How to make your eCommerce business successful in 2019

Remember the day when you’ve made up your mind to start an eCommerce business. What were those several things you’ve started to investigate in order to build a solid foundation for it? Here is the list of those aspects you should thoroughly investigate when shaping your successful eCommerce business :

Define the right product to sell. Usually, this point determines the fate of your business. You should be able to estimate your product from the point of view of future customers. One of the typical mistakes: business owners are falling in love with their products and can’t examine them critically. I won’t even tell you the statistics of how many new businesses fail every year. This might seriously disappoint you.

Conduct a thorough competition analysis. You’ll need:

• BuzzSumo for analyzing the content of your competition
• SimilarWeb to research your market from different angles (marketing, sales etc.)
• Mailcharts to win the competition in the email game
• Alexa for discovering ideas to grow your traffic

Business owners should be aware of the fact that if they pick a red ocean strategy, they’ll have to struggle for the customers’ attention because the chosen niche is not new. Those who launch innovative products are in the “blue ocean”. They don’t have the competition. As it turns out to be quite difficult to create innovation on the market, entrepreneurs should make efforts to improve their products, marketing strategies, and customer service on a constant basis.

Do you have a clear understanding of who your ideal customer is?

The point is that thousands of people are wasting lots of money on advertising because they haven’t managed to investigate their buyer personas in due time.

What is vital to know about your target audience:

• demographics (the place of residence, level of income, education, age, gender)
• attitudes (interests, motivation)
• what kind of value does your product have? (will it make the life of your customers better and what kind of problems can it solve)
• what kind of typical/non-typical objectives your buyer personas may have
• what will make them purchase your product
• which channels can your customer use to search for your product

What will you get if you segment your target audience in a proper way:

• you’ll be able to set correct targeting on Facebook
• you or your marketers will know what kind of messages your audience needs to see in order to find out the value of the product
• you’ll know how to improve the product in order to exceed the customers’ expectations.

But in this case, a good idea would be to conduct interviews in order to ask the customers directly: what do they like about your product and what they don’t like.

Here’s one of the best tools for conducting surveys.

Image source: Proposify

Why do people buy and whether they are ready to pay for what you sell

I have mentioned this issue in one of my articles. After you conduct thorough competitor analysis, you won’t have difficulties with defining a price strategy. But there is one thing, which shouldn’t be forgotten: customers will always find the ways to pay for your product if you arouse a desire to possess it.

You may have the most typical product for your potential customers. But marketing and PR efforts will help you to transform it into something truly prestigious and desirable.

The design of your product is the first thing which creates a bond between your brand and your potential customer. So, the design of your website, your logo and your product are among the most serious investments in your business, because you are going to deal with people, not machines.

You’ll never influence human psychology if you use wrong colors in your brand attributes. You may also think, that’s a trifle and I’m joking, right? Who cares about colors? The answer is EVERYONE.

Once Heinz decided to launch a different kind of ketchup. Not red, but green. And you know what? More than 10 million bottles were sold in the first seven months following its introduction, with Heinz factories working 24 hours a day, seven days a week to keep up with demand. The result: $23 million in sales attributable to Heinz green ketchup [the highest sales increase in the brand’s history]. All because of a simple color change.

Conclusion: it’s not the case when you can rely on your personal experience or trust the website to amateurs. When it comes to design for eCommerce websites, things get more serious. It’s not just a matter of colors.

What kind of a design you get, when co-operating with a good UX specialist:

• it smoothly leads customers through the sales funnel directly to checkout
• it follows the usability and rail standards
• contains the best UI/UX practices
• has a background which raises the conversion rate
• builds trust
• looks very attractive for customers

But it’s not enough. Even the best designers often lack some fundamental knowledge which can help influence the subconsciousness of a customer. A desire to buy is always dictated by our subconsciousness ( scientists claim, that almost 95% of purchasing decisions are controlled by it). That’s why it’s good for a designer to work with an experienced digital marketer (the one, who knows well how human psychology works). A good content marketer/digital marketer should prepare a structure of relevant content for the customers could:

• See the value and benefits of making purchases at your store on every step of the funnel
• Have a desire to spend as much time on the website as possible
• See the right content in strategic places and could quickly grasp the idea
• See good CTA’s and increase their AOV

To make it all work, every business owner should make sure that his brand positioning is reflected in reality, not just on the website. If you have the best customer service – prove it. No matter how strong your marketing and PR is, if you don’t want to strengthen the relationships with the customer with your real actions. Otherwise, it’s not the brand it’s just an empty phrase. Nowadays a good brand is a result of strong relationships with customers.

New Era. New customer. New rules for making your eCommerce business successful.

Forrester predicts that in 2019 Google will prioritize progressive web apps in search results. This means a lot for those brands who want to increase their visibility. It also means that developers should turn up their sleeves and start optimizing the platforms’ resources in order to:

• increase the performance (to speed up the page load)
• improve the accessibility of your web app
• improve the code quality (using the best practices)
• make sure that pages are optimized for search engine results ranking

In such a way you’ll be able to offer the customer seamless and top-notch user experience. “The need for speed” gets more intensive with time. So, those who don’t meet the customer’s demands for speed and usability standards simply may not dream of such things as customer loyalty, maximization of revenue…People are enormously mobile these days and become even more mobile this time. Don’t expect mercy from them. People are busy, they want fast shopping and decent customer service. No one will wait when at last the page will load after 3 seconds…

You can check the website page load right here and right now. If it takes more than 3 seconds for any page to load, that’s a bad sign. There might be numerous mistakes influencing the result (you will see it in the report): bad code, heavy images…

It’s much easier to solve problems when you know their source. That’s why we advise our clients to take our technical audit. All possible errors influencing the performance in a negative way are quickly identified. Our PM gives recommendations on how the errors can be fixed and what has caused the errors.

Calling a spade a spade

Every eCommerce business should have a Unique Selling Proposition. It shows the value of your product on the market, your differentiation among the competition. This will help you to stand out, to make your brand memorable. You should give customers a reason: why they should choose you, not the competitor. How many of those reasons do you know? Have you counted? It’s high time to do this or if it’s already done, maybe the list needs to be refreshed? Once again, see what your competitors offer and decide, whether you can give something more and much better. I believe you’ll make it. So, good luck.