are the most common form of customer service automation. By adding an AI bot onto your website, you can deal with frequent or simple requests (such as stock queries or delivery information).

Consequently, your customer service team is free to provide more nuanced requests quickly and personably. Install a chatbot to your online store and create a range of scripts that deal with the most common queries you face. You’ll save time, deal with more queries, and keep your customers happy all at once — not bad.

Save your struggling social media

Social media is a crucial component in any ecommerce business. It gives you the power to circumvent competitive SERPs and create an online community that generates leads, drives sales, and bolster your branding across platforms.

Managing one social platform whilst juggling the rest of your business can be tricky. But coordinating multiple social platforms while doing so is downright impossible.

With such a valuable marketing channel is worth nurturing, and automation makes it possible.

There is no shortage of social media automation platforms, each with different functions and features. SocialOomph is one scheduling tool that many businesses use to coordinate and schedule their social posts, letting them plan their content months in advance in a single sitting.

Other platforms still let brands monitor mentions of their business on social, helping them spot potential PR crises and finding prospective sales opportunities into the bargain.

Ace your abandoned cart revenue

Abandoned carts are one of the leading causes of lost revenue for ecommerce brands. Your customer is all but set to pay and then they abandon their purchase. It costs online businesses an estimated $18 billion of lost revenue every year — no small sum.

But that doesn’t have to be the case. Email automation prevents abandoned carts by sending a sequence of chaser emails to the lost lead. Each email builds on the last, offering different messages and different benefits (such as discount codes or freebies) to compel the abandoned customer to buy.

And this is all done with minimal involvement on your part. Simply plan the sequence ahead of time and then let your automation do the rest. Email automation tools like ActiveCampaign make chasing abandoned carts easy, and its automation well worth investing in.

Succeed at smart enterprise scaling

Every entrepreneur is after growth. But as your business grows, so too do the problems you face. Orders increase and your customer base grows, placing strain on your business infrastructure.

This results in either ad-hoc workarounds that are akin to putting a Band-Aid on a serious wound, or more hires — a costly process that growing businesses can ill afford.

A third solution, however, is ecommerce automation. This transforms all the daily repetitive tasks associated with a scaling business, letting you focus on more urgent matters. From customer segmentation to price updates, ecommerce automation does what a human does, but better and for less.

And it’s easy to do too. Ecommerce automation tool lets you implement automation with an intuitive visual builder, creating workflows from scratch that foster business growth.

While not every automation tool is as easy to use, many are. It’s accessible and straightforward, and saves you time and money as your business grows — it’s a no-brainer.

Kill it with customer retention

In the busy world of ecommerce, it’s easy to lose yourself down a tunnel of chasing new leads. But as you pursue these potential customers, all too often your existing customers get neglected. And as a result, you lose them.

If you want to increase your revenue, you need to keep your old customers on board. But how do you balance regular lead generation with sustained customer retention?

If you’ve gotten this far in the article, you already know the answer.

Automation turns all the minutiae of customer retention into automatic tasks. Whether you need customer feedback after a purchase, want to send a freebie or discount to a customer on their birthday, or just want to remind your loyal shoppers that you value their custom, ecommerce marketing automation has you covered.

Chasing new leads is a necessity for every ecommerce business — that’s a fact. But so too is nurturing relationships with your existing ones. You’ll increase your customer retention and enjoy sustained profits for a long time to come.

Ecommerce is a rewarding — but challenging — endeavor. But automation makes those challenges easier, and it’s growing in sophistication everyday. Take inspiration from the above and let automation streamline your online business and enjoy sustained business growth in 2019.

To learn even more about building a successful ecommerce business, bookmark my blog and how-to guides, and check-in regularly for the latest tips and advice.

Even in its inaugural iteration, ecommerce was never outright inconvenient — certainly not when compared to traditional retail. And as the digital world has matured, almost everything has become easier to use. Interfaces have improved, accessibility has expanded, and educational resources have flooded the web. Today, it’s possible for a complete beginner to get selling in remarkably little time if they’re dedicated enough.

Still, ecommerce certainly has its fair share of challenges. In addition to knowing the sales industry, and being able to network and negotiate, an ecommerce seller must understand technology. This makes it a tough field for anyone who isn’t tech-savvy. And then there are the various practical problems of running an ecommerce operation.

