e commerce strategies 13.7.14
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increased sales come from — a larger salesforce, new markets, or product innovation? The likely source of new customers will be e-commerce.
estimated that U.S. e-commerce will have generated $262.3 billion in sales for 2013, an increase of 16.4 percent year over year and slightly higher than the 16.2 percent increase last year. By 2017 eMarketer estimates that there will be $440 billion in sales for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.8 percent.
Micro-Target an Online Audience
E-commerce is basically about establishing a “territory”: defining and designing a site to reach an audience with a common interest or characteristic. Whatever your product or service, define your company’s niche markets that you can penetrate online with specialized offerings.
Personalize
Site visitors are demanding one-of-a-kind experiences that cater to their needs and interests. Technology is available, even to smaller players, to capture individual shoppers’ interests and preferences and generate a product selection and shopping experience led by individualized promotions tailored to them.
Create Content to Build Stickiness Winning e-commerce deploys crowd-
sourced content to make a site “sticky” for potential buyers. Amazon attracted millions of consumers by encouraging them to share their opinions of items like books and CDs. What is your strategy to help potential customers for your products or services find you via Google? Use keywords and meta tags to raise your ranking in search results.
Tailor the Browsing Experience to Target Segments
Brand-appropriate site design and well-structured navigation remain key ingredients for attracting an audience and getting them to come back. Provide an enticing browsing experience across online platforms. If you want to sell backpacks to college students, for example, use vibrant colors with a flashy design to evoke a sense of youth and adventure.
Integrate Across Channels
Create multi-channel offerings, enabling your consumers to experience your brand consistently, whatever their shopping method of choice. But be sure that products you are selling via different channels are sufficiently differentiated to account for price differences.
Invest in Mobile
Mobile commerce is growing at a rate of over 130 percent annually. If you lack a robust mobile commerce platform, you will see a dramatic drop off in revenue over the next several years. To stay competitive, you need to offer mobile-accessible services such as delivery status, real-time notifications, click-to-call, maps, and product information.
Tap into Logistics
.To accommodate growth, you may need to tap the capabilities of third-party logistics providers (3PLs) to manage a high volume of complex orders. Reverse logistics, the ability to handle returns and exchanges quickly and economically, is becoming a key differentiator. Same-day delivery and innovative fulfillment networks can be competitive advantages
Consider Subscription Commerce
Subscription commerce takes several forms. In the replenishment model, a commodity item is sent to the customer every month. The discovery model is more promising. It offers a subscription to a curated experience that delivers new, hard-to-find, or customized items periodically to the customer’s doorstep
Bypass the Middlemen
The Internet is enabling small companies to reach lots of consumers quickly. Manufacturers, including factories in China, are increasingly willing to work with small brands. They have discovered that small brands are more likely to introduce new products to market because they are less constrained by shelf space limitations and complex supply chains.
Offer a Seamless Experience Across Channels
. Your sales will grow if you ensure that product availability, promotional strategies, and brand experience are consistent across all channels — whether online, in-store, or on a mobile device. Implement cloud-based supply chain technology to gain visibility into your performance across all channels.
Curate a Proprietary Selection
Proprietary selection is a strategy that focuses on “curating” a narrow and deep assortment of products in a particular segment. These sites make merchandise feel exclusive due to the depth and originality of the assortment, the difficulty in finding the products elsewhere, and the power of customer communities.
Sell Internet-Only Merchandise
This is a strategy that builds an exclusive brand — with ecommerce as the core distribution channel. By offering goods that are not available elsewhere and selling them directly to the consumer online, you maintain much greater control over your margins.
Think Aesthetics
Take a minute to visit Etsy, and you’ll immediately be struck by the aesthetics of the site. By using a grid-like layout (reminiscent of Pinterest) to showcase products beautifully, Etsy stores offer customers an enjoyable browsing experience from the beginning. This grid-like layout avoids the necessity for repetitive click through (unlike some ecommerce giants), removing barriers to conversion and offering a visually stimulating interaction with the site.
Takeaway: Be visual, and consider layout carefully (it drives conversions and combines the fun of window shopping with the ease of online purchasing.).
Get Social
Another thing you’ll notice is the ability to “favorite” shops or items, essentially curating your own collections of say, wedding inspiration or interior design ideas, for example.
As well as the convenience of easily accessing your favorite items, this bookmarking creates a social shopping experience within the site, whereby you can share your collections with your friends and followers, and discover new products and stores by following friends and other like-minded users.
Takeaway: Embrace social shopping — it’s the future of ecommerce. If creating a social shopping experience on your site isn’t possible, be sure to make it simple for your customers to like your items or tweet your store as 92 percent of consumers report that social recommendations are the leading influence on their purchase behavior, according toNielsen.
Build Your Brand to Establish and Maintain Credibility Etsy is big on brand stories, and Etsy stores are expected to write
a comprehensive “about” page to help customers differentiate between them.
By building a consistent brand, stores on Etsy are able to meet customer expectations, build trust, and enhance their credibility.
Speaking of which, credibility is something that Etsy stores do well. Each must comply with Etsy’s strict guidelines, which focus on authorship, responsibility, and transparency, three things that are key to building credibility — an ecommerce essential.
Takeaway: Discover your brand’s story and put it to good use. Let your customers see the people behind your products to help foster a meaningful relationship between them and your brand. Also make sure to minimize customer concerns surrounding the purchase of your product or service by providing contact information and being transparent about how you do business.
Don’t Skimp on Customer Service As mentioned previously, word-of-mouth is
one of the strongest forms of advertising. People should be talking about your business in a positive light, and if they’re not, it’s on you. The personal approach favored by Etsy stores goes a long way towards making happy customers, and it’s not hard to achieve.
Takeaway: Remember, fast shipping, good communication, accurate listings and photos, and above all, eat humble pie if it all goes wrong.
For the More Technically Minded. . .
Etsy embraces a particularly resilient user experience, whereby the whole site doesn’t need to shut down when a minor problem occurs. The site also favors fast load times over complete page loads, so that customers are able to go about their shopping uninhibited.
Takeaway: Identify the critical path services (to conversion) and separate them from background services.
Embrace Search
Etsy is huge. With over one million active shops, finding just the right product could be akin to finding a needle in a haystack. However, Etsy has overcome this obstacle with their approach to categorization. In addition to standard categories (men, women, etc.), customers can search for items in obscure categories such as “gift ideas – outdoor sportsman” or “vintage – paper ephemera.” Etsy also creates seasonal categories and has a “trending items” page that help products to be found.
Takeaway: Use accurate tags and descriptions with keywords to describe your items, and then place them in several categories to ensure they’ll be found.
Engage Customers With Personalized Newsletters Etsy has nine different types of email newsletters to
choose from so customers won’t be bombarded with “one size fits all” emails that can be irrelevant and irritating.
From Etsy Finds to Etsy Weddings, Etsy Dudes to Etsy Success – each different newsletter has something unique to suit different customers, yet another way of pointing people towards items they may have otherwise missed. This personalized approach to email marketing is smart – personalized emails improve clickthrough rates by 14 percent and conversion rates by 10 percent, according to Aberdeen Group.
Takeaway: Analyze your customers and provide options for personalized (more suitable) emails.
7 Tips for Improving Your Ecommerce Strategy Create a User-Oriented
Experience Design a Service You'd Want To
Use Yourself Customer Feedback Is Crucial Utilize Social Media — But Don't
Rely on it Exclusively Invest In Mobile Incentivize Customers Be Ever-Evolving