In recent years, the increasing number of physical shopping outlets transposing their sales to an online context has exponentially increased. Today, seemingly infinite e-commerce businesses provide innumerable goods and services to a worldwide customer base. With such an expanse of competition providing every conceivable product and service, it can be challenging for an e-commerce startup to increase website visibility and attract potential customers. However, there are several effective means of increasing online traffic and sales including implementing a proper SEO strategy,
POS payments optimization, and reducing website response time. This article will give a brief overview of several tips for e-commerce startups seeking some fundamental strategies.
Focus on SEO and implement a solid strategy
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of maximizing website traffic quantitatively and qualitatively, ensuring the site appears higher in particular search engine results. Although SEO is complex to work with in greater depth, it is relatively easy to understand and apply. In simple terms, SEO involves the implementation of keywords - searchable words or phrases relevant to your e-commerce business. On-page SEO for e-commerce platforms is ultimately about ensuring your specific keywords appear in the correct places and that search engines understand the content of your page. Furthermore, optimizing your product pages and enabling products to be indexed will enhance SEO success rates. Overall, on-page SEO is vital for e-commerce businesses to appear in other Search Engine Results Page (SERP) features to attract the most appropriate customers and potentially increase sales.
Make use of a POS system
Point of sale systems (POS) are widely used by most major e-commerce businesses. Primarily used to efficiently process transactions, the advancement of technology has resulted in POS systems that combine software and hardware to operate multiple operations within your business. This can include monitoring inventory, assessing purchasing trends, tracking pricing accuracies, and obtaining valuable marketing data. POS can track what products might benefit from increased promotion and order more stock at the optimal time. In addition, it can automatically move stock between different locations, such as from warehouse to customer. Moreover, POS systems are evolving to become more interactive, where clients can place orders, make service reservations, and pay bills online. Lastly, POS software can organize company invoices and tax returns to streamline and digitize substantial paperwork backlogs.
Reduce website response time
It is intuitive for any prospective e-commerce startup to construct a website that customers can easily navigate without lag. A website response time refers to the speed at which a server can respond to a request - optimized websites facilitate a response time range of between 200 milliseconds and 1 second. However, e-commerce businesses frequently utilize large video files or high-resolution images that can slow browser efficiency. Ultimately, for increased visitor satisfaction, any response time exceeding 1 second is highly problematic and must be reduced. Without a streamlined, navigable platform that responds to requests quickly, the chances of customers leaving the site before completing a purchase are significantly higher. A superior operating system that can accommodate sophisticated content without increasing the response time is ultimately worth the investment.
Do not underestimate the mobile experience
Mobile-first design is becoming essential for e-commerce startups to remain competitive and relevant in the smartphone era. This is largely attributable to the ubiquity of smartphones that has now surpassed laptops and tablets as the primary means of accessing online content. Mobile-first design is the process of optimizing an e-commerce (or any other) website for mobile devices that improves and enhances the user experience and results in better engagement rates through streamlined usability. Optimizing your website for handheld devices can improve customer satisfaction and sales, promote higher search engine rankings, increase traffic, is cost-effective and will keep your business competitive with the latest trends.
Provide quality content
Quality e-commerce content is critical to attracting customers and building trust. Successful brands create superlative content to present information through many channels and mediums. The connection between e-commerce and online material is not to be underestimated - appealing to customers with great products and consistently engaging can be achieved through strong content that encompasses both text and images. It is vital to provide comprehensive, authoritative material that is also accessible and concisely describes why a particular product or service is the solution to their specific problem or requirement. Providing content that is conducive to providing a positive connection between customers and your brand can result in higher brand awareness, increased sales, build trust and encourage client loyalty, promote more organic website traffic, and provide stronger engagement with (and understanding of) customers.
Final thoughts
Establishing a successful e-commerce startup can be a formidable and challenging undertaking. However, this article has provided a set of fundamentals to follow that will assist you to initiate your venture. Ultimately, it is highly recommended in this exceptionally competitive online climate to remain adaptable and creative to stay current with myriad trends that will govern the future direction of e-commerce.
