At the moment to start e-commerce business is cheaper and faster than ever before. But as you can assume – that business where it is so easy to enter is usually a most competitive niche. Despite the fact that to setup e-commerce business can take a couple of hours– to succeed in the ecommerce business is not an easy task.
Blow we would like to share a list of some basic hints that can help you to succeed in e-commerce business with your magento store :
Prepare solid foundation before launch
One of the biggest mistakes which we see in work with our customers is a lack of optimization and automation of certain processes. Deferring those issues to later time – arguing that the issue will be solving during operational process.
You need to organize as much as possible processes, to organize customer tracking process, automate as much as possible other processes: inventory management, products management, orders management, delivery, marketing, customer care and so on. Fixing these issues would be expensive after running your e-commerce business.
You need to figure out where your customers are and don’t think that people will just find you
Nowadays, none of the user who are visiting your website is random users. Internet is too large today for people to fall randomly on random websites. Any of visitors of your website come to you through searching, advertising or recommendations from other sources. So you need to focus on attracting links to your website in order to improve the position of your website in the search. Or hire PR / SEO agency to drive traffic to your site.
Improve navigation process
After attracting customers to your online store – your primary goals should be to retain customers on your magento store and on its conversions into buyers. To do this you have to make navigation of you magento store as easy as possible. Understandable and intuitive. If possible, get rid of unnecessary steps / redirects to internal pages of your online store. Customers always should be focused on the purchase.
Improve checkout process
For sale a large number of products you have to be sure that when a customers purchases goods on your website – here should be no difficulty during the search and checkout process. In case of any difficulties the buyer in 98% of cases refuses the shopping cart and goes from your online store to search for similar products in other onliner store.
Below are several options for changes that will allow you to improve the checkout process to receive more orders:
- Reduce the number of steps in your checkout process. For example, in standard magento checkout here is 6 different steps which should be completed step by step. On each step you are in risk of losing buyers, because it looks like complicated process. We recommended to cut a number of steps in your checkout process and make it easier for your customers. In ideal situation here should be only one step (one page). You can use for it One Step Checkout magento extension.
- Use as less as possible of input fields for collecting data from your customers on checkout form. Statistics shows – than lower amount of input fields you have, than lower bounce rate from checkout page you have. So keep checkout page as simple as possible.
- During checkout process avoid mandatory registration of the customers before checkout is finished. The buyer must be able to place order as a guest, without registration, otherwise you are under risk of losing customers.
- Your buyers should be able to work with several payment options. The most basic payments options nowadays are Paypal, Amazon, Credit card payments.
- Keep billing, shipping, payment information where possible to save time of your customers on purchases in next time on your online store.
You can use One Step Checkout magento extension to optimize you checkout process in your magento store. One Step Checkout allow you convert standard 6 steps magento checkout process into elegant one step checkout process.
Allocate some budget to test marketing
To scale your e-commerce business you need to attract as much as possible customers to your online store. To do this, you need to discover and test different marketing strategies and use various channels to attract customers. To find new channels for customers attraction you need always discover new opportunities, basically it’s required some budget. This budget will allow you to test the different channels and approaches, and to select or decline channels or approaches which are not working for you. Positive results will allow you to scale your online business by attractive more customers.
Conclusion
Online business is competitive area and to achieve success you need alway think about optimization your business. You need discover new opportunities, test them. You need optimize and automate as much as possible steps and iterations to be more faster for your buyers.