6 Simple Cost-Free Ways to Scale your E-Commerce Business

If you perfect the art of scaling your e-commerce business, it helps to position the business well enough to withstand competition. This is because if you can scale your business well it is easier for you to expand sales and achieve some remarkable business growth even without having high overheads. For any e-commerce store, scaling can help higher turnover and more sales even without any significant additional capital investment. Therefore, to experience steady growth in your e-commerce business revenue even with minimal resources, it is advisable you try scaling the business. Here is what you can easily do:

1. Enhance the Loading Speed of your Website

If your e-commerce website is clumsy and unresponsive, it is difficult for shoppers to locate your products. Most shoppers don’t always like to spend too much time searching for products. The reason you must optimize your e-commerce website for fast loading times. While having a good site may not significantly increase your sales, having a bad site is likely to decrease it. A poorly designed site may provide a bad first impression to your website visitors. That negatively affects sales significantly. But if you create product pages with a good loading speed and compelling CTA buttons, you can easily grab the attention of visitors.  That translates to more sales.
 
2. Implement Automation

Without automation, e-commerce business owners spending time on more complex activities as well as simple activities at the same time usually creates time management conflicts. That is where automation becomes important. Automation is hugely important when it comes to the management of an e-commerce business. It is usually engaged to assist business owners cut down the time as well as the energy which they would normally use in doing so many activities. Through automation, business owners can save up on resources and time freeing them up to focus on more important activities such as strategizing on content or marketing plans. Automation therefore allows them to make more sales.
   
3. Encourage Customer Feedback/Reviews
 
It is now known that over 90% of consumers/customers rely on product reviews before making their buy decisions. Reviews therefore play a significant role in scaling a business online. You must therefore take deliberate steps to encourage customer reviews/feedback. Aside influencing the customers’ purchasing decisions, reviews also help to increase consumer trust. Most consumers usually consider purchasing products online after reading trusted reviews. Reviews also help your website to get higher CTRs, improve customer experience, and improve website rankings. All these translate to more sales on your e-commerce business.

4. Boost Customer Service Experience

Boosting customer service experience is one of the most basic aspects in matters of scaling your e-commerce business online. This is because excellent customer experience can significantly lead to increased demand for your products. To avoid customer churn, do not ignore excellent customer service. To enhance this experience, you can create FAQs page on your website, offer live chat, have knowledge base page, include 24/7 telephone assistance, generously use customer satisfaction surveys, prompt response to inquiries, rewarding referral programs and so many other things that can help to enhance customer experience on your website.
 
5. Enhance your Products Appeal

If you want your product to create market, do not ignore its customer appeal. If your product is no selling well, it does not automatically mean the product is bad. It may simply mean customers are not too clear as to how the product will benefit them or help solve a problem for them. Enhanced product appeal can help solve this problem. So, when creating an e-commerce store, do not ignore to clearly present valuable info about your products. This info should be presented in all the places where the products can be easily noticed by visitors to your website. Doing so can help increase conversion rate and sales.

6. Offer Free Shipping

It is now well known that free shipping is one of the major considerations that consumers have to make when choosing which store to purchase from. It can even be one of the greatest contributors to customer dropout if it is not offered. To enhance sales on your e-commerce store, do not hide or delay putting up information concerning shipping costs and other charges thereafter to keep your customers well informed in advance. You can make use of the information within the product description for customers to know they’ll only be required to pay for products and not the shipping cost. Such info can significantly help to reduce instances of abounded cart. That translates to more completed sales on your e-commerce store.   

5 Ways to Secure your E-Commerce Business

The e-commerce industry is currently experiencing rapid growth, because more and more people now prefer to shop online.  Shopping online may offer unparalleled convenience and unlimited choice for customers, but, it also presents significant risks in terms of cyber-crimes. Hackers and cyber-criminals are themselves having a free run online in tandem with the growth in e-commerce business. This is why e-commerce business owners and even shoppers must always remain cautious against any potential threats from hackers and fraud. Good attention must therefore be paid to cyber security.
If you want to secure your e-commerce business from cyber threats and fraud, following are some of the best ways to go about it.
 
1. Always Prepare for the Inevitable

There is a popular Boy Scouts motto that says “Be Prepared.” It comes quite significant here even though no matter how much you prepare, there is always a chance that your system defenses will be breached one way or the other. That is the scary part but if you have a proactive mindset, you can always have a backup plan ready. Having one enables you to act very quickly whenever there is a threat or if any breach occurs. That’s where preparation comes in. A good backup plan should include but not limited to the following steps. You can quickly report the incident to relevant authorities, make a thorough investigation to find out how and why it happened, and limiting the damage by securing any compromised accounts. If in the course of these steps you discover that customer data is affected, transparency demands that you quickly alert your customers and guide them through the right steps they need to take to keep themselves safe.
 
2. Stay on Top of Industry Regulations

It is usually not easy to fully understand all e-commerce regulations because of the rapid changes in the industry. Making efforts to be up-to-date is certainly helpful. In many countries, if you diligently align your business with consumer protection laws, it will not only help secure your operations but also positively impact your customers’ trust. Even though these rules may vary by location, it is best to comply with all the strict standards and regulations, such as California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CPPA) for instance. To protect your customers’ data and privacy, make sure your online payment partners like PayPal stick to all PCI Security Standards. Doing so helps to safeguard any sensitive customer information and prevents credit card fraud. If you stay fully compliant with the rules/regulations, you can avoid huge penalties and safeguard your customers’ trust.
 
3. Pay Attention to Your Digital Footprint
    
If you do business online, whether you notice it or not, you’re always leaving behind digital footprints.  This is why you must fully understand where your business data is stored online and exactly who has unrestricted access to it. You can get to understand it by auditing all of your physical and digital assets. Do this audit from the computers, servers, all your social media accounts and email addresses that you do business with. If well carried out, these audits can help you uncover any hidden vulnerabilities. You may discover any inactive accounts, overshared data and some unexpected data that may be hidden and can make your business vulnerable.

4. Train Your Workforce

Human errors can make your business vulnerable to cyber-attacks. It is well known that most data breaches usually occur because of human error. The reason you must pay good attention to diligent staff training to reduce such errors to the barest minimum. Granted, even though the best cyber security protocol setups can break down, a well-trained team can help mitigate the effects. If you want your e-commerce business to survive cyber-attacks, never you ignore training your workforce on cyber security best practices. This training should not just be a one-time training session. The best training is long-term and impact regular education sessions and surprise simulation drills to keep your workforce on constant alert. That helps to keep them well prepared, sharp, and ready to spot any phishing scams, weak passwords, and other cyber threats that can gravely hurt your e-commerce business.

5. Implement a Layered Cyber Security Strategy

Layered cyber security setups help to increase the odds that your business will suffer an attack. It is best to set up multiple defenses using strong passwords, multi-factor authentication, and regular software updates if you want to keep your business secure. To make it really secure, you may in addition to these layered defenses add some more security layers like firewalls, antivirus, and anti-malware programs. If you market with email, email security protocols are also recommended.

Summing Up

As e-commerce businesses are growing online, so are the risks. To sustain your e-commerce business online, the foregoing tips can help to secure the business for it to keep thriving. With these tips, you can protect your e-commerce business operations and continue to grow the business without allowing it to fall victim to cyber-crimes.