10 Timeless Ecommerce Tips for Small Businesses

10 Timeless Ecommerce Tips for Small Businesses

With technology constantly changing and improving you need to keep on top of your business’s eCommerce store. Nowadays having an online store is a must-have to keep your business relevant and make it easy for your customers to access your products/services.

In this blog, I’m going to talk to you about 10 tips that can help you to keep your eCommerce website relevant and to prevent it from falling behind with the changes that are happening.

Make a good first impression

First impressions are what set the tone for your business to your customers. Making a good first impression can be lasting and lead to your customers recommending you to other new potential customers. Therefore, you should invest in making your online store the best it can be to avoid the possibility of making a negative impression. Your store needs to look good, have relevant content, be easy to use and navigate, you cannot have one without the other.

Be Customer Centric

The downfall for online stores compared to physical stores is that the customers doing have the ability to touch, feel and try the product before making the decision to purchase it. Some online stores are slowly trying this feature out but it’s not at the stage that it’s easy and feasible for every business to do. However, there are other features that you can do to attract customers to make a purchase. The most common example for this is to offer good prices, free shipping, discount codes, or free returns. Simple by offering just one of these options adds an extra incentive to make the purchase.

Be mobile friendly

With the increase in the number of mobile devices and tablets being used to browse the internet, having a website that is mobile friendly is an essential, otherwise you are missing out on potential customers. If your website isn’t mobile responsive and it isn’t on your business mind, your business could be irrelevant in the next 3-5 years.

Align yourself with Social media

Social media is a great tool that you can use to help your business reach more customers. Being absent on social media can be a bad decision for an online business. Social media helps to show your customers some insight about your business, allows them to share your company with others, contact you easily, and get an insight into your customers. These are all things that can help your business to grow.

Here are some tips for your business social media:

  • Post regularly
  • Comment and like on competitors posts
  • Follow competitors
  • Use influencer marketing to grow your business

Use more photos

Visuals are processed faster than text so you should try and use more images to engage with your audience. For example, using an image with a post on Facebook compared to just text will have an increase in the amount of engagement you receive on that post. On an eCommerce website, having images of your products help to ensure confidence in your customers as they can see what it will look like before they receive the product.

Stay on top of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

As I mentioned earlier about how technology is constantly changing and improving, and having an online store is essential to business’ selling products or services, sadly with that means more competition. 90% of users click on the first 3 search engine results, so you want to try and get as high up the search engine results page as possible to increase the amount of traffic you get on your website. To do this requires the help of a Manchester SEO agency to help improve your ranking with SEO techniques:

  • User experience
  • Quality content
  • Site speed
  • Internal linking
  • Meta descriptions and title tags
  • Properly tagged images
  • Evergreen content
  • Local SEO
  • Social

Use Live Chat

Nothing beats human to human interaction, so when it comes to online, having a live chat option is a great way to do this. It makes users feel better as they are able to talk to a real person in real-time. By doing this it humanises your website and reassures possible customers that you care about them as a customer.

Create Call To Action & Sign-up Buttons

Call to action buttons are great at getting your users to perform a desired task on your website. This could be signing up to your company’s newsletter, contacting you, or purchasing a product/service. When creating a call to action button, you want to make sure that it stands out and makes it easier for them to find it and do the desired task.

Your data is safe with us

With any website you want to make your users feel safe on your website, however this is more so with eCommerce websites, as customers will be inputting payment and personal information. To install confidence in your customers you should make sure you are doing are to; pick a secure platform, use an SSL certificate, tracking all your orders, and asking for strong passwords.

Use the right Tools

There are plenty of tools available to make the most of your online store. Depending on your business, depends on what tools are best for you. I have mentioned earlier about the benefits of using social media, however tools like Google Analytics are great at analysing your website’s data to see how your eCommerce store is doing and whether any areas need improving to grow your business.

Conclusion

So by doing these tips you are able to get the most out of your small business to keep it relevant with the changes that are happening in technology and grow your business. Just because you are a small business doesn’t mean you can’t thrive.