6 Easy Ways To Increase Your Online Sales

 

There are hundreds of thousands of different things that you can do to increase your online sales that your website makes. What we aim to do here though is provide you with 6 areas that you can focus on to make improvements and see your sales start to grow.

Having Good Content

Selling on the internet is very different from selling in a traditional high street store. Firstly, getting customers to visit your store is more complicated than making an attractive window display. Secondly, potential customers can’t physically pick up your products and give them a closer inspection, try them out or seek a demonstration.

For this reason, it’s important to ensure that your web content is up to scratch. Ensure that your products have clear up to date images that show the product and its features accurately, being sure to highlight any special features. For more complex products, a video can prove helpful for helping customers to understand how to use your product and can clear up any confusing issues. You will also want to make sure that you have a written description to accompany your products as you won’t be there to tell your customers about how they are used, special features, price and other important information about the product. It’s important to make sure the written description entices potential customers to purchase the product but also offers clear features of the products that are easy to find. Many online retailers use bullet points to highlight the essential features in a clear and easy to read manner.

Product Page

Make sure you are using keywords properly for your products by using keywords that not only gain a high number of searches but are also relevant to your products. Using keywords that rank well but aren’t completely relevant to your products might get you a lot of clicks, but your conversion rate will suffer.

Creating Trust

Buying something from an e-commerce store is heavily reliant on trust. After all, you may not end up speaking to anyone and you’re entering your card details to be used to take money out of your bank account. Demonstrating that you can be trusted goes a long way in helping to increase your online sales and luckily there are a few simple ways in which you can do this.

Firstly, you can display recognised symbols on your website to show that your site is secure, compliant in specific areas or uses trusted third-party services (providing these are all relevant to you of course). An example of this would be to display the secure methods of payment that you use through your website such as PayPal, Visa, MasterCard etc.

Make sure it is easy for customers to get in contact with you, whether by phone, email or webchat. Display them in an easy to find location on your website so that if the need arises, they know that they can easily get in contact with you.

The last way will take a bit longer if you’ve just started trading or haven’t opened up on a review website. Once you’ve started to get a good amount of reviews on an independent review platform such as Trustpilot, it’s a good idea to promote these reviews and your overall score to your customers on social media and your website. Showing that other customers have used your e-commerce store and had a positive experience with you goes a long way in reassuring your customers that you are a trustworthy business that offers a good product and service.

TrustPilot Review

Streamline Your Checkout Process

The main attraction for shopping online is convenience, so it’s important to ensure that customer experience of shopping from your online store is in fact convenient. As the checkout process is the most important part of the buying process it’s a great area to focus on to try and increase your online sales.

Removing the requirement for customers to sign up before purchasing a product can make the process simpler, easier and less frustrating for customers (especially first-time customers) wishing to purchase your products. According to ASOS removing this requirement reduced cart abandonment by 50%. You may lose some information on your customers from not all of them registering but the increase in sales will likely make up for it.

Another way in which you can streamline your checkout is to remove the navigation elements on your checkout page and try to keep it as a one-page checkout process. This section of your website aims to get your customers to purchase from you, so removing distractions can help to focus them on buying from you.

Checkout Process

Recover Abandoned Baskets

As previously mentioned, it’s important to ensure that customers don’t leave at the checkout process without purchasing from you, unfortunately, no matter how hard you try it will still happen to some extent. Sending reminder emails to customers that have left items in their baskets without purchasing has proven to be effective in increasing sales. According to Shopify, 60-80% of shopping baskets are abandoned and over a third of all clicks on abandoned basket emails result in a purchase. By regaining these customers, you will be making the most of potential customers that otherwise wouldn’t have bought from you.

Up-Sell and Cross-Sell

If you sell products individually that also have complementary products, then it’s a good tactic to make it easy for your customers to find them from that product. For example, if you have a web page for a mobile phone why not promote screen protectors or cases alongside them as customers will likely want the later as a result of purchasing the former. Also, consider offering bulk deals where customers are getting more value for their money by opting to purchase more of the same products at a better price per unit.

Deliver

All the previous steps are great to do and an increase in sales is always welcome, but at the end of the day, if you can’t deliver your products as expected you will run into problems later. Making sure that orders are delivered on time and with good levels of service keeps your customers happy, and happy customers create repeat business and good reviews.

Make sure you are using a courier that offers delivery time frames that you are happy with and makes sure that it is clear when customers can expect to receive their purchase. Not telling or misleading your customers about when they can receive their goods will lead to customers shopping with someone else or leaving bad reviews, neither of which is good for increasing your sales in the long run!

Make sure that you are packaging your products correctly so that they arrive in good condition. Receiving damaged goods creates disappointment and leaves a bad impression for your customers. For more information on how to package your products for e-commerce take a look at our blog here.

As you can see you don’t always need to jump on the phones and start making hard sales to customers. So why not give these methods a go and see if you can start to increase your online sales for your business.

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Rebecca Price

Rebecca is a marketing specialist here at Davpack. Her speciality is making companies visible online. Fan of shopping and beautiful shoes. Davpack

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