Thankfully, that same steady design progress that made ecommerce the powerhouse it is today shows no sign of slowing down, ensuring that each year brings fresh technologies and tactics for making online selling easier. Here are some notable ecommerce challenges that are already being addressed through technology:

Trust acquisition

Trust is a tricky thing to achieve as an online business. When you have physical premises, you have various ways to encourage visitors to trust you: you can show professionalism through maintaining a spotless environment, hire capable and helpful store assistants, and — most importantly — showcase your products.

When people can closely examine products, even interacting with them, they can feel confident about their purchasing decisions. Online, you can’t showcase your products that way. All you can do is provide relevant materials, and that only goes so far. It’s better to have ten product images than just one, but even a hundred images won’t give you a great idea of what it’s like to view the product in person.

While this problem will never be fully overcome, AR/VR product resources stand to massively diminish its effects. A seller can create a 360-degree view of a product, allowing a shopper to view it far more closely. By adding the dimensions to a mobile AR app (along the lines of Ikea Place), they can make it possible for someone to preview the product in their home, getting a better idea of how it would look there than they would from viewing it in a physical store.

General admin

The advantage of doing retail the old-fashioned way is that it doesn’t need all that much upkeep. You bring in stock, open your store, and surf that wave until you need more (or different) stock. Most of the ongoing effort is dedicated to staffing the place and keeping it tidy.

Because an online store has no physical presence, though, it needs consistent effort to keep it viable in a hotly-competitive online marketplace. That typically calls for running PPC campaigns, updating website copy, producing blog posts, and — often the most time-consuming part — communicating with customers regarding their orders.

General admin for an ecommerce store can easily take up a lot of time, making it hard to scale the business, but it’s getting easier with the consistent improvement of chatbots and AI store assistants like Drift or Conversica. One well-designed chatbot can handle the bulk of the support requests for a store, and an AI assistant can make it easy for a store owner to make major updates from their smartphone — even starting a new programmatic PPC campaign with a single tap.

Additionally, the process of maintaining warehouse facilities can be smoothed out through the use of facilities management software such as FacilityBot. Keeping track of stock and dealing with the errors and failures that are unavoidable when you’re trying to handle high-level logistics can be hugely stressful, so putting a system in place to productively deploy artificial intelligence is an excellent long-term investment.

Competitive store design

Design standards in the ecommerce world change quickly. Any fresh feature or convention can catch fire unexpectedly, leaving everyone scrambling to jump on the bandwagon. We’re actually seeing this happen with the aforementioned chatbots. In a short period of time, they’ve gone from being disregarded as novelties to being considered practical necessities by most brands.

For a small (or even medium) business, it can be really tough to keep up with the pace. A brick-and-mortar store design can remain unchanged for decades without business being adversely affected, but an ecommerce store that goes without updates for a year or so will start to look very dated. How quickly can a new social media channel enter the zeitgeist?

This is a problem for SaaS to solve, and it’s doing just that through the ever-increasing use of templates, set platforms, and automatically-updated layouts. Massively-scalable systems like Shopify Plus or Magento Commerce Cloud allow sellers to sit back and let their CMS providers seamlessly keep everything in line with shopper expectations. It’s a far cry from the original need to manually implement code changes every so often.

Tax calculation

One of the fundamental strengths of ecommerce is its suitability for expansive selling. You can sell across regions, across state barriers, and even across national borders if you’re so inclined. While you could always do that from a brick-and-mortar business, you’d struggle to sell anywhere you didn’t have a physical presence — since a website is accessible from across the internet, it’s not an issue.

However, that opportunity brings a lot of complexity. Calculating taxation can be quite the annoyance, particularly given the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision to allow states to pursue sales tax from out-of-state sellers. The more you sell, the more you need to calculate — and then there’s the paperwork of registering to pay tax in different areas.

Usefully, the industry has adapted quite quickly, and an ecommerce seller can use an automated tax solution like Avalara to handle everything on their behalf — even down to filing the required forms and confirming their acceptance. This allows online merchants to benefit from the immense potential of selling online without being encumbered by the associated demands.

As time goes by, running an ecommerce business is only going to get easier. Some elements keep getting harder, of course, but those are the creative aspects, and if you don’t have compelling ideas for a store, you’re not going to be successful anyway. Technology enablers are about getting the roadblocks out of the way, allowing you to drive in any direction you think is best.

For more information on starting your own ecommerce business, don’t forget to check out my guides or blog for the latest news, tips and advice.

Today’s internet user flits about here and there, rapidly moving between websites and devices. Not only do their smartphones give them stable high-speed internet access on a 24/7 basis, but they also have an indulgent level of retail choice: countless stores and merchants seeking their custom, with almost any product available from numerous sources.

