credit: Shopper Chopper
E-Commerce can be incredibly challenging.
Between driving traffic to your website, increasing shopping cart conversions, managing your product and SKU data, keeping track of customer data, it can make your head spin.
So how can you make your E-Commerce site generate the result you want, all the while making your life easier?
Here are four tried-and-true methods to help you grow your E-Commerce site.
Be willing to invest money
You’ll need to be willing to invest and spend money.
No business ever found success by being penny wise pound foolish.
Not to mention, an investment into E-Commerce could give you a small portion of a $100 billion dollar market share.
Let’s compare brick and mortar to online, for example. If you were going to open a retail location or physical facility, you’d need to find capital to build this, right?
A brand new, independent retail store would cost millions to build. You’d need to purchase fixtures, lighting, and inventory and you’d need to constantly maintain your building. This all takes money.
E-Commerce efforts are no different. Your website, shopping cart, marketing automation software, shipping/logistics all needs updating. This costs time and money.
Be willing to invest in your E-Commerce site by hiring someone to manage it for you, or by outsourcing the management of it. B open to invest in a strong organic and paid strategy to drive traffic to your shopping cart and your site, especially early on, in order to build a strong foundation.
Find a good E-Commerce consultant with project management experience
This one of the most important parts of an E-Commerce project and where so many businesses entering into E-Commerce fall flat on their faces.
Project management sounds boring and that’s because it is. However, in order to launch a successful E-Commerce site, you need someone to lead this for you, either internally or by outsourcing this task someone.
The definition of a tragedy would be the business owner, CFO or CEO leading your marketing and E-Commerce efforts. Most CEO’s make terrible E-Commerce managers and marketing.
Hire a web developer/designer with solid E-Commerce and SEO experience
You won’t convert any visitors to your site into buyers if you have a poor or low traffic to your website.
You need a developer and designer that understands that value of link building, URL structure, traffic building, H1 and H2 tags, analytics and social ranking.
Most importantly, how to create and deliver engaging content.
To find a great recommendation for an E-Commerce consultant or developer, contact E-Commerce Consulting for help.
Automate, automate, and automate
There are many software companies that can help you with this and integrate into your overall web strategy.
Marketo and Hubspot are likely marketing automation candidates.
Automation also affects your E-Commerce efforts. Be sure and choose an E-Commerce solution that has easy to use functionality, user-interface and upgrades. If it takes you three hours of labor just to change a period in a sentence, then you have chosen a poor solution.
Choose one that will make your life easier and help you automate tasks that are normally labor intensive.
Don’t settle
Follow these steps to create an awesome E-Commerce site.
To learn more about how my approach can help you supercharge your efforts, contact me me here.