Christopher Jan Benitez
The challenge that most e-commerce shops encounter is accommodating customers from all over the globe to purchase from them.
There are different factors that must be considered by online shop owners to ensure that customers from all over the world can buy their goods without having to deal with certain restrictions.
Below are the most crucial factors they need to think about to increase their ROI.
Better UX
Every second wasted on loading page elements is a death knell on any online business.
Considering the fact that 25% of all your visitors leave when your site has not loaded after four seconds, it is high time that you should focus on improving your site speed if you want to make a pleasurable shopping experience to all your customers.
Therefore, making the site load faster and more intuitive can convert more visitors to buy from you without any hitch.
To optimize your site’s loading time, use tools like Incapsula and WP Super Cache (for WordPress users).
Incapsula works as a content delivery network (CDN) that helps ease the load of transferring data from site to the user’s end. Instead of just drawing the exchange of data from the hosting server, a CDN diverts the load to different locations near the user’s end. This makes the loading of your site much more efficient.
At the same time, Incapsula offers website security to protect websites from malware and virus attacks. This is a big deal considering that big sites like Ashley Madison are being hacked, and sensitive information is being released to the public. Having this kind of feature on your site helps increase your trust rating from your potential customers, thus encourage them to sign up to your site.
A complement to a CDN is a cache plugin like WP Super Cache. This tool will help alleviate heavy traffic coming in your site by serving visitors static HTML files instead of the heavy PHP scripts.
Both tools can be used together to provide your visitors a seamless user experience. You can refer to this guide from Blogging Wiki on the optimized configurations for Incapsula and WP Super Cache.
Also, consider the use of A/B testing and conversion optimization tools like Optimizely and Qualaroo. These tools will help you identify which elements on your site are receiving the most (and least) impressions and clicks. This way, you can maximize how the elements work within the context of your page.
Optimizely lets you trace and measure your website performance across all boards. From mobile and desktop optimizations to creating personalized experiences for specific customers, this tool helps interpret your e-commerce site as how your audience sees its.
If you are using survey forms to gain insight to your customers, Qualaroo will help you uncover better answers from visitors. Their answers based on the survey you published will provide you exact answers that you can use to improve your e-commerce site.
Offer different payment methods
Choosing the most appropriate payment gateway for your e-commerce can be daunting for some.
Of course, it is ideal to have as many payment modes available as possible. However, it is not as simple as getting all gateways because of the costs you have to consider.
However, if you have the resources to find this route for your online shop, Shopify and WooCommerce are two popular e-commerce platforms that offer a broad range of payment options.
For sites that run on Shopify, you can use their “third-party processor” partners to push through with customer orders. Same goes with WooCommerce and its partners.
Again, you need to have the resources to offer this service to your buyers.
If not, then you need to pick your spots by providing limited payment gateways that will ensure you safe transactions to a broad range of customers. A post here at Business2Community by Britanny Berger covers this for you.
Offer affordable delivery outside the country
The real problem with most e-commerce sites is the inability to cater to international buyers.
While some online shops do, the price for delivery is exorbitant, which discourages customers to buy from your site.
Therefore, you need to offer mail forwarding, which makes delivery much more convenient and affordable.
For example, if you want to order from a site located in the UK, a service like MyUKMailbox lets buyers get their very own UK address. All their orders will be shipped to that address. The service will notify the buyer that they have received the package and will deliver it to you shortly, wherever you may be!
For US online stores, services like MyUS and USAbox will help international customers to purchase from your shop and not worry about incurring expensive shipping charges. All they need to do is create an address from either site so the orders will be shipped there. From there, it will be delivered right to their doorsteps, wherever they may be.
The idea here is to tie up with different mail forwarding services within your region so you can get more people to buy from your site.
Provide a useful mailing list
Email marketing is big in e-commerce. Once an eCommerce site gets visitors to subscribe its mailing list, it is already one foot in the door in turning subscribers into customers.
More importantly, running sophisticated campaigns like newsletters with discounts and promos, exclusive content to subscribers, and giveaways will help strengthen your bond with subscribers.
By providing value to subscribers through your emails, you can establish your foot in the e-commerce industry and gain the trust of people along the way.
If you have a mailing list, then you need to maximize your campaigns to get the most out of your subscribers.
As mentioned, running a sweepstakes or giveaways exclusive only to subscribers using Rafflecopter or ViralSweep helps keep subscribers and encourage more people to sign up to your mailing list.
You can run the giveaway campaign using your Facebook also to tie your mailing list with your social media.
For sending out newsletters, there are lots of email marketing platforms and tools at your disposal. Some are free; other are paid. However, it depends on how you craft a winning email marketing strategy to increase your conversion rate and increase profit.
Conclusion
E-commerce is all about learning what makes your customers tick. The tips and advice mentioned above should tremendously help your online stores to hike up sales.
These may take you time to fully develop, but it will be all worth it. After all, this is for the benefit of your customers.
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