Introduction
The eCommerce industry is growing at a steady rate and with the persistently changing landscape of digital expansion, technological advancements, and rising social influence new challenges are presented to eCommerce perpetually.
These challenges call for the eCommerce industry to shape new ideas and strategies to counter them and continue on the path to success.
Current State of eCommerce
As of 2019, the online eCommerce retail revenue is estimated to be around the 3.5 trillion dollar mark and is estimated to be near the 5 trillion dollar checkpoint by 2021.
With these massive figures, it is evident that how big the eCommerce industry is and how many global consumers are contributing to it.
Businesses are joining the bandwagon to reap the huge potential benefits of this eCommerce parade.
Consumers have evolving needs & demands with an ideal eCommerce user-experience having the key elements like visuals, social, information, value-addition, shoppability, accessibility, and engagement opportunities.
For your business benefits, we have mentioned some key ideas & strategies to ensure long-term success & consistent growth.
1. Integrate more visuals to your platform
Visuals have been known to attract more users, drive higher audience engagement, form interactions & enhance the consumer experience.
Consumers love amazing photos, engaging videos, and informative infographics and adding them to your eCommerce platform will act as a positive visual influence on consumers’ purchase decisions.
Beautiful product displays through interactive and engaging visuals will allow the users to gain a better understanding of the product and observe the visual aesthetics of the products
You can add striking images of products in a natural realistic setting and add video demonstrations & adverts.
Visuals are more expressive & memorable to the audience and with higher engagement & interest that will lead to increased conversions.
2. Link Social to eCommerce
Social media has grown its influence over the users in recent years with approximately 3.5 million active social media users.
Your eCommerce platform has innovative & useful products with competitive pricing & offers but with much user traffic & awareness, this all will become pointless & unproductive.
Linking your website to social media platforms will help in channelizing the traffic, increasing reach & awareness, building a connection with your social & online presence, turn social media into a marketplace, and increase your consumer base.
There are various social media aggregation tools that can help in creating & embedding social media feeds to your website that links social to eCommerce and drives results.
3. Build brand image through UGC display
User-generated content is the most influential form of content that you can present to the audience as a business. Every eCommerce user looks for information about other users are saying about the product or business.
You can add visual UGC from social media and display it on your own website that will help the consumers to make more informed decisions and gain actual insights & details about the product.
Visual user-generated content will be more engaging, authentic, trustworthy, and informational to the audience.
Having positive user-generated content on your website will help the users to trust your platform, its authenticity & reliability. It will result in more loyal customers.
Growing loyal customers will help in building a positive brand image and build social proof among the audience.
4. Optimize Your eCommerce Sales Funnel
This is a real and visible issue that leads to the high bounce rate and cart abandonment by the users on eCommerce platforms. It is essential that you optimize the sales funnel.
Consumer experience is a key element that influences the behavior of consumers towards a business or even the eCommerce platform.
Having a shorter and faster eCommerce sales funnel will help the users in completing the purchase instantly with minimal time & effort investment.
Tools like Taggshop, tremendously helpful in bringing the point of inspiration close to point of sale and enhance the shoppability of the website.
You can aggregate engaging social media content into a single feed and display it on your eCommerce platform. There you can make the feed shoppable for the users to buy products directly.
This shortens the purchase funnels, allows real-time sales, enhances the product discoverability, provides better product descriptions, and can even make social UGC shoppable like the shoppable Instagram posts.
5. Make use of insights for Personalization
Consumers nowadays are not interested in watching the advertising & promotions that are targeted at the mass audience and aren’t communicating to them individually.
Most of the customers are looking for personalized promotions & recommendations from the brands & businesses.
Your eCommerce platform has analytics that gathers in-depth information of user-engagement with the platforms, besides you can do social media analysis & reviews as well.
Based on these you can form more personalized interactions & promotions according to the likes, needs, and preferences of an individual consumer.
This will make your eCommerce more user-friendly & interactive leading to maximized traffic & engagement.
Conclusion
These five ideas & strategies can help you immensely in delivering the best possible eCommerce experience to the consumers and will drive results to your business.
Attracting consumers, driving engagement, and amplifying the conversions are three major aims for any eCommerce and these ideas & strategies are targeted to deliver that.
Superior consumer experience, shorter purchase funnel, engaging visuals, and positive brand image altogether will help your eCommerce in driving long-term business profits & success.
So, make the best use of these strategies & ideas based on your agenda & objectives to maximize your sales & revenue.