This makes it incredibly difficult to thrive in ecommerce. You’re just one store of many, and relying on shoppers visiting your store might not be enough. That’s where multichannel retail comes in: making your products available through various channels, with each one giving you fresh chances to pick up some purchases.

But it isn’t as easy as it might sound. Plenty of businesses have tried to adopt multichannel tactics but encountered some major issues in the process. If you’re determined to make the most of your online store, you need to avoid these 5 rookie multichannel retail mistakes:

Not prioritizing a few channels

There’s a reason why we’re talking about multichannel retail instead of omnichannel. You can’t realistically be everywhere, and if you tried to get your products in every possible channel, you’d face an almighty struggle trying to handle the situation. What’s more, some channels are never going to return the kind of profit you’d need to justify them.

Most worrying, though, is the prospect of damaging the perceived value of your brand. You should aspire to being perceived as a quality brand, and not every marketplace is suitable for that — you could even make an argument that offering your products through the Amazon marketplace could undermine the value of your own ecommerce site.

Think carefully about every channel you could use, and disregard every option that doesn’t offer clear long-term ROI with little to no damage to your brand.

Not using the channels together

Maximizing the potential of an ecommerce business is all about analytics: gauging performance, altering the strategy, making changes, then testing again. Lather, rinse, repeat. And given that (as noted) different channels invariably target different parts of the sales funnel, it’s impossible to form a cohesive impression of how things are going if there are any holes in your analytics.

Not only do you need to ensure that every channel is fully configured for tracking goals (most likely in Google Analytics), but you also need to connect them whenever useful to push people through the sales funnel. You’re not typically going to earn a sale through the first impression.

For instance, someone just learning about your brand on Instagram might not be ready to buy, but they might be interested in learning more about your style — so include links in your Instagram posts, helping people find you on Twitter (or wherever) and keeping them in your sales funnel for as long as possible.

Not varying your message

How do you write sales content? Some brands use the same materials for everything they do, simply cutting them down or expanding them as needed to meet changing format requirements. This is a huge error, because every channel requires a unique approach. Take the content that you have on your ecommerce site’s product pages — would it fit on Pinterest?

Social media in particular not only asks for specific image sizes and content lengths, but also reaches people at different points in the sales funnel. Anyone who’s visited your site likely has some idea of what you’re selling, but someone who sees your post on Facebook might find your brand totally unfamiliar, needing the content to slowly nudge them towards converting instead of cutting right to the chase.

So cater your text, tone and imagery to each individual channel, bearing in mind whatever limitations are placed on it. That should optimize your overall return.

Not using offline selling to your advantage

Selling online is fantastically valuable, but it isn’t the only way to bring in revenue. Consider the importance of going against the grain. Now that almost everything is sold online, traditional retail can feel special again — and when you’re competing in an online market with slim profit margins and big brands with the infrastructure to stay ahead, it can help you keep up.

This isn’t to say that you should maintain a full-time brick-and-mortar store, because that’s an expense that you likely can’t (and shouldn’t) sustain.

Instead, look for more ephemeral ways to pick up more offline sales: for instance, hype up and host a pop-up shop, strike a deal with an existing store to have some of your items stocked year-round, and/or make your products available at relevant industry events. It’s easier than ever before to digitally preview products, so it isn’t too much of an issue if you have far too large a range to take everything with you.

Not using great software tools

Multichannel retail is complicated. It takes the essential challenge of online retail and ramps it up, requiring you to keep track of orders across distinct systems and ensure that everything continues to run smoothly. Key to the whole thing, then, is having the right systems in place to keep everything in line.

Armed with the right software, you’ll find it much easier to navigate the awkward path of moving into multichannel retail. Don’t make the mistake of trying to do things manually — make the necessary early investment to keep costs down in the long term.

Multichannel retail is a necessity if you want your business to stay competitive, but you need to take it seriously and be keenly aware of the mistakes we’ve looked at here. Work to avoid these pitfalls, and you’ll have a much greater chance of succeeding.

For more information on starting your own ecommerce business, don’t forget to check out my guides or blog for the latest news, tips and advice.

Inbound marketing has been growing in importance for a number of years now. Ecommerce companies are using it more and more to direct targeted traffic to their stores and convert that traffic into customers.

But something is going wrong with your campaign. It’s not working out as you expected, but you don’t know why?

Let’s take a look at the different areas of your inbound strategy so you can pinpoint what is stopping yours from taking off.

