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How to Streamline Sales on Your E-Commerce Platform

How to Streamline Sales on Your E-Commerce Platform

Vallery Henings

December 29, 2020 (modified on February 1, 2022)

Blog

It doesn’t matter if you have the highest quality products in the world or a more effective marketing campaign than your competition – if you can’t close out the sale, you’ll never grow your business to the next level.

According to recent research, the average conversion rate for e-commerce sites is below 5% for most sectors and under 3% for some. How can you ensure that prospective leads convert into actual customers? That visitors to your site don’t just browse your wares, but buy them? That your bounce rate stays low and your conversion rate reaches new heights? Here are four handy tips to keep you ahead of your market rivals and maximise the profit margins of your e-commerce store.

Take advantage of Analytics

Anyone who wants to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their e-commerce site should familiarise themselves with the analytics of its performance post-haste. Google Analytics is the go-to choice for gleaning information about how visitors to your site behave while on it, though any similar tool will yield valuable insights.

Analytics chart next to laptop

Take a close look at click-through patterns and bounce rates, but also other useful metrics such as the sources driving the traffic to your site. This will allow you to see which marketing efforts are more effective than others and tweak your strategy accordingly.

Automate inventory management

There’s nothing more unsatisfying for a customer than tracking down the product they want – then finding out it’s out of stock. You can avoid this undesirable outcome through the use of smart manufacturing software, which can give you real-time updates on the inventory status and even allow you to set automatic orders to replenish stocks when they become low.

Woman doing inventory management

Other useful tools offered by this software include the ability to keep track of the raw materials involved in the production of your goods, track your orders and centralise all of your information into one, easy-to-use database. Keeping things organised at the back end of your site will result in a better user experience at the front end.

Simplify for success

Speaking of user experience, simplicity is key to ensuring that customers find your website easy to navigate and a pleasure to peruse. Get the basics right by choosing a sitemap that facilitates finding what people want, with a search function and related product suggestions built into each page.

Another way in which to simplify things is to diversify your content. After all, paragraph after paragraph of written content can soon become exhausting for shoppers, causing them to abandon their search.

Video can be a great way of maintaining their attention and informing them about your product at the same time; in fact, according to Unbounce, sites that use videos experience up to 34% greater conversion rates.

Improve your checkout

Last but definitely not least, make sure you don’t fall at the final hurdle. The checkout is perhaps the most important part of your sales pipeline since it’s the location at which most people hesitate about whether to go through with their purchase. Again, clarity and simplicity are sacred here. Instead of having a “Next” button, why not replace it with something more informative like “Continue to payment”?

Person entering credit card details

Meanwhile, the checkout is the ideal place to drop incentives to get the sale over the line. Free delivery is a big draw for prospective customers – according to a recent survey from the USA, free shipping is the single most important factor for determining which retailer a shopper will choose. Additional perks like this, as well as introductory offers and prize draws, are a great way to draw in new business and retain existing customers.