E-commerce giants control the international e-commerce market as major monopolies. However, giants such as Amazon, eBay, Zappos, Wal-mart, and Alibaba also set an example for all other e-commerce companies with the know-how they possess.
Getting among the biggest might be difficult, but this situation does not prevent taking lessons from them and developing your own e-commerce business. Here are 7 exemplary lessons from the world's largest e-commerce brands about increasing sales and revenues:
1. Let Your Pages Open Quickly
Even if you possess the most beautiful site in the world, you will lose customers if your pages open slowly. For this, it is sufficient to look at the Google+ social network. Google+ suffered a large amount of active user loss because its pages loaded slowly. You will suffer a loss of visitors too.
Let's speak concretely. Every 100-millisecond delay in the loading of a page reduces its sales by 1%! In short, people are in a hurry and they have no business with slow-loading pages. Additionally, they use mobile devices. Even if they shop from home over the weekend, they look at what they will buy from their smartphone during the week and make a decision.
Mobile internet connection is also expensive, so they do not want to waste time on the road with slow-loading pages. Use a responsive mobile theme and absolutely ensure your pages open quickly.
2. Ensure the Customer Reaches You Easily
Even Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce site, experiences problems regarding customer service in many technical matters such as product shipment. The customer can always be problematic and is almost always right. If you want to satisfy the customer, increase your sales, and retain the customer, you must give importance to customer service. Therefore, the customer needs to reach you 24/7 as well. For this, you have numerous options such as free phone calls, email, and customer support via online chat. However, the most beautiful and most cost-effective solution is to explain all the necessary details such as shopping, invoice information, and product returns on your page in a clear, legible, and understandable text.
The most important point in customer service is not to lead to questions and problems that require the customer to reach you. If you inform the customer correctly from the beginning, you will overcome this problem to a great extent. You can use e-commerce platforms that integrate into services such as LivePerson, BoldChat, and Live2Support.
3. Personalize
They say do not personalize everything in life and take it personally, but when customers and e-commerce are concerned, this is not exactly true. You need to use a form of address specific to the customer, and personalized campaigns specific to their needs and user habits.
This is one of the strongest sides of Amazon. For example, it shows the customer a personalized landing page containing products similar to the products they were interested in before. If you offer a high number of general options to the customer on your product page, people remain indecisive and sales decrease. Personalized product pages, on the other hand, facilitate sales.
At this point, you can use instantaneous, spot-on campaigns like “the one who bought this also purchased these, and all in one is 20% discounted.”
4. Have a Search Box on Your Site
After all, if you facilitate people finding what they are looking for, you will have facilitated your sales too. Thus, customers can quickly find what they are looking for on the home page, category, and product pages. For this, the best is to perform a successful keyword study regarding your products and services and to use these words on product pages.
Thus, they both find your site easily in search engines, and you monitor customer behaviors by looking at in-site searches, increasing your sales by customizing your products and campaigns according to them. As a matter of fact, we see that while the conversion rate of customers using a search box on your site is 2.4%, the conversion rate of those who do not use a search box is 1.7%.
5. Perform Tests
As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said, “If you double the number of experiments you do per year, you’re going to double your inventiveness.” In short, never give up on performing tests, because plans are there to be disrupted and the account at home does not always match the marketplace. You can see why sales increased, why they decreased, or how you will increase sales on your site only by performing tests. eBay founder Pierre Omidyar says the same thing: “Most people don’t go out and try new things,” meaning you need to learn through the trial-and-error method and tests.
6. Transaction Notifications
Since people view promotional emails sent within the scope of email marketing as advertisements, they read them less, and even most of the time they do not click to open these messages. However, transaction notifications are different. Transaction notifications are the confirmation messages you send when they shop from you, place an order, subscribe to the newsletter, or participate in a survey. You can increase your sales by adding email marketing texts to transaction notifications, because conducted researches show that transaction notifications are opened and read 4 to 8 times more than other marketing messages.
So, how do you prepare email messages that will attract people's attention and won't feel like advertisements to them? You can do it like Amazon. Amazon sends you shopping analysis and evaluation reports regarding the purchases you made, but in fact, these are promotional content for marketing purposes (product reviews, etc.).
7. Product Reviews and Social Proof
Do not fool yourself at all: Whom does the customer believe? You, or other customers? If you want people to become voluntary brand ambassadors and promote you from their own social network accounts, first of all you need to satisfy them, but this is just the beginning. And you also need to allow them to write product reviews on your product pages.
If customers write the positive product reviews, it becomes more credible and natural. Additionally, you should allow negative and constructive product reviews that explicitly do not contain malicious criticism. Do not be afraid, no one's product is flawless, and if people write both the cons and pros of your products, it looks much more credible. Furthermore, they will say “these guys trust their products, brother.”
88% of customers say that they trust natural product reviews on a site as much as a recommendation from a friend or acquaintance. Product reviews are at the same time content marketing texts and accelerate the indexing of your e-commerce pages by search engines.
You too can use starry rating systems (meaning gamification tactics in marketing) inspired by Amazon's product page. Additionally, allow customers to apply filters to these. For example, let them read 5-star product reviews along with 1-star reviews. Do not worry, they immediately understand people who write adversely just to attack you, and they do not take them seriously. Thus, the prestige of your products increases.
8. An Exemplary Lesson
When e-commerce is concerned, catching up with large companies is difficult, but it is also impossible for these companies to hide their clever ideas that increase sales from you: Because all you will do is visit their sites and look at what they are doing. Afterwards, applying the tactics you deem appropriate to your e-commerce site according to your own budget, target audience, brand image, and products. Therefore, the 8th exemplary lesson should be as follows: Go and browse the internet to see what your competitors have done before opening an e-commerce site.