Every eCommerce store owner wishes for their website to bring back fruitful revenues. But what has to be done with the site for it to stay in the flow among all the competition? The answer is to continuously improve it, create interesting content, invest in UX and UI, and keep up with the technical trends, to briefly give you a few ideas.
Without a doubt, before implementing any new modern elements and technology on your website, you must first make sure that its performance is top-notch and that the store’s speed is optimized. Otherwise, your site visitors might not even get to enjoy all the cool innovations that you’ve introduced since customers hate wasting their time waiting for a page to open and usually leave impatiently.
Yet if your website is fast and bug-free, we’d like to introduce you to some best practice strategies and current eCommerce trends that can help your online retail store flourish. To support the presented ideas, we’ll also give you neat visual examples of the successful use of such elements and tricks on renowned eCommerce stores.
Cross-Selling Done Right
The first point that’s worth covering among the ways you can boost your eCommerce store regards a properly built upselling section. In any case, pitching items that match the one being browsed at the moment by the user is a great step towards enhancing your sales. After all, are the chances that your potential buyer will stumble upon the items that go well with the product that they plan to buy on their own really that high?
A well-pitched product selection may urge spontaneous buys and increase the size of the orders. Therefore, make sure to spend some additional time designing and thinking through your cross-selling strategy and the items that you show in your “Pairs well with” sections. And side note: if you don’t have such an element on your product pages, work on one without any delay.
To give you some inspiration, here’s a fabulous example of such a section that I personally really enjoy. This is what the “Complete the Look” block is like on the official Puma website. It is perfect for growing sales since it doesn’t just display three to five images of items that make a good combination, they give over ten such options all presented in preview format and broken down into “Looks”. Furthermore, the looks are shoppable! If you click on the “Shop Now” button, the site gives you a pop-up with all the items presented in the block with their price and other details. This allows users to add more than one item that they’ve found to their taste to their cart.
Credit Image: Screenshot taken on the official Puma website
Better Loyalty Programs
It’s a widely known fact that it’s a lot easier to make a sale to a client who has previously bought something from you than to convince a new client to buy a product. Therefore, overlooking loyalty programs as a way to get returning clients is a mistake you surely shouldn’t make.
Such programs have to have beneficial terms for your regular customers. Everything you offer them must be aimed at urging them to come back and buy again. Many companies even introduce the program in the format of a “club”, granting unique perks that are unavailable to those who aren’t part of it (for instance, this can be early access to products from new collections before they “appear on the shelves”).
So how do you convince people to sign up for the program? Let the message appear in your communication with the user throughout the website and offer some sweetener straight away. Make it clear why signing up will be advantageous. For example, below is a pop-up on the official Converse website. The message reads: “Sign up for news and updates and get 15% off your next order”.
Credit Image: official Converse website screenshot
Enhanced Customer Feedback Sections
No matter how hard you try when describing a product and its strengths, no matter which promises and claims you make about it, this comes from the perspective of the store owner, so people will have a dash of skepticism. What potential buyers give more attention to and trust are the opinions of those who’ve already bought this item from you and who have an opinion about it and their purchasing experience.
Do you see where I’m going with this? Yes, a well-assembled customer reviews section placed on every product page can certainly raise your game. Ratings and comments on the product increase trust and fling back many doubts. This results in more sales if the product is good and people like it. If they don’t like it and give it a lot of criticism, this isn’t a bad thing for you as a business owner either as you can get a heads up about what needs change.
Take a look at how the reviews section is organized on the official Victoria’s Secret website. There’s a clear overview at the top that summarizes all the opinions on the item. Then we can see a clear summon asking people to leave their review (this is also generally done in email confirmations). Each review has information about the commenter, their review text, and even a chance for readers to report back on the review (marking it useful or not).
Credit Image: official Victoria’s Secret website
4.Convincing Social Media Widgets
Another great way to pick up your sales is by making use of user-generated content. Because social media plays a very important role in the everyday lives of customers and eCommerce sales, it makes sense to use them to your advantage.
A simple trick here is connecting social media posts with the store’s site using widgets. When such photos of real people and your product appear on the page, this immediately gives inspiration and raises trust. Not to mention the fact that when people see their posts on your website, this creates a satisfactory feeling. Topping that, your store’s social media accounts can also gain from featuring such “non-promotional” content alongside your other posts.
To show you what I mean, here’s the “Social Skills” block on the official MAC Cosmetics website. It allows people to add their pictures to the gallery and pulls those posts that have the official account tagged.
Credit Image: official MAC Cosmetics website
5. Gift Ideas & Handy Finders of Presents
The fifth idea to take note of deals with assisting people in finding gifts. Frequently, this question is a big headache for many, therefore, offering some suitable collections to choose from can simplify the process.
As a rule, gift sections are placed separately right within the site’s top menu. The presents can be then broken down into corresponding categories (be it by recipient, budget, occasion, or anything else). This step can help your store get more orders, especially if a holiday is coming up soon.
This is a page with “Women’s Holiday Gifts” on the official Adidas website. For convenience, the page is fitted with various filters that can easily narrow down the search and help a user find the ideal present.
Credit Image: official Adidas website
Final Thoughts
Wrapping up everything covered in the article, there’s a lot that can be done to increase your online store’s revenues and grow your customer database. The five points mentioned above are the takeaways of the eCommerce store growth tricks that you can begin with. To recap, consider:
- enhancing your store’s upselling sections,
- thinking your loyalty programs through,
- organizing great blocks for customer reviews,
- adding widgets with user-generated social media posts and photos,
- creating a handy gift finder section.
Guest Author: Alex Husar, Chief Technology Officer with 8+ years of experience in Onilab PWA development services, Magento migration, and Salesforce development. He graduated from the Czech Technical University and obtained a bachelor’s degree in Computer Software Engineering. Alex’s expertise includes both full-stack dev skills and a strong ability to provide project-critical guidance to the whole team.
Discussion about this post