Your ecommerce store is critical to broadening your brand and increasing your reach. While ecommerce offers business a wide range of opportunities, it can be difficult to keep up with high customer expectations and an ever growing market. Therefore, we are going to share our top three strategies to help make your ecommerce store a success.
Choosing the Right Shipping Method
People shop online for convenience, but a study estimated that roughly only one in four consumers complete their purchases. In 2017, 26% of online shoppers cited slow shipping as the main reason for abandoning their cart before checking out. This percentage represents a 4% increase over the previous year, showing that consumers are becoming ever more demanding. A delivery time that exceeds two to three days will send them to seek another vendor.
There are many aspects to achieving rapid delivery while boosting your e-commerce. If a consumer chooses to ship by air, they'll face another hurdle -- higher costs. Customers not only expect fast service, but also want to pay as little as possible to get it. To compete with other sellers on cost, a business must typically use ground transportation, but it's only a part of the solution because the major carriers have dramatically hiked their rates and implemented zone pricing.
The farther products are shipped within the United States, the higher the costs are to the customer. However, that can be overcome by storing and shipping products from more than one fulfillment center. By using various locations across the country, a business can increase its bottom line and avoid giving customers sticker shock at checkout.
While minimizing shipping prices, customers also appreciate keeping their sales tax obligations as low as possible. Those taxes must be charged in every state in which a business has a presence, or nexus, and they're endlessly complicated. Sales taxes can jeopardize sales conversions as much as high shipping costs. To increase business and decrease paperwork, it is better to avoid vulnerability to those liabilities as much as possible. In most cases, a distribution center, warehouse or pickup outlet will qualify as a nexus. With large organizations such as Amazon, a nexus can exist almost anywhere. Ideally, a business wants a fulfillment company that has a nexus in very few states, but whose facilities are strategically located to keep zone charges low.
Major shipping companies have added yet another complication to managing costs. Carriers now charge not only based on weight but also dimensions. A fulfillment company must have the packaging ability and experience to ensure that goods remain undamaged at the same time the parcels are compact enough to avoid excessive transportation costs.
In this age, when reams of data stream from phones, iPads and computers, consumers expect instant access to extensive information. They want to know when their orders will arrive and to be able to track their progress. A retailer needs a fulfillment partner that can keep the promises the brand makes to consumers. It is essential that an organization have confidence that it can be transparent, giving customers an accurate estimate of delivery costs, and avoiding frustration and cancelled orders. Anything less than top performance will leave retailers with orphaned carts and shrinking profits.
Streamline the Fulfillment Process
As technology grows at a breakneck pace and orders flow over the net in the blink of an eye, the fastest and most effective human workforce is no longer able to keep pace manually. Well before a consumer visits the website, automated procedures must be in place to ensure sufficient inventory to meet demand.
The order-processing must be automated, effective and up-to-date to keep goods flowing efficiently to mailboxes, porches and receiving departments, giving the organization's e-commerce the boost it needs to expand business.
Additionally, it should be able to forecast and take into account shipping and customs clearance times to ensure that the inventory is sufficient to fulfil orders, yet not so much so that merchandise sits unprofitably on warehouse shelves. The fulfillment partner must be able to provide the information and alerts needed to make sure adequate stock is ready to ship, but without it incurring excess production and storage costs.
That partner also should have the capacity to handle seasonal and campaign-driven peak sales periods. Whether for Valentine's Day, Black Friday or Christmas, first-rate business to consumer distribution logistics such as superior service, rapid handling and reliability are crucial.
The partner should seamlessly works with e-commerce to bring a full suite of application programming interface technology, such as Acutrack's PrestaShop. When customers click the “buy” button, their transactions should proceed smoothly and ultimately be error-free from start to finish.
Tangible Rewards Spur Landing-Page Conversion
The most expensive marketing campaign will fail without a welcoming and inspiring landing page. That entry to the website is a focused siren song that beckons the visitor to delve deeper into content with the marketing pitch that can convert a surfer into a buyer, member or subscriber.
Most visitors to a landing page have a limited attention span. Within seconds, they will decide whether to stay on board or move on. Therefore, they must be presented with an immediate hook.
Organizations spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to create Facebook ads and may even pay more in click-through charges. Unfortunately, the time the viewers stay may not be much longer than the time they took to get there. To prevent a speedy retreat, some organizations offer free PDF downloads or short training videos. In an environment in which an endless supply of documents or videos is only a click away, those offers may not be much of an inducement.
By offering a physical product of concrete value instead of a digital perk, the chances of converting a lead into a member or customer increase. If the landing page has a high conversion rate, it will bring in about five times more money than a page with average results.
It's unlikely that a person would give a friend or loved one a free download as a birthday or anniversary gift. Neither should a company wanting to entice business. Potential customers should be presented with a gift they can hold, feel and see. Visitors should also perceive that the offer has genuine value. An intriguing premium will convert a momentary stop-off point into a favored return destination.
If the business has many choices of products to offer and wants to receive the highest return on investment, selections should be economical to transport, and create enough interest in customers or subscribers that they'll return to make a purchase or sign up for services.
One option for an incentive is a USB thumb drive. It can hold a vast amount of data and is produced and shipped at a minimal cost. The drive itself and its packaging can help establish the brand. The possibilities for what can be provided to customers on a USB drive are limitless, from introductory chapters of a book to photo albums and sound bites. The USB drives can be read by most computers and are easily passed on to friends and co-workers.
To make a lasting impression, send a book. Many readers view a book as a sensual experience. The feel and smell of the pages conjure up early imaginings, exciting adventures and memories of stories that leaped from the printed page to enrich readers' lives.
From the front cover through the last line, a book can make a case. Whether inviting the recipients to explore new taste experiences, improve their health or just escape from the stress of the day, a book can be the gateway to a long and profitable relationship with its readers. Books are also shared by friends, family and colleagues, extending the reach of products or a cause.
Complete Fulfillment Solution
Wouldn't it be ideal to find a partner that can provide the fulfillment needed while controlling costs and expanding e-commerce? How much more could the organization benefit if that company could also produce that thumb drive, and publish the books?
The right company can do all of that and more. Choose a market leader in books, fulfillment. It's essential that it can integrate with any shopping cart, marketplace or e-commerce platform to handle orders seamlessly. It must also provide warehousing, picking, packaging and shipping services that are needed.
The best choice will also take comprehensive service a step further. Offering just-in-time media production will eliminate the need to maintain an inventory of those products. If the customer demands change, the organization won't bear the cost of obsolete or unsalable merchandise. The winning fulfillment partner will provide all the services needed to boost e-commerce business.
