4 Tips For e-сommerce Store To Follow for Success in 2016

Internet users who bought or ordered goods or services for private use over the internet in the previous 12 months, 2012 and 2015 (% of internet users)

The percent of online customers in internet users is increasing, with the most elevated extents (both 68%) being found in the group of 16 to 24-year-olds and that of 25 to 54-year-olds.

A number of e-commerce stores is growing dramatically: according to estimations, the amount has crossed 12 million in 2014 and goes up to double this number in a year! This obviously leads to competitiveness increase. The agility of new technologies forces e-commerce sphere representatives to be always aware and up-to-date with each and every feature that may help to increase the revenue or to provide better user experiences. As the ones from Magento development world, we would share some e-commerce tips that may help an entrepreneur succeed in the digital world of today.

Integrate Online Loyalty Program

You still don’t have one? Well, knowing the following facts probably will change your mind:

1. Returning customers spend on average 67% more than first-time customers. [Bain]
2. It costs FIVE TIMES more to acquire new customers than it does to keep current ones. [Forrester]
3. 69% of consumers say the choice of retailer is influenced by where they can earn customer loyalty/rewards program points. [Maritz]
4. 57.4% of consumers join loyalty programs to save money, 37.5% to receive rewards. [TechnologyAdvice]

Constantly Improve Your Conversions

The more customers you convert, the more revenue you receive. The issue often starts with product search that fails to display relevant results which may be insulting for a customer. Proper customer navigation is essential for purchase amount increase. Luckily, there are some technical solutions:

The integration of these features corrects the mistakes customers make typing the queries and provides them with the most relevant results: after activating of these features a number of results drops from 4, 000 to 25 relevant items. This helps to proceed the search to the shopping cart instead of surfing through thousands of irrelevant results of standard Magento search results. The task may be solved by a team of Magento developers or simply by installing Magento extension, which actually has all these features integrated.

Act Customer-Centric

Each satisfied customer may bring more customers way cheaper than advertising – that is simple formula every entrepreneur should know, regardless of the sphere.

As an online store, you should consider the following in case you want to be customer-centric:

• make sure your call center staff is polite;
• always congratulate your regular customers with their birthdays;
• offer small gifts on holidays;
• provide staff with incentives for good store reviews.

Those tips are a definitely incomplete list of improvements and requirements online stores should meet in 2016. E-сommerce is a tough business to compete in and even following all the trends may not be enough to keep your store successful. Some of the stores lose their niche for such simple reason as failing to …

Track Supply-Demand Management

I know, it may sound too practical for an online store, but for those who run huge operations or sell goods that require warehouse space to keep them ready for shipping, that may result in enormous expenses and money loss. Of course, it’s impossible to affect demand directly, but there are some tricks:

1. placing the products you are desperate to sell as a special offer on the front page;

2. launching the promotion campaigns;

3. increasing the “weight” of the product in the search output.

Among those, I prefer the first and third option, as an additional advertisement may result in extra expenses. The third option requires some explanation: within special extension, you can influence the position of the product in search results. Subconsciously, customers perceive the first result as the best suitable one in most of the cases.

All in all, e-commerce is a great sphere to run the business due to it’s potential and also an enormous driver of innovations in this world and we, as a Magento development company are definitely enjoying it. Are you?