15 Effective Ways to Optimize your E-commerce Website

If you own an e-commerce business, it may interest you to know that around 7 out of 10 e-commerce customers abandon their online carts without completing a purchase. A clear 70% of potential business lost just like that. It is all more shocking when you realize that this loss is attributable to some avoidable issues on your website that warrant optimization. Issues as simple as a slow-loading webpage or the webpage not receptive to mobile devices play a huge role. Such issues could see a potential customer give up in frustration and head elsewhere to do business. These potential customers may even head directly to your competitors instead of doing business with you.
 
To ensure your e-commerce business competes fairly and gets its fair share of the hugely competitive online business, you can implement the following tips to optimize the website.
 
1. Optimize for Mobile Traffic

Google reports now indicate that mobile devices particularly smartphones are now responsible for generating over 60% of online shopping orders. That’s a huge chunk of online traffic. This makes it crucial that your e-commerce website be optimized for mobile unless you want to miss out on this huge traffic. Optimizing your website for mobile involves keeping your content concise and simple. By simplifying forms, users don’t have to fill in so many details, making it easy for mobile screens to accommodate. 
 
2. Provide Plenty of High-Resolution Images
  
When a customer really knows exactly what they’re buying, they’ll be less likely to be disappointed and return it. You can help your business by using only high resolution photos on your website. To do this effectively, you can consider investing in AR/VR tools to showcase the products you are selling in more details. Where relevant, you could also use how-to videos to demonstrate your products in use. 
  
3. Hook Visitors on Your Home Page

Technically, homepage design for e-commerce business matters a great deal. Your home page should be engaging and clearly communicate your business’ main benefits as quickly as possible to visitors. But, you must avoid cluttering the page so as not to overwhelm your customers, thereby preventing them from knowing where to begin. Prioritize an easily found search bar and photos of some of your best-selling products to hook customers in. Make sure to always keep annoying pop-ups to the barest minimum.

4. Improve Your Search Box

Shoppers who use a website’s search feature are much more likely to see a purchase to conclusion. You can enhance this even further with the help of Artificial Intelligence, AI. AI-powered search tools can analyze users’ previous preferences to better understand their intent and deliver them highly personalized results. This helps to better enhance purchase conclusion. 
 
5. Be Transparent and Competitive on Charges

No shopper likes surprise extra charges at checkout. Significantly, “unexpected shipping costs” is one of the leading reasons for e-commerce cart abandonment. To counter this, it is advisable to be upfront about all charges (including any taxes and customs fees where applicable) throughout the purchasing journey.

6. Offer Free Shipping

Free e-commerce shipping is a huge sales incentive for online customers. Significantly, “free delivery” is a leading way the online shopping experience could be improved. If you do offer this feature, be sure to make it prominently visible on your homepage and on header banners across your website. It can act as shopping magnet in some instances.

7. Make Your Website Attractive to Cross-Border Customers

Selling internationally? Great! The world is now like a small village because of the internet. You can therefore deliberately adapt your website for each market no matter where in the world. If shoppers are able to see a website in their local language and prices in their own currency as prominent features on a website, it usually encourages them to shop cross-border.

8. Minimize Page Load Time

Research shows that for every additional second your site takes to load, visitors’ response rates drop. The faster your website loads the more it encourages visitors to “look in.” You can therefore optimize your website to load faster by compressing text and images, deleting unused plugins, and switching your web-host provider. These are some of the best ways you can speed things up a bit. Furthermore, a faster website will earn a place higher up in Google’s SERPs. This is hugely important for any online business to get found by way of organic searches.

9. Take Advantage of AI as Your Customer Experience Manager

AI-powered chatbots can better understand and respond to customers’ queries. These chatbots help customers to find what they’re looking for fairly quickly. AI-powered chatbots in e-commerce can analyze past purchasing behaviors to make product suggestions customers will like, and even upsell and cross-sell relevant products. They can offer post-sales support too, working on tracking and refunds. And, as chatbots are available 24/7, your customers will never be kept waiting.

10. Prioritize Personalization

Personalization is one of the most important aspects to digital customer journeys. AI helps to make personalization possible. The technology can analyze large amounts of customer data such as preferences and behaviors, and then use these insights to create personalized customer journeys based on likely intent. It means, for example, that a new customer and a returning customer would both see a different version of your homepage when visiting your website; each tailored to their unique needs. This has the shopping advantage of helping to increase conversions.

11. Include User Feedback/Reviews

Credible Research info indicates that over 80% of global consumers check reviews as part of their online buying journey. Many base their buy decisions on positive reviews. To take advantage of this, you can always share lots of customer reviews, ratings and testimonials on your website to help build trust in your business.

