STRATEGIES FOR E-COMMERCE
Ecommerce Strategies to Optimize Sales
(1) Free Shipping
The most common reason visitors abandon a purchase is shipping cost. Offer your customers free shipping, and clearly state that benefit on your site.
- 39% of customers would purchase enough to get free shipping.In addition, a study by Compete states that:
- 93% of online buyers would be encouraged to buy more products if free shipping were offer.
(2) Show Discounts and Specials Clearly
Discounts and coupons are powerful marketing tools that allow you to:
- Give your clients special offers on products or categories.
- Let wholesalers purchase at special rates.
- Provide incentives through your offline advertising.
- Help clear “difficult to sell” stock amongst many other ues
(3) Referral Discounts
Optimizely tested a call to action (CTA) for an outdoor gear retailer’s refer-a-friend program and found that active outdoor enthusiasts are significantly more motivated by “Earn Rewards” than “Get Rewards.”
(4) Take Your Email Marketing Beyond the Inbox
Over the next few years, we’re likely to see a lot more ecommerce companies combining their email marketing campaigns with related social advertising.
In a study where a leading retailer in the US targeted 925,000 email subscribers with both its regular emails and coordinated Facebook ads, subscribers who received both ads were 22% more likely to make purchases than those who only received emails.
(5) Use videos to draw attention to your company’s website
Using video in the right way will have a direct effect on user engagement.
Short explainer videos are an excellent way to help visitors quickly understand your company, your products, and your services.
Visually showing your product in action gives visitors a better understanding of how your product works.
That helps soon-to-be customers get more comfortable with making a purchase, thereby boosting both your revenue and your conversion rate.
(6) Add Live Chat to your Conversion Rate Optimization toolkit
Live chat has the potential to close the gap between the online shoppers and retailers. You have the chance to connect with your potential customers and build their trust.
Recent studies have shown that 68.5% of CompUSA customers used live chat while browsing the website:
- 32% percent of them used live chat during the final phases of the buying process
- And out of the 32%, 10% percent converted into a sale. At this point, it is still relatively early in live chat implementation; however 28% of e-commerce websites now offer live chat
INTERNET BASED BUSINESS MODELS
Why Internet Based Business Models?
For those who really haven’t a clear and concise plan already mapped out in their heads, internet based business models can offer the best of both worlds – the epic earnings potential that come with running a successful company, only with far fewer of the bottlenecks that come with traditional bricks and mortar setups. Like suffocating cash demands, before so much as a customer has ventured through the threshold or a penny has been earned by way of revenue.
Internet Based Business Models
(1) Ecommerce/Shopping Cart Model
With this type of model, your website takes over from your physical store in shipping goods directly to your customers. Ecommerce sites aren’t especially difficult to create, and there exist a cacophony of software options – from the free/cheap to elaborate, custom design carts with every type of bell & whistle you could want.
Amazon are a pretty good example of this simple, yet ruthlessly effective online business model. It uses cheap, out of town warehouses which ship the goods directly to consumers. By minimizing its cost base and maximizing economies of scale it can offer prices that most offline only stores just cannot go toe to toe with. For this reason, the more niche your product range and the better your unique selling point, the greater your likely success when using this model.
(2) Digital Download Model
Examples of this are ebooks, software, and music and just about anything intangible that may be downloaded instantly after purchase. A huge feature with this model is that once set-up it requires practically no manual intervention from you or your staff. From product purchase to delivery, it’s all handled by a virtual backroom of wageless robots that exist within the software system that you’re using.
(3) Membership Site Model
These are often touted as the holy grail of models because they offer a recurring income element. Typically, members pay a monthly fee to access digital content that is hidden to non members. The product could be just about anything, but mostly will be some form of digital media such as ebooks, videos or software. Normally, fresh new content is added periodically to encourage the member to stay as a paying subscriber.
(4) Affiliate Model
The site owner earns by placing a selection of affiliate adverts on the site, normally closely linked to the site theme. When a sale is made via an affiliate link or banner, the site owner earns a commission. This is among the most commonly applied net business models for bloggers, and for new entrants into the online business arena.
(5) Hybrid Model
There is a good chance that the business model you end up with could well be a pick n mix of two, or more of the above. For example, your site’s core purpose could be to sell subscriptions to new monthly business products and tools, but it could equally offer affiliate products to bolster earnings.
These are just some of the more popular internet business models that you can adopt. Keep in mind though that the internet, evolving so ferociously as it does, always throws up new opportunities and new ways of doing business.
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