2022 is going to be the ‘Year of eCommerce’. Would you believe it if we made this statement? But it is!
Well, what is e-commerce?
It simply refers to online shops that sell multiple products that have a particular layout and set up. They allow you to browse the products just the way you want and add them to your shopping carts. The only difference is that you can do all these at your home and once you check out the products are simply delivered to you wherever you are. One of the best examples is Amazon.com.
It’s a simple and familiar concept. But what makes it important? Why is e-commerce the future?
After 2 years of the COVID19 pandemic, around a 50% increase is seen in the e-commerce market, all around the world. The Indian E-commerce market is expected to grow to US$ 111.40 billion by 2025. India’s e-commerce orders volume increased by 36% in the last quarter of the year, with the personal care, beauty and wellness (PCB&W) segment being the largest beneficiary. India’s consumer digital economy is expected to become a US$ 800 billion market by 2030, growing from US$ 537.5 billion in a year, driven by strong adoption of online services such as e-commerce and edtech in the country.
So the first thing is that e-commerce is growing year by year with a lot of changes happening around it. Long before, people were uncertain about spending money online and found it intimidating to hand over their card details and trust a supplier they couldn’t meet face to face.
But today just take a look at companies like Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra or even any common product sites. From youth to elderly people, all are much happier to shop with them. As the years are passing Amazon has sold many products that together are worth a billion with more than 304 million active customer accounts. Moreover, the brand is worth $47.73 billion. Now the high street stores are in fact struggling as people are getting familiar with e-commerce.
When you sell products online, it means you don’t have to employ staff and rent the same amount of physical space. If you wanted to set up a high street store, then you would need to be willing to spend a large amount of money to rent the physical space to invest in the stock and manage staff, etc. Instead, if you are setting up an online store then all you are going to need is some inventory and a website.
Now that’s a much broader appeal!
So, if you are looking for a way to make money online or if you want to increase the profit of your existing business, creating an e-commerce store is a great step. The growth of e-commerce sales is rising by the time of the year and so do the competitors.
Hence, it is important to know certain strategies that could help your business to stand out from its rivals. Let’s dive into a few of the effective strategies that you could make use of for your business
Ecommerce Strategies
Assume that you have an e-commerce store on your website and have an idea of things you would like to sell and who your targeted audience is.
However, you may have no idea how to make your brand reach out to those audiences. And for that reason, you must pick the right strategy to achieve your objectives and improve your position in the market.
So, let’s jump into some useful strategies that you can implement on your site today to make sure that you are ahead of the curve.
- Mobile shoppers
The first one is the increase in mobile shoppers. Just take a look at the statistics of 2016-2017. It is estimated that around 50% of the shoppers were on mobile devices and will continue to grow which is huge.
So, make sure that your site is optimized for mobile devices because if it doesn’t look good on mobile devices 70% of the traffic coming from mobile devices will slow down which will result in a huge decrease in your conversion rate and traffic. COVID-19 led companies to make bigger investments in digital, including developing the website experience, adding direct-to-consumer operations and partnering with delivery services. Many turned to social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp to facilitate interactions.
- Instagram shoppable posts
The use of Instagram is rising day by day which is a great deal for business as the customers can buy products directly on Instagram with shoppable posts.
To make use of this feature, all you have to do is set up the product catalogue on Facebook and connect it to your Instagram business account, and finally, tag any product in the posts that followers can buy.
- Google ads smart bidding
Smart bidding is another strategy that can be helpful if you are running any shopping campaigns or any type of advertising campaigns on google ads. Moreover, Google makes use of machine learning so that it can help to optimize your bids for better results. There are different bidding strategies based on business goals.
Smart bidding is quite useful to bring brand awareness, enhance traffic and conversion rates. You can start to get a lot more strategic about how you optimize your google ads bidding strategy. Here you can make adjustments to the creativity you are using, work on your landing page, or even improve your mobile shopping experience for users to enhance your results.
- Transparency for customers
Customers usually look for more transparency from brands. You see a huge rise of people incorporating social causes in their branding. So either they are showing that a portion of proceeds go to a specific cause or they are showing that their products and materials are ethically sourced. This is huge for just showing the transparency of what goes on behind the scenes of a brand, We can also see transparency in terms of just brands showing behind the scenes of order placement.
Amazon has been the frontier for that but with their prime shipping of orders being shipped in one to two business phases, people are starting to expect that level of engagement where they can see where their order is every step of the way and they are expecting shipping faster.
- Influencer marketing
The first thing when it comes to influencer marketing is to choose the right influencer for your brand and it is always better to choose macro-influencers because they have powerful and engaged niche communities that are often a lot more focused on a niche than just a general broader community.
The reach that will be looking for macro-influencers lies around 5000 to 50000 followers. They are the most likely to be willing to showcase your product simply in return for gifting.
The influencers should be those who are within your category and relevant to your brand.
- Video Content
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Google, etc are emphasizing video content. But that doesn’t mean you have to create a youtube channel, you can just concentrate on how to create a video for your product so that could be something like creating a how-to demonstration video of showing the way to use your products in a video.
You can also experiment with video ads if you are running any paid advertising or reach out to influencers who already have a Youtube or Instagram channel that they are adding some video on and you can go ahead and see about getting your product featured with them.
- Focusing on User Generated Content
This is a huge way to get your brand and your products to reach out to customers more. Whenever you see the actual customers have purchased the product and really like it and are recommending it to others as well, that can give a lot of social proof to a product where someone may not be completely sure if they want to purchase it or not.
But as soon as they see those reviews on your site then they are a lot more likely to go through with that transaction.
It’s simple…the more people you can get their hands on your product and review to a bigger audience the better.
- Upsell your customers
This is all about increasing your average order value and your customer lifetime value. These are the two metrics that you want to focus on in your ecommerce store.
Moreover, you should focus on the upsells, cross-sells, and bundles.
Upsell is when somebody is looking to purchase your product and being able to sell them more of that same product.
A cross-sell is like selling a complementary product with the original purchase.
On the other hand, bundles are nothing but an easy and simple way to show the discount rates.
- Voice search
In 2016, one of every five searches online was done through voice search for things like google home and Alexa. This is going to continue to increase and we can see some statistics saying that 50% is estimated to be voice search in the year 2025.
This means that you need to have your site optimized for voice search. Therefore, you need to be thinking about what people may be searching for whenever they may come across your product, any questions that they may have that can lead them to your product as well, and create content on your site both in blog and in your product post that go through and answer these questions and use long-form of keywords.
- Personalization
This just does not mean personalizing your products and having it to where customers can generate personalized materials like that but more like a personalized experience for customers.
Hence, email automation is huge for this but make sure that you are segmenting your email marketing list and are reaching out to customers at whatever point they are at in this journey with you online.
So, to conclude, we can affirm that the eCommerce market has already established their strong presence in the shopping habits of people. And there will not be a downfall. It is said that 95% of all purchases will be done online by 2025. Well, no wonder as everybody these days likes to buy online since it is available 24/7. This only means that there will be lots of bigger and better changes yet to come and you should keep an eye on all the technological and strategic changes accordingly and select the relevant ones to your needs. So it is high-time you got your eCommerce website developed and implemented the right strategies!