While not as novel as it used to be, the e-commerce industry is certainly booming. So much so in fact that the high level of competition makes it hard for businesses to scale, let alone survive.
Nevertheless, there are many avenues that e-commerce stores can take if they want to innovate and grow their business. In this article, we present you with a few important considerations to take into account if you want to scale your business.
1 – Website design
It goes without saying that the success of any e-commerce business depends on online sales. With this in mind, your website should always be the focal point of your growth strategy since a poorly designed site will dramatically harm your bottom line.
Here are some key points to improve as you scale your business:
Landing page
Your website’s main landing page is the key to getting the highest number of conversions as possible. It needs to look aesthetically pleasing, be easy to navigate and persuade the user to perform the actions you want them to.
Take the time to perfect your landing page by fine-tuning these elements:
- Calls to action
- Headlines and sub-titles
- Visual cues (images and videos)
- Social proof and benefits
- Design and layout (especially above-the-fold)
SEO
A perfectly optimized landing page won’t help you scale your business if nobody is visiting your online store. Many e-commerce companies completely neglect the importance of a good SEO strategy and then wonder why they are struggling. Don’t be one of them.
Make sure your most important pages are well-optimized with keywords in the titles, descriptions, headings and content. You can even research what your most successful competitors are doing in terms of SEO to find your blind spots. This can be done with subscription services like SEMRush and AHREFs.
2 – Shipping and fulfillment
After website design, the next most important thing to consider is shipping and fulfillment. Whether you’re a small start-up shipping products from your home or a more established business using an outside company for truck transportation, seamless and timely order fulfillment is necessary if you want to retain customer loyalty.
Here are a few quick tips to consider if you want to improve your shipping process:
- Use data to gain insight into potential problems with your fulfillment process
- Compare different carriers to ensure you are cost-effective without sacrificing quality
- Streamline the checkout process as much as possible
- Make sure your packaging design is appealing to your customers
- Provide real-time shipping information to reassure your clientele
3 – Customer experience
Once your core business (i.e. your online store and shipping process) has a strong foundation, you can shift your focus to enhancing the customer experience. One of the best ways to achieve this is through personalization. In other words, providing each customer with a unique experience that is tailored to them.
There are a number of effective ways to provide a more personalized experience. You can send customized emails based on consumer behavior, suggest products based on individual customer data, upsell products during checkout, implement an advanced search feature, offer customer-specific promotions, and much more.
Conclusion
If you are in the process of growing your e-commerce business, the 3 most important areas to focus on improving are your website, your shipping process and the customer experience. Optimizing these 3 areas will keep your business on a positive growth trajectory well into the future.
