It is no secret that the e-commerce industry is growing quicker than ever. 20% of all purchases made worldwide in 2023 will occur through an ecommerce website, according to the latest e-commerce statistics by Forbes. The report also estimates that by 2026, ecommerce websites will be responsible for 25% of total purchases.
While the stats favor the e-commerce industry, they subtly signal a common fear of every e-commerce website owner: increasing competition. The growth of the e-commerce industry can be attributed to technological advancements, including the widespread availability of the Internet, making the barriers to entry low for anyone wanting to start their e-commerce website.
As an e-commerce website owner, reading this will only raise one question in your mind: can I learn how to increase e-commerce sales? Don’t worry! You only have to ensure that your website provides value and a user experience worthy enough to convert and retain consumers.
How can you achieve that? While it does sound challenging, accomplishing the above objectives can be made easy by incorporating our list of tried and tested e-commerce website features and practices.
Table of Contents
1. User-Friendly Design
A user-friendly design is the key to attracting and retaining visitors’ attention. When creating an e-commerce website, you must prioritize ease of navigation and use. However, building an e-commerce website from scratch isn’t essential for making it user-friendly. The example below shows how the world's largest online retailer, Amazon, reinvented its website layout over a 5 year period to improve the consumer experience.
Like Amazon, you can always redesign a website to make it more efficient. If you don’t know where to begin, you can opt for website redesign services to rework your site completely.
How to Make an E-Commerce Website Design User-Friendly?
You can design your e-commerce website by following the tips below:
- Stick to a color theme that is the same or relevant to your business’s branding.
- Categorize products in logical order. Divide products into brands, types, or both, whatever improves efficiency.
- Create quick links for new, discounted, and best-selling products.
- Ensure predictability, consistency, and simplicity.
- Link the business logo to the home page.
- Include a sitemap and a search bar.
- Incorporate images and other visual media only where necessary.
Remember, your viewers will only convert into customers when they can find the product they need on your website within a few seconds. If the website design and navigation don’t allow them to find the product, they will quickly search for another e-commerce platform that can make it easy for them. Thus, it is in your business’s best interest to either redesign or create a new e-commerce website from scratch to meet customer expectations.
2. Product Images and Videos
If you are wondering about how to increase your online sales fast, the answer is simple: add product images and videos. Nobody wants to buy a product without looking at it first. Therefore, adding product images and videos is essential to any e-commerce website design. Aesthetically appealing and high-quality pictures and videos make the product look good and allow the audience a good look at the product. Images help showcase the product and its details, while videos allow the audience to see the product in use.
A Think With Google survey suggests that 50% of all online purchases occur because of aesthetically appealing images and videos. Thus, adding images and videos can double the sales on any e-commerce website.
3. Product Descriptions
Product descriptions are one of the most important features of any e-commerce website. They inform about the product's manufacturing and purpose, allowing the audience to learn how and why it will be useful. A well-written product description can entice customers into adding the product to the cart.
How to Write Product Descriptions
Here are some key points to write tempting product descriptions:
- Focus on the target consumer.
- Use simple words.
- Describe the product’s size, material, manufacture, etc.
- Highlight the benefits.
- Encourage readers to imagine its use by using sensory words.
- Avoid words like best, perfect, award-winning, etc., without proof.
- Include how to use it.
- Include any potential risks or harms.
- Weave it into a story.
Adding pictures and videos of products helps, but it doesn’t offer the same information as the product description. For example, if your e-commerce website sells clothes, audiences cannot tell the material specification of clothes and miss out on details that make a garment worth purchasing.
If you don’t know how to write tempting product descriptions that translate into sales, contact e-commerce website developers at Content Development Pros. Content Development Pros offer custom product description writing services for e-commerce platforms at a cost-efficient rate with guaranteed satisfaction.
4. Product Reviews
Product reviews are another amazing and easy method to increase sales with little effort. Adding a product reviews tab on every product page and allowing authentic buyers to leave reviews can enhance and optimize e-commerce SEO. The product reviews will act as expanded product descriptions. For example, if your e-commerce website sells skincare products, a customer mentioning dry skin adds this keyword to your product page, enhancing its SEO optimization and helping potential buyers make purchase decisions quicker.
Benefits of Product Reviews
Authentic reviews by registered buyers also showcase your business’s concern for customer satisfaction and the drive to improve. Instead of waiting for the customer to reach out, ask for product reviews through email. This initiative will show customers you have confidence in your product and business. Even if a customer placed their order skeptically, asking for a review and making it visible on the website will help instill long-term trust in your business.
Customer reviews also allow you to respond to any negative customer experience. You can use this opportunity to improve that customer’s experience and others by identifying details that may have misled the customer. You can rewrite the product descriptions, add better images and videos, or add any missing details. Asking customers for reviews is also an easy way to sign up customers for email marketing. Email marketing can help you connect with one-time customers and turn them into regular customers.
5. Refund/Return/Replacement Policy
Unfortunately, scams related to e-commerce shopping are not uncommon. As a seller, you must strive to gain your audience’s trust to turn them into your customers. A refund, return, and replacement policy can assist you.
Create and implement a generous policy by offering free returns, quick refunds, and replacements. The ease of online purchasing, for better or for worse, has made consumers impatient. When they don’t like a product, they want to return it as soon as they want their hands on it when they first come across it.