Lay the Foundations

Before we look at the key stages of inbound marketing, first you need to lay your foundations. Get these in order because it could well be that you have not sorted out the basics, and this could be holding you back.

And before we even look at these, there’s one thing you must do: Define your goals.

You should have a clear idea about what you want to achieve and who you are targeting. That means creating buyer personas, deciding on what your product offering is and your unique value proposition.

What are you offering that is different? What does your store do that other stores do not? What are your revenue goals?

The 3 Key Stages of Inbound Marketing

Once you’ve got your foundations in place, there are three general stages that make up your ecommerce inbound marketing strategy. One or more of these could be holding back your inbound strategy. Let’s dive in.

1. Traffic

Arguably the most important part of the whole inbound strategy is to generate traffic. Without traffic, you don’t make sales. Simple. So you need to drive a regular stream of traffic to your store.

For many ecommerce stores, this is the biggest challenge of all and where they place most of their focus. But how do you do it?

There are many ways to drive traffic, but organic search is one of the most important. By implementing an SEO strategy, you can drive targeted traffic to your site from all around the country and beyond whether you’re based in Los Angeles, New York, or anywhere else in the world.

This involves (among other things) creating product pages optimized for the right keywords, generating links to your site (often through publishing valuable content), and getting higher up in the SERPs. 

You must take all of these factors into consideration when you are setting up your website because it can be a very time-consuming exercise to optimize after the act. If you’re building your website with WordPress then I recommend adding the Yoast plugin to your ecommerce store. It’s not just a time-saver, it’s a business maker.   

But SEO is a long slog. It can take months to start generating real traffic. If you are putting all your efforts into your SEO, this could well be why you are failing to generate the traffic you need.

Enter paid traffic.

Inbound marketing can accommodate paid traffic, even though it is more often focused on free traffic. You want to get in front of your customers at the moment they are looking for the products you provide, and this is where AdWords can be a fantastic generator of targeted traffic. The problem with this is that it can be expensive.

AdWords also provides you with crucial data for your SEO. You can find out the keywords that drive sales, the landing pages that convert, the advertising messages that get results. You can test and improve, you can even launch a retargeting campaign.

Paid social is another option. Using ads, you can target the specific people you want to reach on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, reaching out to the people who are most likely to buy from you.

There is also organic social to consider. By sharing content, getting involved in conversations, and engaging with your customers, you may be able to generate more social traffic to your site. All these together are where you will start to get targeted traffic.

2. Conversions and sales

If you are focusing just on traffic, it could be that your inbound campaign is failing because your pages have not been set up properly for conversions and sales. 

This involves converting visitors into email subscribers and making direct sales in your store.

This is a huge topic, but it involves:

• setting up landing pages for your ads
• converting not just into sales but into email leads so you can continue to target people
• optimizing your checkout process
• using a site search function to make it easier to find specific products
• experimenting and testing to find out what is working, then improving on it
• making it easier to find your bestsellers
• converting visitors from your blog posts, perhaps by using content upgrades

It will also involve factors like optimizing the overall experience including a good mobile experience, a fast-loading site, and clear and intuitive navigation.

This is a very real concern if you’ve hurdled the web design part of your ecommerce business, opting instead to buy one of many ready-made ecommerce sites that are for sale.

While it saves you time by you not having to build your own online store, you might lose out on that essential optimization process. 

If you’ve chosen this business model for your company, you’ll need to carry out a CRO audit – something which is also useful for you to do periodically even if you’ve built your website from scratch. Some of the things you need to cover in your audit are: 

• Layout and design 
• UX
• Analytics 
• Content 

A few quick wins that will enhance your conversions and sales are:

• Posting video tutorials on your website 
• Simplifying your checkout process
• Using multiple images of your products 
• Adding a live chat function to your website
• Making sure you have multiple payment options
• Incorporating user reviews

Services like Unbounce and Qualaroo can help you scale your CRO efforts.

3. Repeat Customers

If you are generating traffic and conversions, you are well on track. But there is one final area to consider: Turning your customers into loyal brand advocates and repeat customers.

We all know that repeat customers are far more valuable. You’ve done the hard work of turning them into customers, now take advantage of that. You need to delight them, and you can do that by:

• Providing incredible support
• Asking them about their experiences
• Offering to help if something has gone wrong
• Sending them valuable content direct to their email
• Providing personalized suggestions
• Giving them special offers unique to them

Show them that you care and you want their experience to be positive. Do this, and you’ll soon have customers who will be singing your praises—and doing their bit to bring in new customers. Referrals are gold. Make use of them.

