Ways to Boost Sales on Your E-commerce Website (Part 1)
2018 was a great year for e-commerce websites worldwide and studies predict continuing growth in the online business with more brands joining the market. A report published by Statista predicts an estimated $4.88 trillion revenue in global retail e-commerce by 2021.
Therefore, monitoring your e-commerce sites should never be a hobby.
With the emergence of hundreds and thousands of e-commerce platforms, it is important that you keep a close eye on the emerging trends in e-commerce marketing.
For example, do you know the U.S. is not the centre of e-commerce trade anymore?
Suspicious? Well, let’s take a look at the first five current market leaders in the e-commerce arena.
Country | Company | Revenue(in Billions) |
---|---|---|
China | JD.com | $55.70 |
China | Alibaba | $39.90 |
United States | eBay | $9.57 |
Japan | Rakuten | $6.30 |
CountryCompanyRevenue(in Billions)United StatesAmazon$177.86ChinaJD.com$55.70ChinaAlibaba$39.90United StateseBay$9.57JapanRakuten$6.30
You can see that 3 out of the 5 biggest e-commerce retailers are not from the United States.
The key is to be consistent with your job.
E-commerce is not just a fad. It is a genuine trend and it's going to stay. The emergence of e-commerce giants like Amazon and Alibaba is because of the profound influence of this trend on the consumer market.
Let’s discuss ways to boost your e-commerce sales in the year 2019-20.
- Programmatic and Contextual Targeting
Contextual and programmatic ads are already a hit and social media sites are revamping their designs to aid this upcoming trend.
What does Programmatic advertising mean?
It is the latest trend in advertising, where the system uses the audience database to display relevant ads. The audience is selected based on their browsing history and user behaviour online. The same set of the audience is retargeted after a definite set of time to generate an increased ROI. Thus, programmatic advertising allows the user to automatically optimise the ad campaigns to reach their potential audience.
It brings your potential customer one step closer to you. - AI is revolutionising e-commerce
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionising the way we shop online by maximising convenience, customer relationships and speed.
For example, the use of chatbots saves you time by taking care of basic online customer interactions. AI provides more accurate search results by learning and later recognising typos, synonyms and related products. - Mobile-first
Since 2014, the gap between the number of mobile and desktop users worldwide is widening. Multiple studies show that almost 80% of users use their mobile to browse through products during the decision-making process.
Mobile-first is the way in which you design your site with mobile devices as the base.
If you’re thinking what difference is that going to make, you might need to give some extra thought into the small screen size, bandwidth, mobile rotation sensor or poor network coverage to mention a few. - Multi-channel selling
Your potential audience isn't just using one channel to shop online. They are spread across various platforms or omnichannel shoppers. To succeed in online sales you’ve got to cater for all the channels that your potential audience use.
These multi-channels include popular channels like Amazon, eBay, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest to name a few. - Smarter payment processing
The payment is the final step of the customer journey. The customer has gone through multiple stages of decision-making. Now all the user wants is to get their payment done, smooth and hassle-free. A study conducted by Baymard Institute says that almost 70% of shoppers abandon the cart.
- Custom packaging
The latest trends in e-commerce marketing say that customers tend to buy what makes them feel good about themselves. And the packaging is one powerful way among them. They tend to see the product packaging as a part of the product itself.
According to a study conducted by Dotcom Distribution in 2016,
Source: Dotcom Distribution study
68% of the shoppers felt that the packaging helped the brand to look upscale.
Our world is changing. It is advancing towards comfort, convenience and momentum. So is human behaviour. As an e-commerce website owner, you need to embrace those changes to gain better attention from your potential customers.
E-commerce is an ever-evolving marketing platform that learns and adapts to the customer needs and convenience. Subscribe to our newsletter to know more about the latest trends in e-commerce marketing and to stay ahead in your business.