But creating and implementing this e-commerce sales strategy isn’t enough. You must ensure website visitors can see the refund, return, and replacement policy. Add its tab next to the product description to make it unmissable. The policy must also be clear, specific, and written in simple and easy-to-understand language. A clear, specific, and easy-to-understand refund, return, and replacement policy can urge audiences to become customers.
6. Order Tracking
Order tracking is another one of the e-commerce strategies that assist in instilling customers’ trust in the business. Order tracking can be efficiently incorporated in the following ways:
- By adding an order tracking feature on the website.
- By providing the order tracking link in the order confirmation email.
- By sending the order tracking link through text message.
No matter what method you use, order tracking will help minimize the need for customers to reach out to a customer service representative. It will also make following up with their order easy and bring them peace of mind.
If anything, this over-enthusiasm might prove counterproductive. Sending too many emails may make your business look desperate and land you in your potential customers' spam folders or cause them to unsubscribe!
A secondary benefit of incorporating an order tracking feature into order confirmation emails is the ease of signing up customers for email marketing. Email marketing can be utilized to stay in touch with customers and build stronger relationships, improving sales in the long run.
7. Chatbot for Customer Support
Chatbots are rapidly gaining popularity and for all the right reasons. They quickly answer customers’ concerns, help them navigate the website, and even find specific products. Their availability 24/7, 365 days a year, makes them significantly helpful when no customer service representatives are available. It makes purchasing decisions easy for visitors, turning them into customers and driving sales.
You can make customer support and overall experience even better for your e-commerce website visitors by making it available in multiple languages. Create multiple versions of your website for your targeted audience's most common local languages. Chatbots can also be programmed to reply in multiple languages. The strategy works because e-commerce sales increase as visitors find their concerns answered quickly.
Getting quick support at the right time and in a language they best understand can encourage customers to finalize their purchase decision. It can also reverse a customer’s decision to refund and return the product bought from your e-commerce website.
8. Email Subscription
Adding an option to sign up with your e-commerce website by creating a profile or receiving marketing emails is another feature that improves sales. Email marketing allows a business to stay in touch with its audience and customers and build a connection with them over time.
Coupon codes for discounts on purchases, exclusive deals, restocking, and new launch notifications, as email marketing, have been proven to produce great results. Email marketing produces long-term results, that too for a low cost.
Getting audiences to subscribe with their email addresses is not difficult either. Offer a ten percent welcome discount to new customers on signing up. The product quality, value, and overall experience will soon turn your one-time customers into regular.
9. Loyalty Program
Loyalty programs promote sales in many ways. Firstly, they require visitor/customer’s email to sign up, which opens the path to email marketing and turning them into regular customers. Secondly, loyalty programs make it advantageous for customers to become regular customers to earn points/rewards, making your e-commerce website their go-to for specific product category purchases.
The second method makes your customers visit your ecommerce store regularly, which allows you to promote new products to them. The rewards for their purchases also help them try out more products on your e-commerce website. Lastly, combined with good overall customer experience, loyalty programs encourage customers to leave reviews and help new visitors trust your business.
Catering to the same customers regularly also allows you to identify what your e-commerce website is lacking. You can use the customer feedback to rebuild or build an ecommerce website accordingly. The insights you gain lead to improvement, further boosting sales.
10. FAQs
While a generous, clear refund, return, and replacement policy do help gain the audience’s trust and turn them into customers, it can be insufficient. Your audience needs to know everything about your business to ensure they can even use the generous policy.
A website's FAQs, an abbreviation for Frequently Asked Questions, offer information about the business’s policies, privacy, security, shipping, and other similar concerns. The page can also include FAQs from the customer's perspective, such as out-of-state or international shipping, shipping duration, shipping service used by the business, terms and conditions of using the website, etc. Moreover, you can also allow audiences to ask questions and registered buyers to answer them.
Benefits of Adding an FAQS Page to an E-Commerce Website
Simple and direct answers to FAQs help turn the audience into customers in multiple ways, such as:
- Answering consumer concerns before they need to ask them.
- Eliminating the need to contact a customer service representative to some degree.
- Appearing transparent.
Detailed information on company policies on various aspects can make a business appear more trustworthy. It can help customers finalize their purchase decisions.
11. Smartphone Optimization/Mobile App
Lastly, optimizing your e-commerce website for seamless use on smartphones is another essential to drive sales. Revenue from e-commerce purchases made through smartphones is in billions of dollars and rising. The use of smartphones for online shopping has also increased. These developments have led to the term m-commerce, i.e., mobile e-commerce, being coined. Hence, optimizing your e-commerce store for smartphone use can significantly improve sales.
Mobile apps designed specifically for shopping have also been increasing in popularity in the past few years. A mobile app for your e-commerce business will allow you to send push notifications to your audience and existing customers. It will also make shopping easier for your customers and improve sales, as customers won’t need to go to a web browser to open your website.
Enter this growing branch of the e-commerce industry by getting a mobile app designed by e-commerce website developers such as Content Development Pros. Content Development Pros offer comprehensive, high-quality mobile app development services while prioritizing your satisfaction and approval.
Optimize Your E-Commerce Website for Increased Sales by Contacting Content Development Pros Today!
While the above tips work, here’s the simplest answer to how to increase sales on a website. Contact Content Development Pros.
Content Development Pros provides one of the best e-commerce website design services. Besides smartphone optimization, mobile app development, and all the services mentioned above for your e-commerce website, it also provides many other services, such as multiple shipping options to your customers, store locator services, A/B testing to ensure your webpages are highly clickable, etc.