12. Prioritize Website Security

Many online shoppers do abandon a purchase because they don’t trust the site with their credit card confidential information. To reassure customers, you must be clear about your data protection policy. It helps if you obtain an SSL certificate (which authenticates your website's identity and enables an encrypted connection) and having it on display.

13. Embark on Test, and Continuous Testing

You can only optimize your e-commerce website by knowing where the weaknesses are. Google Analytics will help you understand important metrics like session duration, bounce rate and engagement so that you can make improvements. This should be an ongoing and continuous process. Regularly test, and retest the performance of your website to improve on your results.

14. Offer Different Payment Methods at Checkout

“Payment options” is a significant contributor to cart abandonment in e-commerce business. You can work around this by making sure to provide many options and alternative payment methods at checkout point. Depending on convenience, you can make available, credit card options, digital wallets, PayPal, Bitcoin, Direct wire transfer and so on.

15. Have a Clear and Unambiguous Returns Policy 

A very clear business policy enhances credibility. Product returns should be done smoothly and without undue hassles. A significant percentage of online shoppers always check an online retailer’s returns policy before making their buy decisions. Therefore, it is hugely important to invest in this feature and be very clear about it on your website.

Key Tips for Small Business Marketing in Tough Times

Economic realities worldwide are always characterized by ups and downs. This affects marketers a great deal. When the economy suffers an unexpected downturn just like we currently have with the covid-19 pandemic ravaging the world, smart marketers must be able to think outside the box for their businesses to survive. Generally, at such times, there is always the tendency for most marketers to focus mainly on how to cut costs and save money. That usually poses very huge challenges for many marketers. If fewer and fewer customers begin to spend less money on your business, you will be forced to lower your business expenses to help your cash flow if your business must survive the unexpected turn of events. Part of the things you must do to help your business is to explore credible ways to ramp up your marketing efforts to get more sales despite the tough times. That poses some challenges no doubt but if you are able to take full advantage of these here key tips, you may turn out better than many of your competitors.


 
Review Your Marketing Strategy

Tough economic times are usually very perfect times to test out new marketing strategies and products/services to meet people’s needs during the times. Therefore, ramping up or even changing your marketing strategy in addition to testing new tools is worth trying out. In fact, anything you can do in your business which helps to lower your marketing expenses is worth trying. Marketing experts advise that in tough economic times, you can even do more marketing at lower costs. One of the commonest ways to do this is to simply switch from paid ads to free ads using online media tools to promote your business. With free ads, it is possible to increase the intensity and frequency of your ads without any additional costs and you get good results.

Redirect Your Products Offering

At times of economic downturns, it is better to focus on changing up your products offerings to better meet the needs of your customers since as the economy changes, your customers’ needs change significantly as well. That is called business adaptation. Not many businesses can survive tough economic times if they’re unable to adapt to such changing times. So, in times of tough economic downturns, when customers realize that you are striving to meet their needs despite the tough times, they tend to continue their patronage in reciprocity.

Adopt Grassroots Marketing

Many marketing experts like to recommend a grassroots approach as an effective marketing strategy when the economy is down. Many others like to call it “reverting to old school” marketing strategy. It relies hugely on word-of-mouth marketing which is as old as marketing itself and still very effective as well. It costs next to nothing too to pass on your message from mouth to mouth. Word-of-mouth marketing could kick start by simply passing a message to just one person, a few individuals or a small group. The words get out of there by way of normal people to people social/business interactions and the message will spread wider and faster to a much larger audience. On and on it goes just like that and your business benefits as a result. You can easily pass on good words about your business if you can seize any opportunity to speak at some religious/community/social events. If somehow, you manage to get your audience curious and excited about your business, they remember and many will pass on the information which may earn recommendations and referrals for your business.

Segment Your Marketing

Market segmentation remains a very good marketing strategy particularly in tough economic times. Economic downturns usually affect different people in different ways. That is why it’s smart marketing to be able to gauge where your customers are at in the economic downturn and to segment your marketing to meet them where they are. It is futile to simply assume that some people have or haven’t been affected by an economic downturn. If you can properly survey your audience to gauge their needs, you can then correctly segment your marketing to meet those needs. Doing so enables you to market the right products to the right people at the right time and even in the right place. That can help to boost their patronage even in tough times. Market segmentation may seem like a little too much extra work, but you’ll realize it’s worth it when the results start coming in.

Stay Connected and Available to Your Customers

When customers realize that you really care about them no matter how tough the times are, they too will remember and care about you. Simply caving in and disappearing during economic downturns is bad for business. It pays to remain steadfast and available to your customers despite tough times. Many customers do appreciate that as a great sacrifice for them and many never forget. The good news is that with the depth and versatility of the Internet, staying connected with your customers is much easier and reliable these days. No matter how tough the times are, it is still very easy and free of cost to send out regular email newsletters with helpful information and tips. It is easy to also provide updates on your business by posting tips on social media at no cost at all.