Nowadays, more and more entrepreneurs are setting up their online stores. This is because of the growing number of people who are getting online. As a result, more and more people are making most of their purchases through online stores. This phenomenon is what attracts many entrepreneurs and digital marketers to enter the world of e-commerce.
Venturing in e-commerce business is daunting. Although the growth potential is high, the responsibility is big. A new e-commerce store is not enough to generate revenue. Just because a site is up and running doesn’t mean its traffic is guaranteed. It entails improvement and promotion. The challenge is to keep up with competition as there are many e-commerce stores you can find online these days.
Nevertheless, there are several ways for a new e-commerce site to survive and thrive. These ways are not secret ingredients, but they are effective and proven. All you have to do is to implement them consistently and patiently. To help you figure them out, here are five ways to increase the revenue potential of your new e-commerce store.
1. Wed Design
Your e-commerce site is probably up and running. You may already be confident that all your site’s components are complete. On the other hand, it helps when you test everything in your site before you proceed to your succeeding work. It is recommended you check if the design of your site is responsive and user-friendly.
The success of every website depends on user experience. If your site is cluttered with so many unnecessary widgets and plugins, it will drive your visitors away. Loading speed is also a factor. If your site loads very slowly, the same result may happen. It will discourage your visitors to stay or transact.
Some hosting companies offer various responsive themes and designs that are user-friendly. This is a better option if you wouldn’t want to go through a lot of HTML and CSS coding tasks. You can go straight using WordPress hosting to simplify the task and to be able to choose some important plugins that can help you change the design of your e-commerce site.
2. Posting to Deal Sites
Let’s assume your site is already complete. The design is good, and the products are ready. What you need now are real buyers of your products. They may come naturally and organically from search traffic, but it will take time for it to materialize. If you wait for it, you would end up just paying for your WordPress hosting fees without any immediate return.
To start earning or to increase your current revenue, it’s a good idea to create a campaign such as special deals. This is for the purpose of generating quick money while driving visitors to your site. How to do it? You can do it by means of posting your special deals to some popular deal sites such as Groupon and Aliexpress.
It’s easy to register your deals. All you need is to sign up with them. Most deal sites will only charge a commission. These sites already have some huge traffic, so your deals will easily get noticed. You can register a campaign that expires in a week or a month-long deal. In this way, those who become interested in your deals will likely visit your site.
3. Live Chat Support
An e-commerce site may do well even without anyone attending to a visitor if the site is selling some digital products such as software, plugins, apps, videos, and the like. But if your products are tangible, they will have to go through shipping processes.
Most customers who wait for the shipping of the items they purchased tend to make some follow up. What they do is to look for somebody on the site to help them out. This becomes a problem when nobody is online to attend to customer inquiries.
This is why many online shops and e-commerce sites provide a live chat support service for their customers. Some websites even outsource a call center team to answer phone calls and accept orders.
Nonetheless, you don’t have to have an elaborate customer support system. A web chat support agent that can communicate with customers through a simple messaging platform is enough to keep loyal customers and converts new visitors.
4. Facebook Page
Almost all companies have their own Facebook page. This is because more and more people are now using Facebook. Most of their online activities, including purchases are also done through Facebook. Consequently, many entrepreneurs create Facebook page versions of their e-commerce sites to take advantage of the growing number of Facebook users.
By creating a Facebook page for your e-commerce site, you are making yourself easily accessible by your loyal customers. This is also another way to promote not only your products but also your site. The only challenge is to grow your followers. This can be done by promoting your Facebook page on Facebook’s platform itself in order to get more people to like your page.
If you want to do it for free, you can optimize your Facebook page for its own search engine. Keep in mind that Facebook is also a search engine. This means your Facebook page can also be searched by Facebook users.
5. SEO
SEO or search engine optimization is still the most powerful marketing tool online. The number of Google search users is still higher than the total number of Facebook users. It shows that most of your potential customers may still come from a search engine. Therefore, you need to optimize your e-commerce site for Google’s search engine.
Conclusion
There are many e-commerce sites that started small and grew big. Amazon and Alibaba are good examples. However, not all e-commerce sites were able to follow their path. In reality, operating them is not a joke. This is why many entrepreneurs are trying some various approaches to make their e-commerce sites grow. The above tips can be useful for many different types of e-commerce sites or online shops.