Break your Bad E-commerce Habits

Everyone has one or two bad personal habits that they'd like to get rid of. There are also plenty of bad habits when it comes to running an e-commerce business. 2021 is just around the corner and so it's the perfect time for breaking bad habits; while we can't do anything about your personal habits, we CAN offer you advice on how to break bad e-commerce habits. Here are just some of them...

Not Setting Goals

When studying analytics about your company's performance online, it's common to look for the bad news and grumble about it. This is the wrong approach. Running digital campaigns requires a lot of work, researching and testing then analysing the results. Before even launching a campaign, you need to set key goals and optimise the campaign towards reaching them. If a tactic doesn't work, you should treat it as a learning experience and alter your tactics accordingly. Setting clear goals will help to make a campaign meet your expectations.

Believing in Universal Conversion Rates

Many e-commerce website operators assume that every campaign will have a universal and thus predictable conversion rate. This simply isn't true. Conversion rates depend on myriad factors beyond just the campaign's quality. These include viability of product, reputation of your brand, demand for the product, prices, competition, reviews and trust.

Not Understanding Customer Behaviour

You need to have a clear understanding of who your customers are and how they are behaving on your website. With this understanding, you can begin to provide them with personalised offers: when customers are offered promotions on products related to their past purchases, they're far more likely to buy again. According to a study by leading management consultancy firm Bain & Company, growing customer retention via personalised offers can improve profits by up to 25%. Though its essential to acquire new customers, many businesses overlook the importance of rewarding existing customers.

Over-reliance on Images

Product images are of course crucial but these may not be enough. Video is one of the most powerful ways of improving customer conversion: Optinmonster found that a massive 84% of online shoppers made purchasing decisions because of product videos. One big disadvantage of online shopping is that customers cannot interact with a product as the could in a brick-and-mortar store: videos allow the customer to see products from multiple angles and get a better idea of what it is they're potentially buying.

As a world-class web development agency, Brickweb can help you to optimise your online presence. Find out more about our work on the website, where you can also request a free SEO report on your current website.