5 Little Known Ways to (Ethically) Drive Ecommerce Store Sales

In today’s technology-led era, it’s quite easy to approach eCommerce development with a basic set of features & functionalities. However, the challenging part is getting desired results from it. With over 2.14 billion people placing online orders from different corners of the world through more than 20 million eCommerce sites, you still struggle to see your sales figures escalating.

Fortunately, it isn’t tricky to understand the core reasons behind low sales and work on them to ensure enhanced user experience and boost sales for your eCommerce site. This post has been deliberately devised to offer critical insights into increasing eCommerce sales and building strong brand value.

Table of Contents

1. Stop following others

2. Remove distracting elements from the checkout page

3. Leverage FOMO (Fear of missing out)

4. Improve the load time of your site

5. Improve security

Endnote

1). Stop following others

Although it is essential to critically evaluate your competitor’s site and its features and functionalities, following them blindly may not always serve you right. Your focus should be on your brand’s uniqueness and how you highlight it on your website using  personalized features for your customers. To get desired results using this idea, you need to use your eCommerce data wisely to know your users well.

Segment your audience into smaller groups and look for ways to offer them the experience they want. Offer product recommendations with easy-to-access information and keep creating offers based on user behaviors.

2). Remove distracting elements from the checkout page

When customers place an online order, they expect a smooth checkout process without any interruption during the payment. For instance, many eCommerce sites force customers to create an account before placing an order. This can get quite annoying and might result in cart abandonment.

Paul Boag, a leader in user experience design, precisely said: “Users don’t come to your site to create an account. They come to buy.” You must wait until the order gets placed and then invite customers to create an account on the website to stay updated on fresh arrivals, the latest discounts, and more.

3). Leverage FOMO (Fear of missing out)

One of the most common practices to drive sales is creating a sense of urgency or fear of missing out to persuade customers to buy from a store instantly. Whenever there are time-sensitive special offers or a limited edition, consumers act quickly to grab the deal instead of waiting till the last minute. Listed below are some of the popular ways to create urgency among customers:

• Flash sales ending midnight

• Reward for the first 10 customers

• Limited-period discounts

• Size scarcity

• Stock scarcity

• Limited-edition products

• Show a countdown timer

• Limited-time discount on abandoned cart items

• Limited-time free shipping for orders below $100

• Last chance emails

4). Improve the load time of your site

Nobody loves to shop from an eCommerce store that takes forever to load. Slow load time is a killer of your business revenue. According to Envisage digital, over 79% of online shoppers avoid online stores with performance issues. Ensure that your eCommerce site takes no longer than 4 to 5 seconds to load on a desktop and 8 to 10 seconds on smartphones. Anything beyond this will not be acceptable to today’s fast-paced internet users.

A good exercise to determine whether your online store needs speed optimization is to run your site’s home page URL through a website speed testing tool like Pingdom, GTmatrix, or PageSpeed Insights (Google). If the site’s load time is above 5 seconds, you need to prioritize optimizing it.

You can reduce the load time of your site by seeking the service of an eCommerce developer to compress heavy files, reduce the number of redirects, minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML codes, and uninstall useless third-party plugins.

5). Improve the security

 To increase your eCommerce conversions, you should focus on improving your site’s security. Besides having an HTTPS version, use reliable third-party plugins and multi-layered security. Further, regular backup of your site is also a necessity. To earn the trust of your customers, you can use a multi-layered security approach from popular security providers like PayPal, Norton, Google, and McAfee Secure. This will add an additional layer of protection to your eCommerce store and improve the overall sense of security by displaying security badges. 

Endnote

All these aspects directly impact your brand’s credibility and revenue generation capabilities. Hence, working on these critical areas will undoubtedly help you achieve desired results from your eCommerce site and enhance your user base with happy and contented customers.