When you set up an e-commerce store, you often expect that it’ll turn out to be the most profitable venture of your life.

You expect so because it has the potential for it – while your operating costs remain considerably lower than brick and mortar stores, your reach remains large as people sitting across the country (or even world, if you wish) can order from you.

However, even e-commerce stores require some special effort to maximize sales revenue. Without those efforts, you may never be able to unlock the true potential of your store. Here we’re going to tell you about 7 such efforts. Sit tight as we take you through this long but carefully curated list. Let’s go:

#1. Make your site and app mobile-friendly

The first step towards boosting the sales of your e-commerce store is to make your store mobile-friendly. You can do that by taking two different routes – you can develop your app, and you can optimize your site for mobile devices. You should keep in mind that neither of them is a substitute for each other because most users browse the web on their mobile devices. So it’s quite possible that even if you have an app some users may land on your site while searching for products through a search engine.

Therefore, your website should also be optimized for mobile even if you have an app. Major e-commerce companies go to the extent of creating separate mobile-specific versions of their sites. But, if you can’t afford that much at present, you can try optimizing your existing website for mobile in a few simple steps that we’re going to explain below.

Steps to make your site mobile friendly:

1. Use responsive design: This is the simplest method to make your e-commerce store mobile-friendly. Use a responsive theme on your site, and it’ll look good on computers as well as mobiles and tablets. But don’t forget to test it on multiple screen-sizes.
2. Incorporate push notifications: You can also incorporate the functionality of push notifications on your site as well as your app. Push notifications alert to your customers whenever you want to update them about any special offers that you may be running, or when products in a customer’s wishlist are back in stock, and so on.
3. Get a custom mobile theme: Finally, if you can afford it, you can also get a separate custom theme built specifically for mobile devices. This option works best, but it also puts an additional cost initially on your business. If you can afford it, the results can be quite rewarding (especially if a lot of customers land on your site instead of your app).

#2. Dealing with abandoned carts

A big problem for all e-commerce stores is the problem of abandoned carts. These are potential customers who were on the verge of completing an order, but couldn’t complete it because of some reason and left the product they were buying it in the cart (thus creating an abandoned cart).

The reason for this problem can be wide-ranging – the user might have run into some sort of urgency, they might have found a better deal anywhere else, they might have encountered hidden costs upon landing on the cart page; or some other reason. Ideally, you should try to reduce your cart abandonment rate, but even if some of your customers have abandoned their carts you can earn quite a few quick bucks by convincing them to come back and complete their order. Here’s how to do that:

Use email marketing to bring back the potential customers of abandoned carts.

If some of your customers have abandoned their carts, reach out to them with special discount offers through email marketing. You can send cart abandonment reminders through email, and offer them a better deal in the form of discounts to complete their purchase. Create fear of missing out (FOMO) about the discount offers that you give by including a timer on the landing page. That will further increase the chances of a sale.

#3. Offer customer-specific pricing

Who doesn’t like something customized specifically for them? Almost everyone likes it. Now, what if this principle is applied to online discounts and offers? Well, the results can be quite rewarding. At least the stats say so – in 2017 a study found that in the US about 90% of online shoppers find personalized marketing appealing. Now that’s a big number from the perspective of effectiveness, so this becomes a strategy you must try. Here are some ways you can try it:

• You can offer special discounts to your repeat customers who have purchased from you a few times;
• You can offer discounts to those customers who have purchased items worth a certain value from your e-commerce store;
• Or you can offer special discounts to those who may be willing to place bulk orders.

Whichever approach you choose, you can implement customer-specific pricing through various plugins and extensions that are offered for this purpose.

Two popular examples are User-specific Pricing Extensions for WooCommerce and Bold Custom Pricing app for Shopify. Use them and you’ll build a following of many loyal customers who’ll shop from you again and again.

#4. Run special offers on events and festivals

Festivals and events can bring you another opportunity to boost your sales significantly. You can run special discount offers on these occasions to boost your sales and to generate some leads that would turn into customers later on. An example is the Black Friday sale. At Black Friday, most shopping stores – regardless of whether they’re online or offline – offer discounts to their customers. Similar discount offers are also run on Christmas and New Year, and it has been found year-on-year that sales volume on such days is much higher than the regular average. You should also try offering Festive Discounts coupled with a week-long marketing campaign, in the beginning, to ensure return purchases from your customers.

#5. Use high-quality images and videos

The quality of product images and videos you use is also of paramount importance to boost sales. Low-quality product images and videos don’t do any good, so it’ll be best if you use high-resolution images that show the products in full detail. And use multiple images, as one image rarely shows the product in all its glory. If images alone are not sufficient to describe the features of your product, use videos too. But don’t forget to compress your images and videos before using – otherwise, they may end up increasing the loading time of your site, thus affecting the user experience adversely. There are several image compression tools available online that can be used for the purpose, or else you can also install a plugin (i.e. Smush plugin) if your store is built on WordPress.

#6. Show Related and Similar Products Prominently

Related products

Similar Products

If you browse Amazon (who doesn’t), you might have seen that they show two types of products on every single product page. One column shows Related Products, which are products that may be used in combination with the main product that is being displayed on the page. And the other column is for Similar Products, which are products that may serve as alternatives to the main product being shown. Each of these columns serves two purposes:

• Related products column helps people find everything that they may need to get the best experience out of the product that they’re willing to buy. Many times there are accessories or extensions that enhance the experience of a particular product. By suggesting those products right there on the product page you help them find those products easily, and they end up buying those products, thus increasing your revenue. It’s a win-win situation for both.
• Similar Products, on the other hand, allow people to compare the prices of products that they want to buy with other similar products that are available in the market. This removes the tension of getting a bad deal from their mind, thus making them move quickly in the direction of purchase.

Showing each of these columns on your product pages is not difficult, as identification of both similar as well as related products is done by the algorithms built into the software of your e-commerce store based on the purchase habits of your customers, product descriptions and other factors. You just need to do a bit of tweaking occasionally to ensure that all products being shown are relevant. Over time it learns itself and recommendations become more accurate.

#7. Build a blog

Finally, if you want to attract people to your site through search engines, you must include content marketing as a part of your marketing strategy. There can be no better channel of content marketing than a blog, and you can easily set up a blog by using WordPress. By creating useful content for your potential customers who may be searching for it on a search engine, you can introduce them to your brand, which can lead to many sales too if you apply the strategies given on this page. Here are a few examples of how you can leverage a blog to boost the sales of your e-commerce store:

• You can create detailed guides that help people choose a product easily from the wide range of options available in the market. At the end of those guides you can embed the search function of your e-commerce store, which allows them to search for the product on your store right after they finish reading the guide;
• You can create blog posts that help people learn how to maximize the benefits of a product that they want to buy, what are the latest features that are coming in modern versions of the product that they’re searching. Again, the trick is to send them to your product pages from the blog, which you can do by including links to those pages in the blog posts.

These are two of the many ways in which you can create useful content for your potential customers, and drive them to purchase from your e-commerce store.

Conclusion

So these were the 7 methods you can use to boost the sales of your e-commerce store. If you apply all of them as we explained, they have the potential to increase your sales by as much as 50%. Give them a try and share your thoughts about each of them in the comments. Also, if you know any other methods that you use to increase your sales, share them as well so other e-commerce stores can also learn from your experiences.