Ecommerce: How To Run An Online Store Like A Pro

E commerce is one of the biggest outcomes of the rapid technology advances over the past few years. Better & more secure payment gateways, powerful mobile browsers, advent of the internet – have all made ecommerce a mainstream industry. If you have a brick and mortar store – complementing it with an online store can instantly open up the world for you. But with all the noise surrounding ecommerce and the number of players in the market – it can get a bit difficult to carve an identity for yourself.

In this article, we’ve dig into our combined years of experience working with and setting up ecommerce stores to present you 3 tips on ecommerce. They’ll help you run your store like a pro and dominate the online sales business!

1. UI and UX of your e-commerce store

The moment a potential customer lands on your website, they’ll make assumptions about your brand based on the design, look & feel and the functionality. That’s why is absolutely essential to ensure that your ecommerce website is designed keeping your customer’s experience in mind. A few components that you should pay special attention to:

Simple Menus

Keep the menu as simple as possible. Loading up the main menu with every available product will overwhelm the user. Spend time categorizing your products as neatly as possible and try not to have multi-level menus. Realize that every added option in the menu will increase the user’s time to make a decision. And more time a user takes to make a decision, less likely are they to complete the checkout.

Intuitive & contextual Filters

We’ve seen so many ecommerce stores implementing standardized filters that don’t apply to certain products. Ensure the filters are contextual to the category/product list.

The longer the list of products in your catalog, the more important filters become.

Design

A study by VWO concluded that larger product images can increase your conversion rates by as much as 10%. Consider hiring a professional photographer to take high quality pictures of your entire catalog. Detailed product descriptions also contribute to conversion rates.

Mobile Optimized Website

This one’s a no brainer, but it’s surprising how so many overlook it. More and more users are accessing websites and completing orders from their phone. You don’t really need to build an app for your ecommerce store, but it’s imperative to have the website optimized for mobile.

2. Setup A Great Referral System

Referral marketing is one of the most popular and effective ways of growing your user base organically. A simple example of a referral system is when you reward a user with a discount on their purchase when they invite their friends and family. Certain types of referral systems in ecommerce reward both the advocate (your user who invites) and the referred party (user’s friend/family).

Many ecommerce giants swear by the effectiveness of this strategy. Amazon has been using referral based user acquisition ever since they launched. Paypal’s monumental growth has been attributed to a referral system. They literally paid users to signup as well as invite their friends and family. This helped them grow at a rate of around 7-10% per day, growing their user base to a 100 million. Since then a lot of startups have used this to grow fast.

Referral is like a word of mouth system and works on a deeper level as both the involved parties are monetarily rewarded. Consider setting up a referral system for your ecommerce store. If your value proposition is worthwhile – it might just bring you insane amounts of traffic and grow your business faster than you can handle!

3. Up your Customer Service Game

Zappos, the footwear giant is known for its exceptional customer service. They have an extremely loyal customer base even though their prices are not the lowest in the market. Infact, 75% of Zappos business comes from repeat customers. There are case studies published highlighting the part their customer service has made in making Zappos the largest footwear store in the world.

Having a great customer service could really set you apart from your competition, especially if you’re fighting a lot of competition. And if your budgets are constrained and have no room for hiring call centers – consider getting a chatbot for your ecommerce store.

Take a leaf from the Zappos playbook – consider upgrading your customer service to awesome levels, build a loyal audience and make a name for yourself in your segment!

Setting up a proper e-commerce portal takes a bit of work. Using an out-of-the-box service like Shopify or WordPress (Woocommerce) can limit the flexibility you’d like. That’s why we suggest Spree commerce to our clients. It gives you all the flexibility you need, while ensuring rapid development thanks to the huge repository of ‘gems’.

If you’re thinking about setting up an ecommerce store and want to understand how to go about it – we’d be happy to help!