Tips for Running a Successful E-Commerce Business

The e-commerce landscape is only becoming more competitive in Australia, with 9.2 million households shopping online in the last 12 months. 

With the pandemic providing e-commerce stores with more traffic than ever before, ensuring your operation stands out against the competition is crucial to your longevity. 

If you’re ready to learn how to get started with e-commerce in 2021, you’ve made a great choice, as an estimated 37% of people are making more unplanned purchases.

But to make sure you achieve the most success, you need a robust e-commerce strategy that ensures you reach customers and generate sales. 

Here, we highlight a range of e-commerce tips for beginners to help you start your journey.

Elevate Your Website

Whether you decide to use WordPress for e-commerce or invest in a fully customised website, ensuring your website achieves your goals is critical to your success. 

This means producing stunning product pages that showcase the strengths of your products through both keyword-driven descriptions and high-quality imagery. 

You also want to ensure your e-commerce site’s navigation is seamless, so that customers can move through your categories without getting confused. 

Alongside powerful e-commerce plugins for personalisation, an effortless checkout process and super-fast loading times, you can ensure your e-commerce website is a pleasure to use.

Understand Your Customers

To generate a top-notch conversion rate, you must understand how your customers think about your products and services. 

This means your e-commerce strategy must include extensive market research to discover hugely beneficial information that will help you shape your operation. 

You should also develop detailed buyer personas for your ideal target market, including demographics like age, gender and location, while also uncovering sharp insights into their core motivations and goals. 

This way, your e-commerce store can market its products effectively and create content that resonates with its most valued customers.

Dominate SEO

Many small e-commerce sites simply don’t have the financial power to invest heavily in PPC campaigns. This is why SEO is so appealing, as it helps businesses generate loads of organic website traffic for free.

There are countless aspects of an e-commerce store that can be optimised. But a good place to start is your product pages. Rather than being satisfied with a generic description, craft a compelling message with keywords that customers use to conduct their online searches.

You should also start an informative blog that positions your business as one of the best in the industry. Meanwhile, your e-commerce strategy needs local SEO if your products specifically appeal to customers in your area.

Stay Active on Social Media

Virtually every e-commerce strategy uses social media to attract its perfect customer base. But many companies fail to use these powerful platforms to their maximum potential. 

By getting active on social media with a thoughtful digital marketing campaign, you can appeal to your target market and attract new customers from across the internet. 

Make sure you know which platform is most popular amongst your target market and focus your attention on expanding your reach. 

Alongside engaging content that appeals to your customer base, this e-commerce tip helps you grow your following and reach sales-ready consumers.

Create Attractive Offers

Emerging brands that need to capture the attention of their target market can get ahead by creating compelling offers. 

For example, free delivery is a hugely important factor for customers, with 84% of online shoppers saying they’ve specifically made a purchase because shipping was included.

However, there are endless offers that engage customers. You can create the perception of scarcity by promoting limited-time deals or giving consumers a small discount for signing up to your email marketing.

With a research-driven offer that appeals to your target market, you can ensure customers notice your business and choose you over any other e-commerce site.

Deliver Great Customer Service

You might not be dealing with consumers in person with an e-commerce store, but that doesn’t mean you sacrifice customer service. 

By providing customers with fast and accessible ways to reach your team, you can enhance your brand’s reputation and boost loyalty with your target market.

As consumer behaviour evolves in the modern age, customers want to have self-service options that mean they don’t have to speak to someone directly. 

But this must also be balanced against leaving customers to fend for themselves when something serious has gone wrong. 

Make sure your brand is active across numerous channels, develop powerful chatbots and don’t forget to include humans wherever possible.

Go Mobile-Friendly

You can’t appeal to your customers to the fullest extent without a mobile-friendly website. With 47% of Australian consumers using their smartphones to make online purchases, you’ll miss out on sales if your website is hard to navigate. 

This means you need a mobile-responsive theme for your WordPress e-commerce website that’s painless to browse. Make sure the font you use is large and readable, while it also helps to have buttons that are easy to press.

In addition, optimise your images for loading times and remove any annoying pop-ups that might limit your customers’ ability to scroll.

Measure and Analyse

Every e-commerce business and target market is different. Implement a comprehensive solution for measuring and analysing vital metrics to ensure your work is achieving your goals. 

Instead of guessing about the best way to attract your customers and generate sales, data-driven insights will give you an incredible shortcut that levels up your ROI.

Your WordPress e-commerce website tracks useful stats. However, you can go further by installing e-commerce plugins for heatmaps and session recording, helping you understand how customers engage with your website.

Backed by this information, you can make changes and rapidly grow your success.

Adapt with the Market

It doesn’t matter what industry you operate within, the nature of conducting business online is constantly changing.

In recent years, consumer behaviour has changed dramatically, with customers wanting personalised recommendations, access to voice search and more ways to pay, alongside numerous other improvements.

So how do you keep tabs on the changing marketplace? Ask your customers for feedback through email marketing and social media. Then take steps to genuinely address their concerns. 

This e-commerce tip also means staying aware of how your rivals, especially the most successful ones, are implementing changes that improve their e-commerce performance.

Chat to the Experts

The world of e-commerce is set to become even more competitive in the coming years. But applying these e-commerce website tips and numerous other factors will help put your business on the path to success.

If you’ve just recognised the importance of e-commerce in business and need to outperform the competition, start a conversation with the top marketing company in Australia, First Page Australia. 

With our highly experienced team implementing powerful e-commerce strategies for big and small businesses every day, we know what it takes to deliver incredible results.

Get in touch with our friendly team to ensure your e-commerce store includes everything you need to attract customers and boost conversions.