Why your Business Isn’t Making the Most of the Boom in E-Commerce?

July 22, 2014 - 8 minutes read

The e-commerce industry is booming. Its rapid growth has prompted many enterprising individuals to take the plunge and open online stores selling products and services. Some of them have gone on to become highly successful, while others have either shut shop are struggling to improve their sales figures. It’s interesting that in spite of the tremendous potential e-commerce has in store for businesses, some of them are unable to tap it to the fullest extent. They get sidelined by the competition and can’t seem to attract the growing number of shoppers that are moving from physical shopping to online shopping for satisfying purchase needs.

There are plenty of reasons why they are unable to make the most of this boom in e-commerce. Let’s take a look at some of them:

1. Inability to Establish a Territory

An e-commerce business, helps you micro-target your audience. Yes, you can target audiences across geographical boundaries, but the advantage you have is that you can reach out to an audience that has a common demographic characteristic or interest. Why not exploit this advantage? Don’t go targeting everybody; this might just dilute your messaging. Remember, there is tremendous competition in e-commerce so it makes sense for you to focus your attention on an audience that has a better chance of converting into your customers.

Also, don’t just target a territory, make sure you entrench yourself in it.

2. Lack of Personalization

Personalization is the fuel that drives e-commerce revenue. What your site visitors want from your site is a personalized shopping experience that is customized to satisfy their needs and requirements. You don’t really have to try too hard to make this possible, because technology is available that can help you know about the interests and preferences of shoppers, which in turn helps you deliver a shopping experience perfectly tailored to suit them. This experience can take the form of making targeted product recommendations and promotions or something else.

Your inability to deliver such experiences might be making them ignore your business and buy from your competitors who are actually satisfying their demand for one-of-a-kind shopping experience.

3. Ordinary Ranking on Search

One of the reasons why your business might not be doing well is because it doesn’t rank on search engine results pages. Many people believe that all they need to do is open an online business and customers will come to them. Well, here’s the thing – online shoppers have a huge number of options to choose from, as far as shopping sites are concerned. Why would they pick your site over that of your competitors? One answer here is that they will pick it if the site appears at the top of the search results pages. For this to happen, you need to invest in SEO and that too quality SEO. This will improve the visibility of your business, thus attracting more organic traffic to your site.

4. Lack of Stickiness

When a visitor comes to your site, how do you ensure he/she stays on your site? The answer is using sticky content to grab the attention of users, and which persuades them to take a look at the products on your site. You need to up the engagement quotient of your site. Make sure you use high quality product images, interesting product descriptions, product videos and do everything else to increase the stickiness of your website and the products it’s selling. Showing product reviews is also a great way of helping customers make informed buying decisions. The fact that they make it a point to go through such reviews also enhances site stickiness.

5. Ordinary Reputation

You know what actually kills the growth of your e-commerce business? It is the fact that your business might not have a solid reputation.

How do you build an authoritative reputation?

Start by integrating a blog with your e-commerce site and publish useful, solutions driven content on it. This content should steer away from talking about the products and services you are selling and focus more on solving specific problems of your customers pertinent to the domain your business belongs to. Great content, the kind that is well-written and emerges as a solutions provider is not only appreciated by target readers but also helps build your reputation, which rubs off on your brand.

Just publishing such content is not enough; you will need to ensure the links to this content reach your target audience.

This is where you need to take help of social media. Make sure your business has a presence on all popular social networks. Start building a list of fans and followers and share links to your published content with them. Your fans and followers will read this content, and re-share these links with their friends and followers. This will do two things. It will ensure the ‘solid’ reputation of your brand spreads amongst your target audience and also spread brand awareness.

6. No Mobile Commerce

Is your business profiting from mobile commerce yet. By 2018, mobile commerce will be worth a massive $626 billion. So, it makes perfect sense to make sure your e-commerce business is mobile friendly. You also need to offer services that are mobile accessible and which enhance the shopping experience of your customers. Services like delivery status, click-to-call, product information and even real time notifications offered through mobile will be a step ahead for your brand and help it stay competitive. Why not go for a responsive website for your online store that renders effectively on a range of devices? This way you have a presence on both desktops and mobile with a single web property.

The Wrap

This is just a small but important list of reasons why your business might not be making the most of the e-commerce boom. The idea is to understand the medium you are trying to exploit, identify its strength and make use of them to empower your business. If you don’t do this, your online business will always come out second best, which isn’t good news for its sales figures. What’s more, it is also of paramount importance that you keep implementing strategies that will keep improving the performance of your e-commerce business. Do not take things easy. This is the key to e-commerce success.

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