Ecommerce is big business. It is also a highly competitive and rather unforgiving industry. If you want to enter into ecommerce you need to have robust plans in place. Here are some tips to help emerging ecommerce businesses find real success.
Know Your Niche
It is essential that you truly know the audience that you want to sell to. With so much competition online, it is worth finding your niche and sticking to it instead of slipping into the territory of too many competitor companies. Every ecommerce company needs to conduct thorough market research.
Market Intelligently
Knowing your niche is the first step towards marketing your ecommerce business intelligently. You need to engage in content, inbound, social media and sometimes influencer marketing to increase the reach of your company.
It might be worth enlisting the help of an ecommerce marketing agency. An experienced agency can help your business gather and analyze the data it needs in order to put together an intelligent marketing strategy.
Search Engine Optimization
You need to fully optimize your ecommerce site or page so that it performs well on search engines. Market research needs to go into finding out what your target consumer groups search for online. This information needs to be applied to your online spaces using keywords, metadata inclusion and link building. Search Engine Optimization is completely necessary if you want to get a decent quantity of traffic.
Focus On Mobile
Roughly 72.9 percent of all online purchases are made via mobile devices. This startling number should be reason enough for you to prioritize the mobile compatibility of your ecommerce site. Minimal text content, fully scalable templates and compatibility with Google and Apple pay are all very important indeed.
Don’t Engage In Price Wars
Companies engage in price wars in order to undercut their competitors and secure a large share of their chosen market. Prices are artificially gouged with the hope of drawing in new custom. Unfortunately, price wars only really benefit the largest companies. If you are starting out in ecommerce, try and avoid price wars at all costs. Large companies can afford to make a loss on their products temporarily in order to capture elements of the market before making more incremental profits on large quantities of products. Small companies will bankrupt themselves if they opt for this method. Instead, offer you customers guaranteed quality and customer service.
Respond To Customers Promptly
Customers have come to expect incredibly swift response times. Enquiries about product defects, shipping problems and any other kind of issue need to be met promptly if you do not want to risk bad feedback that will render your business unprofitable. Feedback is as extremely important factor in your success in an online marketplace. Bad reviews and feedback can sully your reputation and also ensure that algorithms that rank products on sites like Amazon push your pages down the pecking order.
Make sure your company is adequately staffed to respond to customer enquiries within a day of them being sent over.