5 Simple Ways to Boost eCommerce Sales

Who doesn’t want more sales? Whether you’ve been selling online for years or you’re a vibrant young startup, maximising sales is surely a top priority for every eCommerce business.

But how do you go about attracting a regular stream of visitors to your eCommerce site? Once they are there, how do you convert them into actual paying customers? These top tips should help.

Part 1: Attracting new visitors

1. Run paid ad campaigns

Running paid ads (e.g Google AdWords or Facebook ads) is one of the best ways to quickly boost sales in your online store. It’s a huge shortcut to quickly getting in front of your ideal customers and sending a flood of new visitors to your site.

The downside? It’s all too easy to spend a lot of money on paid ads and see little or even no return on your investment. Crafting a successful campaign is a real skill and requires a mix of knowledge, experimentation, and sometimes even a little luck.

The good news is that, if done properly, paid ads can really help take your eCommerce business to the next level. We’d always advise starting small, investing a cautious amount into the campaign and tracking your results. After all, you can never be sure how a campaign will perform until you’ve properly tested it.

Once you’ve found out what works (and just as importantly what doesn’t), you can then invest more money into the ones that prove successful.

2. Invest in SEO

In an ideal world, you’ll be generating a regular flow of traffic from search engines like Google. To achieve this, your site needs to rank highly for the things your target audience are actively searching for. Most people only check out the first few results, so you’re unlikely to get very far if you appear on page 23.

So, how do you boost your ranking? It’s all about optimising your site for the search engines and utilising a variety of both on-site and off-site SEO techniques. 

For example, both products and static pages should be properly optimised with keywords. It also helps to regularly update your website with fresh content, including publishing blogs and other media. Google loves this!

In reality, SEO is a complex and ever-changing field – and we could probably write a whole book on different SEO techniques and the factors that affect your ranking. Invest in SEO over the long-term, spend time tweaking your site, and your efforts will really start to pay off.

3. Get active on social media

Anyone looking to boost eCommerce sales simply cannot afford to ignore social media. We’re sure this isn’t news to you – but you might be sitting there wondering how best to approach it. After all, social media marketing is a complex and often confusing subject.

To be successful, we’d advise putting together a clear social strategy, finding out what works and then tweaking your strategy as you go. Both social media ads and organic posts are excellent ways to find customers and boost those sales.

If you’re just starting out, it’s a good idea to find out where your customers actually hang out and concentrate most of your efforts on those platforms. If you’re targeting an older audience, for example, you probably won’t want to invest too much time on TikTok. Saying that, social media often throws up some surprising results!

Whatever you decide to focus on, be sure to keep your profiles active and post content on a regular basis, while striking a good balance between sales-orientated posts and useful content. If you’re experimenting with paid ads, start small and test your campaigns before investing a ton of money into them.

Part 2: Boosting conversions

Increasing the number of visitors to your store is only the first part in helping boost eCommerce sales. Once they’re there, you need to turn them into paying customers, and that means creating a first-rate shopping experience and optimising your site for conversions.

4. Streamline your checkout process

Experience tells us that the checkout process is one of THE most important parts of your entire online store. Cart abandonment is a real problem across the eCommerce industry, with almost 70% of shoppers failing to complete their purchase.

So, how can you reduce the problem and maximise those sales?

It’s all about having a streamlined checkout process, with as few steps as possible and logical, well designed forms. Often, little things can make a huge difference to cart abandonment, like including a process indicator, displaying verified security symbols, and having a strong call-to-action.

In addition, be sure to offer a guest checkout option so people don’t need to log in to complete their purchase.

5.     Better showcase your products

One drawback about shopping online is that people can’t actually touch, hold or even smell your products like they would in a shop.

For this reason, it’s important to make the customer’s experience as immersive as possible and showcase your products in the best possible light.

One of the most important things is having well-designed product pages, with a compelling product description, detailed specifications, a beautiful gallery of images and prominent ‘add to basket’ button.

Remember, photographs are especially important online, so spend time making sure your images are as professional as possible with good lighting. You’ll want to include multiple images of each product so customers can see the finer details and view the item from different angles.

So, there you have it – five simple but hugely effective ways to boost your eCommerce sales.

Bonus Tip:

Don’t forget your existing customers! It’s often much easier to sell to someone who has already bought from you before, so make sure to invest in encouraging repeat purchases.

Email marketing is one of the best ways to do this. Build a list of loyal customers and you’ll have a group of people who are ready and waiting to buy from you time and time again.

Need some help to take your eCommerce sales to the next level? Get in touch with our friendly team today for some expert, no obligation advice.