8 Ways to Increase Your Ecommerce Success [+ Grow Your Online Store]

How do you measure eCommerce success? There are countless ways to scale your online store, increase conversions, and retain loyal customers.

But for many, the road to eComm success is paved with trial and error.

While experimenting and testing are crucial in an ever-changing industry, the end goal should remain the same: Providing an optimal customer experience.

You can do this through personalization, customer communication, and various other integrations or marketing strategies, but it all starts with design.

Consider this: When your favorite site or app suddenly stops functioning the way you’re used to, does it throw you off?

For instance, if you can’t find what once was simple information because the structure has changed, or it becomes difficult to navigate — there’s a likely chance you’ll move onto another website. And one that easily moves you through their system, shows you personalized products, and is visually appealing.

This is known as User Experience Design and it shapes every moment while you are browsing. 

User Experience, UX for short, ensures that your website is intuitively structured, understandable, and working right.

It’s made up of several layers including strategy, scope, information architecture, page structure, and visual design. Simply put, it makes your site better.

However, before you dive into all of that, you need to know your customers and your market. A strong UX strategy is created through a thorough discovery during which customer interviews and competitive analysis are completed. This step is crucial to creating great UX and overall customer experience. 

Great design leads to better customer experience.

But what else can you do to increase customer experience and scale your eCommerce store?

8 Ways to Increase eCommerce Success and Grow Your Online Store

1. Enhance Your Navigation and Search Options

It’s important to understand the difference between your customers, and in eCommerce there are two distinct types: explorers and seekers.

Explorers roam the digital aisles of your store, observing offerings and gaining familiarity with your brand and products.

Seekers are determined—they know what they are looking for and seek it out directly. 

In order to create positive customer experiences, it’s important to maintain a balance between these two characters. How?

The answer is actually pretty simple: through effective Navigation and Search. 

Navigation

The Explorer isn’t seeking out a particular product. They prefer to see options and variety.

Navigation helps them find products, but it also helps them know all of the categories and types of products in stock, allowing users to sift through them efficiently.

This is particularly helpful to first-time customers who may be unfamiliar with a website’s offerings.

If you aren’t establishing the proper navigation you run the risk of losing a significant amount of customers.

Search

Search is usually geared toward the seeker—the shopper who is returning to a site and knows what they want. Unfortunately, there are many ways a customer may use your search: for a product, ask a question, or using a synonym.

Many eCommerce stores still require shoppers to use the exact phrase used in the product listing. Here’s a practical example: a search may not return any results for “blow dryer” if the product is called “hairdryer.”

But there are tools that allow you to present a better search experience by handling synonyms, visual results, and similar products.

Services like Klevu—one of our partners—offer top-notch search experiences for your customers. 

The important thing to remember about search and navigation is that they work in harmony.

Various navigation settings help a customer find what they’re looking for, anchor them to a location within the website, or help them narrow down a list of products.

While search can help them find the product in their own words or with their own modifiers.

2. Invest in High-Quality Product Photos

You’ve heard that picture is worth 1,000 words, and it’s true. People want to see the product they’re looking to buy.

With the exception of a product you purchase repeatedly, would you trust a store so much that you’d blindly buy its products, without seeing size, shape, color, fit, style, or labeling?

Investing in quality images and videos will do more for your products than what even the most effective product description ever will.

This is especially true on your product page. In fact, there are different kinds of images that serve their own purposes.

From compatibility and sizing photography to lifestyle and customer-generated photos, all of these types of images tell the story of your products, shape the reputation of your brand, and answer questions for your customers. 

Don’t forget, these elements are stronger when they are complemented by well-written copy that is clear and simple.

3. Create Effective Product Listings and Use Concise Text

While images and videos are certainly content kings when it comes to displaying products, it’s just as important to ensure that the text you have on a page is valuable and descriptive. The most obvious benefit is for SEO and accessibility purposes.

Many eCommerce success stories start with better images and videos.

The big thing to understand about the text is that your average customer probably won’t read all of it. In fact, only 16% of users are going to read it word-by-word, whereas 80% of them will scan it.

On a page without any headings or bullets, users will naturally use an F-pattern to scan a page.

The more you can break up your text into small, digestible pieces, and use headings and short paragraphs the more likely your users are to read all the text. 

This way of breaking up content can have two major benefits: The first being that you can pair text with imagery and video—which reinforces the benefits or features of your products.

