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If you’re looking to launch your online business and to create a store that customers can buy and order directly from, then luckily for you, there are several blueprints for success to model your business after. There’s a lot of room for variation and to find the unique strength of your brand, but you should also keep in mind what business owners before you have learned and, where possible, emulate what they’re doing right.
Here, we’re going to look at six of the key ingredients to running a successful eCommerce store. It’s always worth keeping in mind that these tips aren’t going to fit every specific set of circumstances but, in most cases, they’re going to help.
User Experience
Given that the entirety of your customer’s experience with your brand is going to be online, then it only makes sense to ensure that you’re providing the best online experience that you can. Aside from working with experienced eCommerce website developers to that end, you can look at services such as conversion rate optimization, which looks at each element of the site that’s designed to pull your customer closer to the point of making a purchase, and seeing what works and what doesn’t work.
Content
When it comes to marketing and reaching your audience, pulling them ever closer to pressing the checkout button, then there are very few strategies that are more effective than content marketing. Content works with your marketing strategy in a range of ways, being a great way to optimize your site for search engines, giving you something worthwhile to post on your social media feeds, as well as allowing you to tap into trends with fitting and incisive content. It also gives you a way to naturally wax about the benefits of the products you offer.
Payment
You most certainly want to make sure that your customers have the method to pay that makes them feel the most comfortable as lacking any of the major payment processing options will result in customers abandoning their shopping carts for the stores that will meet their needs. Aside from ensuring that you accept all the most popular payment methods, like debit and credit cards and Paypal, you should look into tech like intelligent payment routing that can allow you to benefit from the use of multiple merchant accounts. This way, whichever way your customer pays, it goes through the transaction mediator that is most likely to succeed, reducing the chances of failed transactions. Otherwise, these can be a huge barrier.
Support
Regardless of how well your site is built and optimized, it should be treated as a given that a user is, at some point, going to have some trouble finding what they need or completing a purchase. As such, making customer support accessible and convenient should be key. A lot of websites nowadays are using live chat widgets that allow you or a member of your team, or even a sophisticated AI chatbot, to pop into chat and make sure that your customers have the help they need when they need it.
Trust
There is, quite naturally, an additional barrier that appears between customers and the online stores that they’re using for the first time. They don’t know whether or not your business is legit. As such, it’s important to offer transparency and trust where you can. A website security certificate is always a good start, but you should look at what trust badges you can acquire to make sure that your business stands out as legit. Some of them, in particular, like a BBB rating, tend to carry a little bit more recognition and authority.
Customer Success
Your relationship with your customer should not end after they have completed a purchase. If your customers are willing to provide their email addresses, don’t be afraid to follow up with the option to rate your services. For those customers who rate it highly, you can seek their word-of-mouth by asking for testimonials and reviews but just as important are those customers who rate the experience poorly. Get in touch to ask what they didn’t like about the experience and make real efforts to address any common complaints, should they arise.
Innovation and coming up with new solutions can often be a huge stepping stone to success in the business world, but that doesn’t mean that you have to figure out how to do every little thing from scratch. The tips above can help ensure you’re ticking all the boxes that matter.
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