E-Commerce: 6 Ways to Improve Your Sales

6 practical tips to improve your ecommerce sales and revenue.

You’ve got a business going, created or curated amazing products, built your e-commerce site and won some happy, loyal customers. But your sales aren’t growing quite the way you’d hoped they might.

What can you do about it?

Well, if your site’s not generating sales, the reasons usually fall into one of the following categories:

  • There’s not enough of the right traffic. Maybe you’re getting thousands of visitors to an article you wrote about how to fix something. And that’s great. Relevant and useful content is fab. But if someone wants to fix something, they may not be buying today. So when we talk about the right traffic, we’re talking about having enough visitors to the site who are shopping for what you sell today.
  • There’s a conversion rate issue. If you’ve got a lot of traffic but low conversion rates, is the traffic the right sort of traffic? If you’ve got a lot of the right traffic, is the product right? Or is there something at play on the site causing issues? Is there something in your pricing or product that’s just not quite the right fit?
 

We’ll pop some resources to find out more about each of those issues at the end of this piece. But what we want to focus on now is 6 practical things you could try to improve your sales.

1. Spend some time on keyword research and improving product page content

Particularly for websites with a lot of products, getting keyword research and content right for each product page can be laborious. But it can be very much worthwhile. We often see websites even from big brands where product pages are the poor sibling of category pages and the homepage when it comes to copy. So this is an opportunity for the smaller business. Using keyword research tools like kwfinder.com can help you uncover different ways that people might be searching for your products.
 
Taking this information and applying it to your page titles and product description copy could just help make sure your product pages have a better shout at showing up in search results for people looking specifically for your product.
 
You might be surprised by how many people search for very specific products each month. Let’s take a look at an example. Kwfinder shows us that 170 people per month search “elephant charm bracelet” in Google UK:
how to improve ecommerce sales keyword research
 
Turns out that John Lewis has a product that meets that very description:
 
keyword research ecommerce
 
But John Lewis is a POWERHOUSE of a website, right? Surely you can’t outrank them for anything?
 
But actually, their product page isn’t particularly well optimised in terms of some of the basics for that “elephant charm bracelet,” keyword.
 
And while, at the time of writing, their site ranks 14th for that query, they’re outanked by a number of much smaller brands (e.g. https://www.carolinetemple.com/elephant-charm-bracelet-p-513nd and https://www.bloom-boutique.co.uk/helena-silver-elephant-personalised-bracelet) who have better optimised landing pages.
 
Now of course, there’s way more to ranking than just popping a couple of keywords on a page. But it’s a great starting point. And sometimes just spending some time understanding how people search, getting the content right and making small changes can make a big difference, particularly across a number of pages.
 
The main reason I LOVE product page optimisation? Well, people searching for a specific product are great people to have on your site. If someone’s searching “elephant charm bracelet” and they find your product page with that very thing on it, it’s a pretty safe assumption that you’ve got a chance at winning the sale.
 

2. Do some price comparison

If you’ve already got excellent quality traffic on your page and you’re really confident that there’s no reason the site should cause people an issue finding a product and checking out then one thing to look at might be how your product sits in the market.

If your product is one that is stocked by multiple retailers, check out how you fare from a price comparison perspective. If you’re miles over, it could be costing you sales. Price comparison is so easy for consumers these days that understanding where you sit in the market is vital.

3. Offer Gift Cards/Vouchers

According to 2021 statistics, 17% of the US population would opt for a gift card as their first choice of gift. Add to that the 32% who would choose cash, and that’s almost half the population that clearly would rather choose their own gifts than have someone else do it for them.

So if someone knows a loved one loves your brand or products but perhaps can’t decide which product or even which products the recipient might already have, you give them an easy option. Most good ecommerce platforms will enable you to offer gift vouchers. 

4. Check the Trust Boxes

Once a prospective new customer has hit your site, found something they love and is happy with the price, how many of them are going to go off to Google to search your brand’s reviews.

According to data from kwfinder.com, here’s how many people per month make searches for some of the big brand reviews in the UK:

  • “Boohoo reviews” – 2,300
  • “Pretty Little Thing review” – 1,100
  • “Made reviews” – 500

With a limited free trial of a keyword tool, you’ll be able to see how many people search your brand plus “reviews.” Or even check out the impressions data in for your brand term in Search Console to see how many people do it.

But this is almost the final stage in the process for prospective customers – to vet you and make sure you’re not going to take their money and run.

So do put testimonials on your own website, do include reviews on your site too.

And pay attention to sites that rank in Google for your brand term plus “reviews,” as these websites will often include specific review platforms like TrustPilot, where you can claim your profile.

5. Delivery

Free delivery is almost a fundamental expectation of people these days. Thanks for that, Amazon.

So if someone gets to your check out and is then landed with hefty delivery fees (particularly on lower order value items where the delivery can be almost as much as the product) it could kill the conversion right at the end of the cycle.

If free delivery’s not an option for you, be clear about your delivery throughout the process and consider what your delivery fees are like as a proportion of your average order value.

Could you encourage upsell by offering free delivery at a certain minimum order value?

These are all crucial considerations.

6. Consider Live Chat

If you have a product that often attracts questions before purchase, live chat could speed that up for you.

If you find you have a lot of customer service emails before the sale, then Live Chat could help. It means customers can get an immediate response before exiting the website as opposed to interrupting the buying process.

Resources

We appreciate this is a quick tips rundown. But if you’re interested in finding out more about some of the tips above and more about conversion rate optimisation on the whole, here are some resources:

  1. https://ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-research/
  2. https://www.hotjar.com/conversion-rate-optimization/
  3. https://www.practicalecommerce.com/The-Many-Benefits-of-Offering-Free-Shipping
 

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