Second, it ensures that you know exactly why someone would want to buy this product and what they are getting for it. 

4. Create Consistent Product Pages

Consistency comes in many forms but perhaps it is most important in structure. To enhance your eCommerce success, it’s important to choose a category structure that works for all products.

This means making sure that all your product pages have the same types of content across the board.

Consistency is also revealed in your language and tone. Do you have a millennial-driven brand? You may use more slang and simpler phrases. 

Another important place to create consistency is in the accessibility of your site. Accessibility refers to the act of ensuring that all of your users, even those with disabilities that may require assistive technologies, can use your site.

A common accessibility feature is creating a high-contrast text which makes the copy more legible. It’s about adding alt tags for images to assist those with screen readers. It’s about enabling those who can’t use a mouse to navigate between form fields (spoiler: this is also great for people who can use a mouse). 

Furthermore, when your website behaves, looks, and feels consistent it can make your brand feel more competent and trustworthy. 

5. Increase Your Site Speed

This last and most obvious UX principle is site speed. It is perhaps the most noticeable issue and can lead to high page abandonment.

Ecommerce success goes hand in hand with site speed: Speed isn’t just a technical issue, it’s a UX issue too.

By understanding response time limits, you can accurately understand if you are providing a great experience for your customers. 

Traditionally, 0.1 seconds to 100 milliseconds will feel instantaneous to a user. This is what you should strive for regularly.

A one-second load time won’t feel instantaneous but will keep the user in their flow—they know the computer is working, but are patient with the system. Once you hit between 3-10 seconds, users start to wish it was faster and often begin to abandon the site. 

Providing a speedy, responsive website is critical in establishing trust and competency with your customers.

6. Create an eCommerce SEO Strategy

SEO (search engine optimization, if you didn’t already know) is crucial to eCommerce success. Studies show that a vast majority of search engine users don’t want to click to even the second page of results, This means that — especially if you’re not using paid media — your website needs to rank high in search results. How do you increase your Google ranking?

There are small ways you can update your own SEO:

• Add alt tags to photos
• Use effective meta descriptions on your landing pages
• Include backlinks on blog posts
• and more.

You can also contact an eCommerce SEO agency to ensure your product pages, listings, and details show up early in rankings.

We offer a wide range of eCommerce SEO services for established online stores and would love to assist you with developing an effective strategy. Contact us!

7. Develop an eCommerce Email Strategy

Think about it: An effective email campaign sends your brand directly into the hands of a targeted group of customers. Why would you want to miss an opportunity like that? Besides offering sales copy, brand awareness, and updates about sales and promotions, eCommerce email marketing also provides the option for a personal touch.

A “Welcome Series” campaign, for instance, provides an easy way for a customer to get to know your brand, and for you to get to know your customer’s needs and wants better. This allows for further personalization and an increased chance of customer retention.

On the other hand, an “Abandoned Cart” series reminds customers of products left behind and can suggest upsells, offer incentive discounts, or simply keep the brand and products top of mind.

8. Streamline Checkout Systems

The easier you can make a customer journey to the checkout, the better. But once there, does your site make shoppers jump through hoops to get their payment in place? The more steps a customer needs to take in order to make a purchase, the less likely they are to complete the buyer journey. Adding more relevant shipping options, a simple signon option, and easy pay options like Amazon Pay (which reduces the need to add info; it’s already stored in Amazon), all contribute to a better customer experience and increased eCommerce success.

What can I do right now?

These are a few of the many principles that can make a great eCommerce website.

Start by evaluating your own site. Ask yourself, “How easy is it for a user to find a product via the main navigation alone? Can someone use a synonym for your products in the search bar?”

Ask potential or existing customers what they think and ask them to try to accomplish these tasks. If you want to know how much time people spend on your site, set up a tool like HotJar and start recording pages to see where people look and how far down the page they go.

These can give you good indications as to how captivating your imagery and content are. 

To get a leg up consider working with an experienced agency like Shero Commerce and ask questions like:

• What do I need to do to improve the UX of my site?
• How many issues need to be resolved?
• What sort of integrations can increase my eCommerce success?
• Is there any way to make my website faster?

You’ll want to learn about the most common issues they see and what they do to solve them. That way you know you’re getting someone who is truly focused on the customer experience and the growth of your business. 

If there’s any way we can help, reach out! One of our experienced eCommerce specialists will be happy to assist you with a variety of eCommerce growth strategies.