The year 2013 was an extremely successful period especially for online sales. The holiday season especially exhibited signs of a strong performance by most web shops. According to reliable sources, the holiday shopping period especially displayed amazing results. For example, the total eCommerce sales between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday grew by as much as 24%. A similar performance was noted for mobile commerce, which grew by a phenomenal 60%, thereby accounting for nearly $1 billion in revenue. This also means that a quarter of the business on Thanksgiving and Black Friday were acquired from mobile devices. Furthermore, it is worth noting that tablets are emerging as a principle engine amongst other devices that are boosting as eCommerce sales. Smartphone sales registered only half the sales compared to that for tablet orders. It can be significantly noted here that tablets accounted for $237 million dollars in sales on Cyber Monday, whereas the total eCommerce spending on Cyber Monday was approximately $ 2 billion.
These facts point to the necessity of establishing a plan and strategy for 2014. It’s definitely not advisable to lag behind in deciding what you should do about your strategy for growth. In order to derive more value from your eCommerce solution, it becomes necessary that you consider the following solutions.
1. With the emergence and growing popularity of mobile devices over desktop computers, it has become essential for eCommerce stores to be responsive. Mobility has thus become a matter of prime importance for eCommerce merchants wishing to gain the most from their eCommerce venture. As indicated by shopping trends in 2013, mobile shoppers, especially those who shopped using a tablet device, comprise of around 25% – 40% of an eCommerce store’s target audience. It is thus paramount to own a robust and viable eCommerce solution to offer a scintillating online experience to these prospective customers. Utilizing Responsive Web Design is a good step to begin with to make your eCommerce store a viable shopping instrument for online customers. An even better alternative is to provide a mobile oriented website as well as layout as the next logical as well as optimal step. It is not advisable to delay building a responsive web design (RWD) for your website. However, if you already have one in place, it is high time that you looked at the web traffic as well as conversion rates for your website to determine whether it is the right moment to create a unique and creative layout as well as design for mobile devices. Ensure that the year 2014 is going to be a win-win situation for you.
2. Measuring your Customer Service Effectiveness is the next step in determining whether your online business will be capable of retaining your customers or not. This will ensure that each request made to your customer service team has been addressed successfully. A wide range of customer service effectiveness measurement tools are available today. Google the web to discover the appropriate tool for your business. A good example is the salesforce.com service cloud as well as solutions from inContact. Thus, adhering to good customer service effectiveness and ensuring better request success will help you do wonders for your eCommerce store in 2014.
3. Make sure that you adhere to operations compliance, as this area is going to get more and more complex and even more expensive to manage manually. This is especially true in the area of sales tax collection and remittance. Consider using automated solutions that help you to reduce tax compliance costs in 2014.
4. Further, you can improve the performance of your eCommerce store by improving your search feature. Thus, customers will be able to find easily what they are looking for. Many a times, your store might feature a particular product, but it might not show up in a search conducted by a customer, because of a weak search function. Thus, a search that turns up inappropriate or no results is as good as a lost potential sale, which could be considerably detrimental to your store in the long run. You especially need an effective search tool when you have a large catalog, especially over 10,000 SKU’s. You also need an effective search function if you have a lot of product meta-data. Help your customers to find the products and services they want quickly. The best way forward is to choose an industry leading solution such as that from SLI systems or a similar provider that has the capability to plug into most eCommerce platforms. Improve your search feature and pave the way to economic success in 2014.
5. It is a wise idea to grow your business in the off season as well as the shoulder season. In case you are capable of achieving more than 50% of your online business in the fourth quarter, then you need to consider how to improve your customer base during the rest of the next year, beginning from the first quarter of that year. As an example, even modestly improving your conversion rates as well as customer retention during the first three quarters will help you offset the risk of completely depending on holiday sales. This can possibly be achieved through the use of more sophisticated and ROI-based eCommerce internet marketing tools. Features offered by tools such as Listrak and Bronto are capable of levering a definitive advantage for your Magento Enterprise platform. Grow your business in 2014 by improving eCommerce conversion rates as well as your customer retention capacity.
Shivi Rao is a content marketer with Krish. She has worked in various industries spanning technology, science, rural marketing, startups & unicorns, eCommerce business, and digital marketing, believing that content is the foundation to facilitate the visibility of any organization and ensuring her words do the same. In her free time, you can either find her lifting weights in the gym or feeding the strays.
21 December, 2022 After WooCommerce, Shopify is the 2nd most loved and used eCommerce platform worldwide. Shopify is an entirely feature-rich eCommerce platform. It offers many drag-and-drop options, and its apps work tremendously for store owners. In addition, Shopify is easy to use as it doesn't require depth coding.
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