Do you have a social media presence online? Great!
Do you have a website to direct your customers to? Awesome!
Is your website optimized for e-commerce? …
If the answer is no, then you might want to change that. Why?
While a regular website is great for showcasing your company’s products and services exclusively, an e-commerce website is what will inevitably help your customers to make the transition from browsers to buyers more quickly.
The traffic that comes to your website is only as good as the number of visitors that actually convert into buying customers. After all, what is the use of a website if it is not helping your business to maximize its sales? While there are quite a few different factors that contribute to website sales, having an e-commerce experience on your website is definitely somewhere at the top of that list. Here are 3 reasons to make haste on upgrading your website for buying and selling online.
Convenience Always Wins
It’s easy to go online and browse products you love from your favourite brands while lying on your bed or sitting at your desk. It’s another story when you have to find the energy to leave your house, get into your car and drive all the way to the store to search for the product you want, and then still be required to stand in line to pay for it.
Sometimes, your customers are ready and willing to buy, but the lack of a fast and hassle-free way to pay can turn them away from your store to seek the product at another store that can offer them that convenience—even if it's not their ideal buy.
Your customers are happiest when you make the sale easy. Conducting transactions through an e-commerce website is one of the most efficient ways to do this.
Increase Brand Recognition and Loyalty to Your Brand
Sometimes, a customer may set foot in your store once and then leave, never to return again, simply because there are a number of other places where they can buy a product similar to your own.
You can’t control where your customer goes. But you can control the experience they receive when they interact with your business. With an e-commerce website, you have the ability to retain customers who have visited your website even once, through email marketing. You simply provide them with an enticing offer on your website in exchange for their email address. If they are satisfied with the product or service they have been offered, you get to remind them of that happy experience by showing them what else your business can do for them via email, thus easily encouraging them back to your website to purchase again.
Using this strategy, you get to put yourself in front of your customers continuously without them having to do a thing. The result? Increasing brand recognition, engagement, loyalty to your brand and—what we all want—more sales.
Your Turf, Your Rules
If by chance your business uses a third-party app to conduct its online sales, transitioning over to your own e-commerce website is well worth considering, lest your sales fall prey to the whims and machinations of a single marketplace. This may include (among other things) suspension of your account —for sometimes ambiguous reasons—, market seller fees, and loss of control overpricing. Even if not for these concerns, your sales will still depend on whether your ideal customer shops through that specific platform.
You can avoid all this with your own e-commerce platform, where you make the rules, and customers, rather than getting distracted by other displayed brands on the third-party platform, buy directly from you.
Ready to Upgrade?
Gone are the days when customers were willing to travel miles to your store to fulfil their shopping needs. The world today simply and greedily asks, “Is it convenient?”
Provide at least some of that convenience to your customers through having an e-commerce website. Ready to optimize your website?
Book a call with me and I’ll help you get started or visit our website here
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