6 Overlooked Ways to Increase Ecommerce Sales

Becoming a successful eCommerce business owner is one of the best ways to become financially independent.

Ecommerce, or electronic commerce, refers to the buying and selling of goods or services using the internet. Every business with an online store that can take payments and fulfill orders is an eCommerce.

Dropshipping, for example, is a type of eCommerce business model, where a drop shipper forms a business partnership with suppliers, who receive orders from your website, package the products and send them directly to customers on your behalf. This means you don’t have to buy, stock or ship the items yourself.

Let’s look at 6 overlooked ways to increase eCommerce sales:

1. Outsource or automate order fulfilment

Order fulfilment is the process of capturing payments, packing, shipping orders, and handling returns.

Your eCommerce order fulfillment process plays a pivotal role in the success of your growing eCommerce business because it affects both the customer experience and the effectiveness of your operations.

If you’re still fulfilling orders manually, see if you can find an easier and smoother way to do it.

Automation of order fulfillment is at the core of business growth.

By integrating and automating your order fulfilment process, you’ll minimise fulfilment errors, generate automated invoices, send automated customer reminders, and email sequences to ensure customer satisfaction and repeat sales.

Third-party/outsourced order fulfillment companies can also store your inventory.

Having a streamlined process will save time while allowing you to focus more on business growth and expansion.

2. Focus on converting existing customers

While customer acquisition is definitely important, it may not be the smartest strategy to start with.

The biggest mistake majority of companies make is ignoring their existing customers.

Both up-selling and cross-selling to your existing audience is more cost-effective than acquiring new customers.

Why?

Because people who are already buying from you are familiar with your brand and products – you don’t have to waste time introducing them to your brand or waiting until they decide to trust you.

All you have to do is improve your current customer experience and help them with valuable suggestions during the check-out process, retargeting or email campaigns.

Loyal customers can be worth up to 10 times the value of their first purchase. Plus the chances of selling to existing customers is around 60-70% compared to a 5-20% probability of a sale with new customers.

So what can you do to get more repeat sales?

• Send Wishlist reminder emails

• Provide exclusive promo codes and free gifts for loyal customers

• Personalise emails related to their recent purchases

• Offer a special discount, but don’t make it a habit

• Offer free shipping to loyal customers

• Show some love on they birthday

• Establish a loyalty programme

• Run retargeting ads

There are agencies that can help you with all of that. Regency is a creative digital agency specialised in eCommerce. They’ll help you update your website and make it visually appealing, easy to navigate, and super fast.

3. Offer alternative ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ checkout options

Giving your customers a wide range of payment options is the easiest way to increase sales.

Pay In Installments via Klarna or Afterpay will increase e-commerce sales.

These 0% interest finance options are an easy way to boost sales as it makes it more accessible to people on different budgets.

Buy Now Pay Later market is growing and the Covid pandemic has positively influenced BNPL’s market.

4. Optimise your checkout process

Almost 70% of shoppers abandon their carts and a majority will never return to complete their purchase.

That’s an immense opportunity loss.

Shopping cart abandonment is the biggest problem for many e-commerce businesses, but it is also the most neglected one.

Here’s what you can do to unlock your highest revenue potential:

 • Present an exit offer with a promo code to shoppers who have attempted to leave the cart or checkout pages at the moment it occurs

 • Send an immediate recovery email if the person ignores the exit offer

 • Try to get your whole checkout on 1 page

 • Don’t confuse a customer with too many choices and buttons (this adds to decision fatigue)

 • Offer a discount or free shipping (cart abandonment often has to do with price or shipping)

5. Improve your product pages

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the practice of optimising your pages for conversions and increased sales.

If your product pages don’t convert as well as you want, your website may have some of these common problems:

 • You aren’t properly segmenting your products

 • You don’t have the right balance between text and visuals

 • Your product descriptions are not helpful or SEO friendly

 • You don’t show icons/batches that prove you are trustworthy

 • You don’t have customer reviews

A big part of conversion optimisation is providing helpful and search-engine friendly product descriptions.

6. Build your brand on social media

Social media presence will not only increase traffic to your site, but it grow customer trust in you.

Social media allows you to create a homepage and build a large online presence for your brand.

Did you know 92% of users do not convert on their first visit to a website?

The great thing is that you can capture those sales by showing your product on social media channels your customers are visiting.

This advertising technique is called ‘retargeting’.

You can retarget your website visitors on other websites, social media, and email.