eCommerce websites will not only widen your reach beyond the location of your business, but it also means you can trade 24/7, helping you connect with the growing number of customers who prefer to do their shopping online. A good eCommerce store will not only attract and convert customers, but it will also bring in repeat business.

After creating sales with a new customer, they will be familiar with what your business offers and have the confidence to buy more in the future. Whilst every Start-Up business wants to find new customers, selling further products to existing customers is a lot easier and a much more efficient use of limited budgets.

Whether you already have an eCommerce website, or you are considering setting one up, it is important to get your strategy and planning in order to have the best chance of success. A well-designed eCommerce store with a secure and user-friendly transaction process should be your foundation.

You need to ensure that potential customers are finding your website, this means driving traffic to it from all the platforms where your potential customers tend to spend their time, which could be search engine results, social media, third party websites or apps etc. Once you have got a flow through of traffic to your website, you need to ensure your potential customers make the decision to buy and complete their purchase, by providing all the information they need upfront such as delivery timescales, delivery costs and your returns policy etc.

Optimising your product pages, you might assume the homepage of your website is the most important as it serves as your online shop window. However, with eCommerce sites, which is not always the case.

Many visitors will land directly onto one of your product pages, especially if they have been using a search engine like Google to find what they are looking to buy. Someone looking for a specific product by name or brand is going to be a lot closer to making a purchase decision than someone using more generic term or title. If you focus on your specific customer groups, you are likely to see much better conversions and sales outcomes.

A WELL-DESIGNED ECOMMERCE STORE WITH A SECURE AND USER-FRIENDLY TRANSACTION PROCESS SHOULD BE YOUR FOUNDATION

Your page title will typically be the name of the product itself, but make sure you include details like the brand name and colour if those are likely to be words your customers might use when searching online. Try to write product descriptions using your own words, in a way that will work best with your audience.

A good description will highlight the key features to help a customer decide to purchase. Optimised images, whilst it is key to use excellent quality photos of your products including multi angled shots, you should also optimise these for web use. This means saving them in the right dimensions to display on your website, at the smallest file size possible – without lowering the image quality. This will help your website load time, boost your SEO. Good branding, some customers will never visit your homepage, so it is essential that you make sure your company branding is well presented in header and footer to give customers the confidence to purchase from you.

Always check your page layouts on mobile’s laptops, tablets, and desktops to make sure they display well on all devices. The power of brand and category pages Your eCommerce store could score more visibility in Google search results by creating dedicated landing pages for the brands and types of products that you sell.

Big brands have their own followers, so giving potential customers an effortless way to browse all the products relating to that brand will help when they come to visit your website. The content you will want to put on your brand pages similar to those on your individual product pages.

However, you will also need to provide a good description of the brand itself, including details on the brand, product range, along with links to the main product 1lines you stock.

This is a fantastic opportunity to tap into a range of relevant keyword search terms with links to all the relevant products that you sell conveniently listed out underneath.

Category pages, you may be selling a number of items in related categories. Category pages enable you to group these products together, and they can be immensely powerful in helping boost your search engine rankings for these particular keywords, as well as making it easier for customers to browse your product range.

So, you could have category pages for large and small household appliances as well as small soft furnishings covering multiple brands. Treat this as an opportunity to introduce the category, its products, and key features that customers should consider when browsing or purchasing items in that category, and then link through to the complete range of products.

A GOOD ECOMMERCE WEBSITE IS ALL ABOUT EFFICIENCY: YOU NEED TO TARGET THE RIGHT CONSUMERS TO VISIT YOUR ONLINE STORE

One of the key characteristics of an eCommerce website is that it will have a lot of pages, there is your standard home and contact pages, but also individual product pages, as well as brand and category pages to help your content surface in search engine results.

With all these pages, it is important to keep your focus on user experience, and a growing trend is the use of on-page chatbots to help your customers through their shopping experience. This is ‘conversational commerce.’ through conversational commerce, businesses can provide answers to frequently asked customer questions, help them with their buying decisions, and give customer support as needed; all of which helps connect businesses with their customer base like never before.

The goal here is to mirror the personalised experience that customers would expect from a shop assistant in a high street store, and effectively deliver this online. Chat functions can either be served up via an integrated chat window or carried out using third party messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or iMessage.

These conversations can either be staffed by human operatives, or by an AI-powered chatbot that is programmed with the necessary information to help visitors throughout their shopping experience. Let us say you are looking for gift for a friend, you visit the online gift shop, and start browsing but do not see anything that meets your brief so, you need assistance. A chat box pops up in the bottom righthand corner of your screen – “can I help?”. Over the next few minutes, you discuss your friend’s preferences in the chat window.

The chatbot – or human assistant refers to the shop’s catalogue and makes a few suggestions by posting links to them in the chat window. The outcome is that you find the perfect gift for your friend, and you complete your transaction, but think about how that could have gone without the conversational element.

You may never have found that perfect present on your own and left the site out of frustration., through the consultative connection with the business in real time, you made a purchase.

Basket abandonment. It is a fact of life that many people will put items into their online shopping basket without completing the checkout process to purchase them. Here are some ways to reduce the amount of abandoned shopping baskets on your website.

Create an abandoned Basket recovery email campaign, this is effective as it uses manual or automated emails to remind customers who have visited your website but not completed their online transaction to return to your site to do so.

When a visitor adds items to their shopping basket, they should be prompted to enter some contact details including their email address. This means that if they subsequently drop out of the purchasing process, a recovery campaign can be triggered.

Bear in mind that you will need to have the appropriate permissions from the user regarding data protection and cookies. A good, abandoned basket recovery campaign will comprise a series of emails to remind the recipient of the products they were interested in, and prompt them to complete their purchase.

Each email should include details of the products left in the cart, with a handy link taking the customer straight back into the checkout process so they can easily complete their order. A powerful way to round off this series is to include a discount coupon or incentive with the final email.

It is important to remember there is no single right way to set up an abandoned cart recovery campaign, so you could experiment with sending the emails at different times and with different offers or formats to see which works best with your customers. To get your email campaign in place you will need an email marketing platform.

Online research will show several free options that will allow you to start building relationships with email marketing. Basket abandonment campaigns are just the start of how you can use email marketing as a tool to drive sales for your eCommerce store. It plays a key part of any online marketing mix, as it is a wonderful way to keep your existing customers engaged, informed of your latest news and primed for repeat online business.

Do not forget, email marketing requires that you store your customers’ personal information securely and in line with the rules of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) including obtaining suitable permissions before capturing and storing customer details, and then contacting them with a range of communications.

Once you have permission, it is a clever idea to send a welcome email to your new contacts. This is an ideal opportunity to introduce them to your business, point them towards your latest products and let them know what to look out for from your business in the future. First impressions count, to help build a lasting customer relationship, include some information about your business and why you started it.

This will help you seem more personable. A common tactic to help create repeat business is to offer free delivery or a money-off discount, or to promote a seasonal time-limited offer to increase urgency and drive sales Keep at it – Let your audience know what your ongoing email schedule is likely to be. If you are going to be sending a weekly or monthly newsletter, it is best to set that expectation upfront to reduce spam complaints.

A good eCommerce website is all about efficiency: you need to target the right consumers to visit your online store, deliver an excellent user experience which drives sales, and have an aftersales process that builds engagement and repeat business.

YOU NEED TO TARGET THE RIGHT CONSUMERS TO VISIT YOUR ONLINE STORE, DELIVER AN EXCELLENT USER EXPERIENCE WHICH DRIVES SALES