If one of the areas detailed above is lacking, the whole inbound strategy will be ineffective. If you’re not driving traffic, or not driving the right type of traffic, your strategy will fail. If you’re not converting visitors, your strategy will fail. If the customers you convert don’t become repeat customers, your strategy will fail.

There’s a good chance that one of these three areas is holding you back. So take some time to go over your entire strategy. Study your analytics to work out what is working and what is not working. Pinpoint where your inbound marketing strategy is not working, then fix it.

Then you too can take full advantage of one of the most effective marketing strategies available today.

For even more guidance on starting, building and running an ecommerce business, take a look at my dedicated guides page and blog for the latest tips and how-tos.

Suppose you sell two products that do the same thing, except one is cheap and practical, and the other is expensive and luxurious. Along comes a prospective customer with an eye to buying the first one. Do you simply make that sale, or do you make an effort to push them towards the upmarket alternative? It’s the latter, surely — the price is higher, the profit margin is greater, and you stand to gain more from that exchange.

This is the popular art of upselling, and when it’s done well, it benefits everyone. You get to make more money, and the customer gets the indulgent experience of going away with something better than they anticipated getting. But you can take upselling too far, making it not just ineffective but actually counterproductive.

When does upselling start to make you less money instead of more? Let’s consider it:

How upselling can backfire

There’s a fundamental back-and-forth to the sales process. It’s easy to forget that when you’re dealing with ecommerce because it feels so disconnected from any traditional model of negotiation, but it still manifests in the wavering interest of the shopper. They want to feel that they’re getting a good deal, and every time their options change, their opinion does too.

With that in mind, here are some of the ways in which upselling can cause a shopper to be less interested in placing an order:

• It can give them too many options. There’s such a thing as analysis paralysis where you have too many choices and you can’t ultimately decide. If someone has resolved to buy item A, but you start telling them about items B, C, and D, they might end up leaving without picking one of them.
• It can confuse them. When you introduce someone to a higher-cost version of a product or service, they might not understand what the difference is — and if you bring up something like a type of warranty or support service as an add-on, it can easily lead someone to wonder why they need it.
• It can feel heavy-handed. Depending on the execution, an upselling attempt can feel obviously self-serving on the part of the seller. If you conveniently offer a good alternative, it can be useful for the buyer — if you push it too hard (as a series of page-spanning pop-ups, for instance), it will become annoying, which will make the shopper dislike you and want to shop elsewhere.
• It can ignore intent. There are times and places for upselling, and plenty of circumstances in which it just doesn’t fit. Take budget items, for instance. If someone is pointedly shopping for the cheapest version of something, they’re not going to be interested in being upsold, and seeing your eagerness to drive up their spending will make it clear to them that you don’t understand their needs.

It’s all about understanding context and making sensible decisions about what the shopper will accept before it stops being useful and starts being grating.

How to know when you’re going too far

Most of these factors are subjective and thus hard to gauge, so how do you know when upselling is starting to impede your efforts? The first and simplest method is to focus on the analytics. This calls for a lot of A/B testing: whenever you’re thinking about introducing an element of upselling to your sales funnel, add it as a variant and run it against the existing version of the page.

If you do this carefully as you roll out updates, you’ll notice when it starts to turn against you, because the metrics will reflect it. You’ll see more site visitors leaving after your upselling attempts — they’ll likely leave their original selections in their carts as they go. Naturally, you’ll see a decrease in the average order value: the very thing upselling is supposed to help with.

The reason analytics matter so much is that they move past your fallible impressions of what’s working and cut to the fundamental data: if they show that your upselling results in 2% more conversions, then it’s clearly working, no matter what you think of it.

The value of detailed feedback

In addition to watching your analytics, you should get into the habit of consulting customers to get their feedback about your operation. Ask them how useful your upselling attempts are: do they like being given opportunities to change their orders, or would they prefer to be given space to complete their orders?

This is important for the following reason: customer opinion is often a great predictor of future metrics. For instance, suppose that your analytics show your upselling to be successful, but your customers say that they’re starting to find it a little too much — it may be that making another update will hit the tipping point that turns it counterproductive. If sentiment is turning against your sales approach, you can change course before going too far.

In conclusion, upselling can go wrong in various ways, and starts hurting your profitability when you overdo it without realizing. To avoid this, track your performance carefully, and be ready to adjust your approach when the metrics demand it.

To learn more about building a successful ecommerce business, check out my blog and how-to guides for easy-to-follow advice.