Nowadays, most businesses sell their products online. In fact, there are many companies that are purely online based. No matter what applies to you, it is clearly imperative to maximise your online sales as much as possible. If you are not making as much online sales as you had expected to, you are probably wondering where you are going wrong. Read on to discover some possible theories.
- Your website is not optimised properly – This is one of the main reasons why businesses are missing out on sales. Have you embraced search engine optimisation? Do you have a solid SEO strategy in place? If you are languishing on the bottom of page three on Google, it is extremely unlikely that you are going to generate a large amount of sales. You need to climb up the search engine result pages for relevant keyphrases. After all, if you don’t target the right key phrases, you may benefit from more traffic, but your conversion rate won’t increase significantly, as these visitors will leave your website as quickly as they arrived.
- Your shipping rates are too expensive – If your delivery rates are too expensive, it is likely that users are going to look for the products you sell elsewhere. It is important to offer incentives to make the shopping process more straightforward and less expensive, for example; offering free returns and free standard delivery. There are so many e-stores offering free returns and free, or at least very cheap, delivery today, and so if you want to compete, you cannot afford to charge high shipping fees.
- Your e-store is not optimised for mobile use – This is another major mistake that a lot of businesses are guilty of today. When you consider the fact that most people access the Internet via their smartphone today, it is not difficult to see why this is so important. It is vital that your website is responsive, which means users benefit from optimal viewing and experience no matter what device they are using.
- You don’t focus on customer relationships – Nowadays, the most successful online businesses are those who get to know their customers to forge loyal and strong relationships. This includes using analytics to target marketing campaigns effectively, as well as building relationships via email marketing and social media usage.
- Your website takes too long to load – Internet shopping is meant to be about convenience. People prefer shopping online because they don’t have to go through the hassle of going to a physical store. However, if your website takes too long to load, the experience becomes draining, and users look elsewhere. If you have too many large image and media files on your website, it’s likely they are going to be slowing it down.
Hopefully, you have stumbled across the reason for your poor online sales performance. If any of the above points are applicable to your business, it is important to take the steps to rectify them as soon as possible so that you can improve your number of e-sales and take your business to the next level.
