E-commerce is a growing market, with more and more Americans making purchases online. This holiday season’s digital sales are predicted to be the largest ever, and increasingly, mobile is opening up a new platform for e-commerce that is set to expand the amount of online shopping Americans participate in by orders of magnitude as the tech is fine tuned. As digital becomes a more pressing concern for businesses both large and small as they try to stay relevant and competitive, making the most out of digital sales funnels through analysis and fine tuning should be something that all business owners take time to pursue.
Beware of cart-abandonment. In an article on the subject from the Washington Post, cart abandonment was cited as costing online merchants an estimated four trillion in lost sales in 2014. One suggestion for combating shopping cart abandonment from the article was retargeting, or tracking customers who navigate away from a full cart in order to increase the odds that they will double back and complete their purchase. Either via email, remarketing using cookies that can display ads for your business on pages after customers have navigated away, or through a combination of the two, businesses that make the effort to stay on top of potential loss can mitigate it and reclaim revenues.
Streamline your site based off of sales data. An e-commerce site is never truly finished, it is more or less constantly in a state of being fine tuned as you gather more customer data. The paths that customers take through your website can be looked at and measured to help you determine how to create a more effective customer experience based on high converting pathways and pages with high exit rates. Ideally, you will be able to identify higher converting pages and isolate the factors contributing to their success, integrating them through the remainder of your website.
Create an array of recommended items. Recommended items can increase the amount of your average sale by building on the momentum of a customer purchase. When coupled with a smooth checkout process and marketing tools geared at cutting back on cart abandonment, they can increase the amount of sales your website makes while offering added convenience to your customers.
Photo Credit to Dave Stokes on Flickr
