An ecommerce website is ideal if:
- You sell a wide range of products. Websites are capable of showcasing far more products than a bricks-and-mortar shop, and if you have a lot of different items on offer, an ecommerce site will probably be the single most efficient way for you to sell.
- You wish to market to a wider audience. If you’re only selling from a physical location at present, you’re only reaching a tiny percentage of the market (i.e. those within travelling distance of your shop). Even if you have multiple locations, that’s still nothing compared to the reach of an ecommerce website – imagine what could happen if you made your products available to the entire country, or even the entire world!
- You already have a non-ecommerce website that gets a lot of traffic. If you have a website that doesn’t allow people to buy your products, chances are you’re missing out on a lot of sales. Many internet users now expect the option to purchase online, and if your website doesn’t offer this, you’ll lose your customers to a website that does. The solution, of course, is to upgrade your site with ecommerce functionality – you’ll be improving user experience, and since your website already has some history with the search engines, it will likely rank much higher than a brand new website would.
How to Market ecommerce website
1. Marketing Emails
The most obvious and most popular way to bring customers back for a second purchase is simply to email them. If the customer entered their email address at the checkout (and opted in to receive correspondence from you in the future), it’s definitely in your best interest to stay in touch with them, and services like MailChimp have made it easier than ever before to do this.
2. Social Media
Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are perfect for keeping in touch with past Ecommerce Website customers and making sure you stay on their radar. Once a customer has followed your company on Twitter, for instance, all you have to do is tweet regularly and your brand – your logo, your company name, your latest news and updates – will keep appearing in their feed, reminding the customer that you exist and that your online shop is still very much open for business.
3. User Accounts
Allowing your Ecommerce Website customer to register an account on your website will make it a little bit easier for said customer to come back sometime in the future and place that all-important second order. If, while finalising purchase #2, Mr Jones can simply enter a username and password instead of typing in all of his personal details from scratch, this will give him a better overall experience, thus increasing the chance that he’ll both complete this order and use your website again the next time he needs a present for his mum.
