Proven Ways to Drive More eCommerce Revenue
- AI/ML, Digital Commerce, eCommerce, Retail, Shopify, Site Speed, User Experience
eCommerce continues to grow significantly, opening both challenges and opportunities for merchants and manufacturers. In 2019, the global eCommerce market size was already valued at $9.09 trillion. According to Grand View Research, the eComm market size is estimated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.7% from 2020 to 2027. This clearly shows how critical online selling has become for both B2C and B2B.. And with the ceiling of potential profits raised while the barrier to entry has been lowered, the number of competitors and alternative goods steadily increases, along with the expectations of customers.
Leading companies continue to demonstrate that the right upgrades, along with modern features and functionality, ensure a competitive advantage by improving the user experience and conversion rates of their online store.. But what are the winning strategies these companies follow? And how can you take advantage of them for your eCommerce site?
This blog post highlights proven ways to drive more eCommerce revenue.
Prefer to listen to the content?
Hear ELASTECH’s CEO, Armen Tatevosian, and EVP of Global Operations, Jim Zordani, in a conversation about ways to drive more eCommerce revenue. While this conversation focuses on holiday shopping and year-end buying in particular, the methods presented are proven to deliver tremendous benefits to both B2B and B2C all year around.
Site Performance Optimization
Site performance optimization is one of the quickest ways to achieve substantial ROI for your eCommerce site. It is proven that accelerated site performance demonstrably improves conversion rates, regardless of market. A HubSpot study shows that conversion rates decrease by 4.42% with every second a page takes to load. This shows how much of an impact site performance has on the overall results for every online store.
In order to optimize site performance, you need to assess your store. Many companies use a simple site speed test to provide a score for their website. While these scores provide some interesting perspectives on site performance and some generalized feedback on why performance might be lackluster, they do not provide the details to resolve site performance issues. Another ELASTECH blog post highlights more site performance optimization pitfalls to avoid. A proven method to assess your website thoroughly is using Google’s Core Web Vitals. These reports include several metrics like FCP (First Contentful Paint) and LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) that show how your pages perform based on actual usage data. In the next step, you need to improve each of these vitals using established best practices and sophisticated tools. ELASTECH can help you with that. With our proven methods and toolset, we guarantee better site performance results that deliver tangible business value.
Click below to schedule a conversation with one of our experts. On this call, we will review an assessment of your site performance and show you the impact our optimization services would have.
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Wishlist and Gift Registries
Large retailers like Macy’s have greatly benefited from gift registry and wishlist strategies as they continue to deliver tremendous revenue, especially since COVID-19. Implementing these strategies enables you to take better advantage of gifting occasions like holidays, birthdays, weddings, graduations, and more.
Wishlist and gift registry features have also proven extremely successful for companies that primarily sell goods to businesses or unauthorized purchasers like business contacts and children. Site visitors can just put their selected items on a wishlist. This list can then be shared with approved purchasers, whether it be their supervisor, parent, or someone else.
Checkout Optimization
The checkout process is one of the most critical parts of every customer journey. Every additional click, page load, or form field during checkout can negatively impact conversion rates.
As a result, companies should prioritize removing as much friction as possible within their eCommerce site’s checkout process. This includes the removal of unnecessary steps, clicks, and/or form fields. Features like saved customer profiles, pre-filled forms, guest checkout, express checkout for returning users, and the support of all major payment methods (Apple Pay and Google Pay are critical if you have a mobile app) are established methods to improve checkout rates.
Customer Reviews
It has been proven that displaying a high number of positive ratings, reviews, and customer testimonials is very effective in establishing social proof, which boosts trust and credibility in your company and products. As a result, customers gain more confidence in a quick purchase decision. Especially now, with an increasing number of competitive products, this is becoming a game-changer for many companies.
In today’s eCommerce market, there are tools that aggregate your product reviews across all channels, including review sites like Trustpilot and Google, as well as social media. If you are a manufacturer, you can even obtain reviews of your products that are sold on different marketplaces.
Mobile Experience
According to a recent survey, over 60% of online orders are done via mobile devices. This shows that an optimized mobile experience is no longer a “nice-to-have” but an essential requirement to maintain and win market share. Nowadays, users expect a seamless experience, whether they visit your eCommerce store on their smartphones, tablets, or desktops.
A best practice to optimize the mobile experience of your site is to follow a product-driven approach. Leverage user data and behavior to tailor content specifically for each visitor (i.e., customized product recommendations based on individual browsing history across devices). Responsive design and A/B testing are proven methods to improve mobile usability.
Site performance is also a critical aspect of your mobile experience. Smartphones usually have lower processing power compared to desktops. As a result, slow-loading pages experience even higher bounce rates. Proven methods to improve mobile site performance include:
- The use of smaller, compressed image files
- Resizing and optimizing images according to common screen sizes
- Simplifying page design elements to minimize code weight
- The removal of slow rendering elements like large CSS/JavaScript files
- Enabling browser caching and compression to reduce page load times through faster resource delivery
- Minimizing redirects, which can significantly slow down page transitions on mobile
By following these and other best practices, you can ensure fast site performance on mobile devices, which improves user experience and conversion rates.
Advanced Promotions
Tactically promoting your products and services is critical to boosting conversions. While many companies still rely on sitewide discounts, leading merchants and manufacturers have proven that personalized offers that are tailored to each user drive the highest ROI. These companies show relevant products to their target customers based on demographics, customer journey, browsing behavior, purchase history, and a whole set of additional criteria. Many of these promotions are also time-bound, which creates urgency for purchases.
It is recommended to use advanced tools that are integrated with your CRM and/or other internal systems to optimize pricing discounts while maintaining acceptable margins and providing incentives for visitors to buy. Depending on your marketing stack, promotions can be delivered to users via email, showcased via social media channels, etc.
Conclusion
Increased customer expectations have created a more complex and competitive market online. With online purchasing at an all-time high, many companies continue to lose market share even if their volume has not decreased.. But that is not the case for those who have adapted to take advantage of changing customer expectations and signals from their competitors. Each of the methods highlighted in this blog post is proven to deliver rapid returns on investment when implemented properly.
ELASTECH’s eCommerce development services include the evaluation of best-in-class technologies, platforms, apps, and tools. Our experience will help develop your roadmap, with staged feature development and deployment, to move your eCommerce business forward while boosting online sales and revenue. Our offer to you is a free consultation with an expert to help determine or confirm your next steps toward eCommerce excellence. Click below to schedule your appointment.
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