How To Optimize Your eCommerce Site For Sale

In a world of intense ecommerce competition, entrepreneurs have to be able to deliver a blissful customer journey through their online stores. Only the best will do, because customers have so many options that they don’t have to settle for anything but the best. Here’s what you need to do to optimize your online store to drive sales.

Be Smart ABout Using Pop Ups

Pop ups are some of the most hated ecommerce tools around. Customers hate them. They literally pop up at annoying times, disrupting the customer experience and creating frictions and pain points in the customer journey.

Yet, pop ups exist for a reason. For instance, they may serve to notify a customer about a website’s privacy policy. Used sensibly, and with restrictions, they can be gentle guides to customer behavior. A guiding principle should be that you should use them only when necessary. For instance, when a customer gets to your website, there’s no need to ask them to conduct a survey, or download your mobile app. If you want your customer to sign in for future notifications, make it worth their while. Think about how customers interact with pop-ups and figure out the gentlest, most customer-focused way to introduce them.

Pay Attention to Searches

Searches are a vital tool, informing you about what your customers are thinking about. For example, they may search for an item and not make a purchase, but that might be a sign that there’s a need that you are not fulfilling.

You should be vigilant about monitoring search activity to see what your customers’ needs are. You should always put yourself in the position of the customer. So, conduct the same searches as your customers and look at the results page, and see if what it reflects shows the best of what you have to offer, and what improvements you have to make. For instance, is a new product shown in the search results?

Your marketing efforts should be geared toward your top search results. This is what your customers are on your ecommerce website for, these are the needs that they would like met. Spend your marketing dollars telling them just how you will meet those needs.

Make Suggestions

Your goal is not just to land a customer, it’s to increase their spending on your website. You do that by making suggestions based on the products they are buying and their search and purchase history. So, for instance, a baby boutique store could suggest that a person who buys a bassinet might also buy a cup holder. The best online stores, such as Amazon, do this all the time. Customers are told what other customers also looked at or bought, what they may also like similar items, and recommendations.

If your website has cross-sell items, you want to optimize this aggressively so that customers get the very best and most useful recommendations.

This can be the basis of a very lucrative land-and-expand strategy, such that revenue can grow without the need for you to grow the number of customers. You simply get each customer to spend more. Then, growth in the number of customers is a bonus.