Top Tips For A Better Digital Store
The last few years have seen a meteoric rise in the popularity of Ecommerce, with more Customers than ever before opting to do their shopping online. This in turn has led many businesses to need to take their first steps into this world if they want to survive.
Running a digital store is a very different experience to running a traditional physical store, and it can be difficult for the inexperienced to know how to make the most of it. Heck, even the experienced don’t necessarily always know what they should be doing.
Wherever you fall on the spectrum of Ecommerce experience, today we’re going to look at how you can improve your digital store and make more sales with higher profits and happier Customers.
Make Navigating A Breeze
The best thing you can do to improve your digital store is to make it easy to use. No Customer who has any sort of choice in the matter is going to stick around to use a Site that’s frustrating to navigate, so if yours suffers from any obvious defects, you need to fix them now.
There’s a great many aspects we could discuss at length, but here’s a quick highlight reel:
Make sure important buttons are clearly labelled and easily located. This means things like Call To Action buttons, cart and checkout links, and anything else that Customers will want immediate access to when it’s relevant. Make them a reasonable size, a colour that stands out, and put them in a logical place.
Make your product range easily searchable. Trawling through long pages of products trying to find the one thing you want isn’t an experience that anyone enjoys. If you have more than a few products, and especially if your range is quite varied, make sure you offer a robust system of filters.
Check out the stores your direct competitors are operating and make sure your offering is at least as good as theirs. You should also have a search bar placed somewhere sensible, usually the header.
The endless scroll is a great model for Social Media, but not for your store.
Limit how far Customers need to travel to reach any given point on your Site. It shouldn’t be more than a few clicks or a brief scroll. If it’s unclear how to reach a part of your Site,
make it clearer.
Use Your Data To The Fullest
As the owner of a digital store you have unmatched access to the inner workings of that store. You can see everything that happens, and you should be taking full advantage of that knowledge. Every last scrap of data you collect improves your understanding of both your business and your Customers.
The more you understand about your business and your Customers, the better placed you are to make decisions that will lead to more sales, higher profits, and happier Customers.
The first thing you should be looking at is what you’re successfully selling. If a product is a top seller there’s going to be a good reason for that, interrogate your data and figure out what it is. Is it the price? The quality? A recent promotion? Its position in your store display?
There are lots of factors that go into the purchasing decision of your Customers, understanding them helps you to figure out how to persuade them to make larger purchases. Keep in mind this doesn’t just apply to the product you’re studying, the insights you pickup can be applied to your other products as well.
Don’t forget to also look at the average amounts of the purchases people are making. Do you make lots of small sales? Or just a few large sales? Misunderstanding your cash flow is a deadly mistake that can cost you your whole business, yet another reason you should be paying close attention to the data you have coming in.
Other information like your Customer Retention Rate, what times your store is busiest, geographical locations where your business is especially popular, all of these are useful. They can help you arrange your product lineup, plan your marketing, and budget for the future. Don’t neglect your data!
Keep Up To Date
When we looked at the navigational aspect of your store, we were focused on improving the experience of your Customers, and that’s again what we’re looking at here.
No Site lasts forever, they all need work to keep them up to date. Sites that haven’t been updated in years have a very distinct vibe to them, an air of neglect, of being abandoned to rot. This is not an atmosphere that’s conducive to generating sales.
A visual update every now again is a good way to keep your Site from looking antiquated, and a necessary part of Site maintenance, digital design trends move quite quickly.
Be especially certain to keep on top of developments in the interactive parts of web design. If a new development in user interface design becomes popular, Customers will start to expect it. If your Site lacks this hot new thing, you’re starting your transaction by immediately disappointing your Customers.
Payment options as well are something to keep on top of, you want your Customers to feel comfortable that they won’t have their credit card stolen if they shop with you, and that means implementing payment methods they trust.
Then of course there’s the obvious need to keep your products and services information up to date. Customers can’t buy your new range of cupcakes if it’s not listed, and if the details of your products undergo a change you need to update them. Not only does it irritate your Customers (always a bad move) but you open yourself up to litigation if your listings are marked incorrectly.
Running a physical store isn’t simple, and an online store is no different. There’s a lot to consider, but if you can keep on top of it all, the potential for growth is enormous. If you want some extra help, feel free to get in touch with us.
