There are thousands of online stores out there; even if you only consider startups, this remains true. While that may seem obvious enough, it often feels like a lot of these startups forget that they’re, numerically speaking, a drop in the ocean.
You need to stand out in this business. One of the best ways to do this is to simply be effective. Many of these businesses simply aren’t! Here are a few essential tips.
The danger of unrealistic expectations
One of the worst things you could do to a customer when you’re running an online store? Get their hopes up. A lot of startups in this area make a gruesome mistake: in order to drive those initial sales, they set unrealistic expectations. They promise the best delivery times, despite leaving the package in the hands of the national post service, which means it could take ages to arrive. While you don’t want to make your proposition unattractive, it’s much better to underpromise than it is to overpromise
Customer loyalty is your best asset
It’s way more expensive to try getting new customers than it is to keep your current ones. Another way of putting this, which is a business adage you may have heard before – retention is cheaper than acquisition. So how do you keep customers coming back to you? One of the most famed ways of doing this is through some sort of loyalty program. However, these aren’t as easy to develop as many people assume. You need to take care to create loyalty programs that add value for both you and the customer! Above all, of course, you should ensure you’re delivering the best service possible. High-quality and speedy delivery is what helped Amazon get this far, after all.
Using the right platform
Not all ecommerce platforms are the same. This probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you; after all, some are going to be better than others, right? But it’s not just about quality. The platform you use should be specifically tailored to the kind of business you’re running. If you’re the provider of the goods, for example, then something like Magento may do wonders for your website. If you’re a third party, meaning you’re facilitating the transaction between the buyer and the provider, then you’re a marketplace. This means you’ll need something like the Arcadier marketplace platform.
Help should be a click away
Okay, so maybe help being one click away is a bit of a high expectation. At least, it sounds that way, right? But if you incorporate live chat onto your website and make sure a link is embedded on every page, wherever the customer is looking, then help can literally be that close. This is something that is very realistic for smaller ecommerce websites; websites like Amazon introduce a couple more hoops for people to jump through because their plates are so full! But for your website, it’s definitely something you should consider. Whatever way you go about it, help needs to be as streamlined as possible. Don’t do what many others do, which is simply leave it all to email.
