As we enter into the world of eCommerce gradually, we realized that eCommerce has become the next hottest trend and it is showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
Well, post covid many businessmen have switched over to an online mode of conducting businesses and since then competition in the eCommerce market is getting intensified at a higher level. While consumers across the globe enjoy shopping online within the four walls of their homes and the plethora of eCommerce platforms available in the market, these are the two greatest boiling factor that has influenced businesses to go online.
For, if you intend to start doing business online, you’ll have to ensure that your customers have the most enjoyable and seamless experience possible. That means having a good website, appealing product images, great marketing tools, customer support, and many more.
Now let’s talk about the 8 steps or best practices you can employ to give consumers a reason to fall for your store and make it a Successful eCommerce/Online Store.
Your website is the gateway to defining the first impression in the minds of your potential online visitors. No matter how aesthetically appealing your website is, it must be clutter-free and everything should be in its place. Your online store must be navigational-friendly to avoid confusion. Easy navigation helps users find their desired products easily from the category page, read reviews, compare them, and then make payments easily.
You must arrange your products category-wise, making it easy for your customers to find what they are looking for. For instance, with VistaShopee, you get the power to add unlimited categories for your products ensuring a smooth customer purchase journey from product surfing to a product purchase.
High-quality, reliable products, and services are at the heart of every successful eCommerce store. Your product should solve an unmet customer need or challenge. You must also offer the products at a compelling price point.
Today's customers are considered as 'Smart Shoppers' they are always on the lookout for a high-quality product that is reasonable in price. And when it comes to online shopping they are more vigilant about the brand from whom they are purchasing, so your overall brand as an excellent quality online store must stand out from the rest.
Thus your product quality and pricing can make or break your eCommerce store. Do some market research to get some idea about what are the customers likes and dislikes, which products your competitors are selling as well as the market value of similar items.
Getting your eCommerce store up and running seems an easy task, but your eCommerce store is said to be successful only when you pull out some adequate quality traffic to your site and once you start generating online sales. For this process, you obviously need to identify your online target audience such as what people search the most on the search engine? How often do they buy online? Which product do they find comfortable buying online? And most importantly what do you want to serve your customers?
For this, you must define your absolute target audience to help attract loyal and influential customers. Instead of chasing after buyers who are not interested in your product, focus your marketing efforts on an audience that will appreciate your online store and your products and would like to keep coming back.
The first impression online customers get of your products is from the images on your website, and you might not get another chance to impress if your images don't match the quality of your product. This is especially the case with an online eCommerce store. While in the case of a physical store your customers would easily get to touch, hold and even sometimes try out the product to ascertain the quality of the product.
But for online shoppers, do not get this opportunity. They wholly and solely relied on the Product images and the description that explains the know-how of the product. Fail at either one, the potential online customer will slide away and never return back.
The higher the quality of your product images the more your customers would get enticed to buy your product. For instance, if you create your online store with VistaShopee you can add multiple product images from every angle to showcase your products in style. In fact, in your eCommerce store product images acts as a silent salesman all set to seal the deal with your potential online visitor.
A modern online store needs attentive and thorough customer support. As your business grows in complexity you'll need to meet a broader range of customer queries. Whenever any online visitor lands on your website it's a desired thing they might arise with some questions related to your business or the products you offer.
For this, your online store website must have an easy-to-find self-help section to save your customers time. Some stores even introduce a FAQ page with all the most asked questions along with their valid answers to it. Such kind of FAQ page actually cut down your major chunks of the cost that would go into customer support.
Also, these days many top online shopping stores are using AI-powered chatbots. Instead of experiencing the hassle of calling and emailing, customers can ask the chatbot or virtual assistant to resolve their queries related to delivery, defective products, refund, etc.
With VistaShopee you get robust customer support tools to always acknowledge your customers 'first' such as the facility to add an FAQ page and even incorporate WhatsApp (a widely used chatting app) or a LIVE chatbot called 'Tawk.to'.
You just need to remember acknowledging your existing, as well as potential customers on time, always takes you a long way towards creating a loyal customer base that would act upon promoting or recommending your online store to others.
It’s just common sense — if customers are offered the chance to pay using the method they prefer, they’re more likely to go through with their purchase. That’s why it’s important that you allow your would-be customers to choose from an assortment of different payment options. Not to let go off the cash on delivery feature as plenty of folks still prefer the COD facility.
With the rise of digital wallets and UPIs, consumers have a variety of payment options. Earlier, eCommerce transactions were more based on cash on delivery due to a lack of trust or the need for product transactions.
Due to the demonetization drive, more and more Indians have started using electronic payments. With many eCommerce companies investing heavily in strengthening the online security for payments, more and more consumers are using online modes for shopping VistaShopee has many popular payment gateways pre-integrated like Razorpay, CC Avenue, PayU, Instamojo, PayTM, Cashfree, etc enabling you to accept payment through Debit/Credit card, Net Banking, Wallets, UPI’s.
According to a study from the Baymard Institute, 27% of customers who abandoned their carts during checkout did so because the checkout process was too long or complicated.
The purchase decision of many customers is dependent upon the number of steps required to go through the payment process and the available payment options to choose from.
Lengthy processes while checking out can cause a loss of trillions in a single year. Most visitors exit websites right from the cart if the payment process gets delayed. So, to avoid that, the payment process must be straightforward and on point. Thankfully, there are a number of other steps you can take to ensure that your cart abandonment rate is as low as possible which includes
1. One-page checkoutAfter choosing a product, there should not be unnecessary ads or information to be filled in. The road to the payment gateway must be clear. So a simple, accommodating checkout process plays a big part in helping increase online sales!
Indians are very price-conscious and have a high need for bargaining. They naturally are on the lookout for exciting deals and offers. Who doesn't love big discounts and coupons to buy maximum products? Ecommerce companies use this and offer deep discounts to lure customers and get them to finally seal a deal with them in the form of product purchase.
To help you generate more sales online VistaShopee lets you set interesting offer prices and discounts with promo codes to induce online visitors to make product purchases. And guess what? Offer Banners on your website work best to flaunt big deals that instantly click with the visitor to convert.
Running discounts with promo codes encourages customers to try out the product for the first time as the cost risk factor is low and why not existing customers would also be enticed to use the discount offer for their own benefit.
These were the 8 Steps on How to make a Successful Online Store. While it does take some effort to align your online store to the best practices outlined above, most modern eCommerce platforms make it relatively easy to accomplish these goals — easier than it used to be, anyway.
With the way the economy — and the world in general — is trending, expect competition in the eCommerce industry to get all the more cutthroat in the months and years ahead. However, if you stay on top of the latest practices, there’s no reason why you can’t emerge from this period as one of the winners.