Tag Archives: eCommerce Store

Turbocharge Your eCommerce Store with These Growth Hacks [2023 Update]

More and more individuals have started their own businesses at breakneck speeds. eCommerce is one segment of the industry that has experienced tremendous growth over the past couple of years. After an increase of 50% last year, the United States eCommerce martket is worth more than 1 trillion dollars.

Of course, one of the biggest drivers of starting a business is the ease at which one can start. In the past, starting any business meant having to do the appropriate state-level registration filings, opening a bank account, procuring large scale technological infrastructure at huge costs, and then securing a merchant account via a lengthy and convoluted application process. This process served as a huge moat for wishful individuals looking to break into an most industries. Today cloud computing, software as a service (SaaS), and mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets have greatly reduced these investment barriers and allowed businesses to form with minimal investments.

Furthermore, companies such as Host Merchant Services focuses on guiding merchants, including high risk merchants, to streamline the merchant account application process and advising businesses on how to quickly start accepting payments. This business formation process, particularly for eCommerce businesses, has been facilitated by specific platforms catering to them, including eBay, Shopify, Etsy, Amazon, to name a few.

Given these changing dynamics of quickly setting up a business to start accepting payments, coupled with the skyrocketing costs of rent of physical stores, result in eCommerce as a natural option for doing business. However, beyond simply doing business as an eCommerce merchant, there are ways to focus on growth to further expand your operations. In this article, we look at ways merchants can turbocharge their eCommerce store with significant growth hacks.

The Growth Hacks

Virtual and Augmented Reality

Over the past two years, consumer demand has shifted to online shopping experiences in lieu of in-store visits. As technology has facilitated contactless payments, the 3D virtual view of an entire designer showroom via investing in virtual and augmented reality allow consumers to experience full virtual rooms to “try” on outfits.

eCommerce businesses that invest in VR and AR technology will have a leg up on the competition allowing consumers a visualization of their product by trying on products via a hyper-realistic representation of a 3D fitting room. What AR and VR lets customers do is have a view of how certain apparel may look on them, within their space. Such capabilities can have tremendous benefits for merchants since, according to a survey conducted by UPS, 27% of all product returns were due to the product being “not as described.” According to ATLATL Software, a specialist of AR, VR and 3D software for eCommerce businesses, “two-thirds of shoppers say they have more confidence in their purchase as a result of the visuals rendered from AR and VR.”

Furthermore, according to research firm Statista, mobile commerce, the primary mode by which merchants implement AR and VR technology, is expected to surpass $430 billion annually in 2022. So, one of the best growth hacks eCommerce merchants can implement is to align their business to be an active participant in the mode of commerce that is likely to control a greater portion of consumer activity.

Finally, as large as eCommerce and mobile commerce are, online shopping still has many pitfalls. The online shopping cart abandonment rate is around 70%, according to research by Baymard Institute. However, the use of AR and VR increases conversion rates by 94% among merchants utilizing the technology.

Let Your Customers Know Their Payments are Secure

We’ve made great strides with the payment technology, with ecommerce first coming online with desktop, then mobile, and then via business’s own apps, along with consumer spending habits shifting to prefer eCommerce vs a traditional in-store shopping. As great as all these changes have been, they present their own set of challenges. Merchants are continuously faced with striking a balance between the customer experience and protecting those customers from security threats.

It’s hard to ignore these trends. Security experts are not ignoring them, and merchant services providers take these potential threats seriously. There are big expectations from merchants. According to the latest American Express Digital Payments Trendex Report, 90% of consumers already feel that their payment details are sufficiently secure given all the enhanced security protocol merchants implement. In fact, nearly 40% of shoppers feel that those protocols are making the checkout process cumbersome.

Nonetheless, the convenience of eCommerce and contactless payments not only pose threats, they’re resulting in real losses from nefarious activity. According to market research firm Statista, nearly 75% of all eCommerce merchants worldwide experienced some form of fraudulent activity in 2021, with total losses amounting to about $20 billion in total. As a result, the market for fraud prevention and security in eCommerce is expected to balloon to $70 billion by 2025.

There are specific actions merchants can take to inspire confidence in the security of their platform while also minimizing threats. According to the previous American Express report mentioned, more and more consumers are growing comfortable with the merchant saving their card information on their databases, a process called “card on file.” Today, 61% of consumers are comfortable sharing their payment information with the merchant to set up card on file. That is up from 43% in just two years.

With card on file merchants and consumers both save time and potential of error by eliminating data entry in every checkout. Furthermore, the payments can be processed via a secure tokenization mechanism. Tokenization does not use actual personal financial data but rather a meaningless set of characters generated in the form of a token which can be used to settle a transaction as the token will be accepted as a credible payment after it is deciphered by the token key at payment authentication.

Merchants should showcase this, and all other methods used in securing their payments, building confidence in their platform, which can also serve as a feedback loop for other customers to set up card on file with the merchant. Some ways merchants can accomplish this starts with their website landing page. Customer can see when a website is encrypted by a method called SSL, or Secure Socket Layer. SSL secures all financial information passing through various channels from the website when processing payments. Other ways to build trust around the security of a merchant’s platform is to showcase various trust badges on your website, such as a business which is ‘PayPal Verified’ or ‘Secured by Verisign,’ among many other options.

Urgency, FOMO, and Social Proof

A great way to increase sales in eCommerce is to implement certain initiatives that promote urgency among buyers, or some level of fear of missing out (FOMO). For consumers, FOMO can be instigated by marketing that appeals to their desire to clinch an opportunity before it’s too late and escapes them. Merchants will need to convince customers that time is of the essence, and there are hoards of peers vying for the same product, a concept known as social proof.

Social proof is one of the best influencers of consumer behavior. The book Influence by Robert Cialdini revolutionized persuasion and influence marketing with the concept that people look to others to decide what they themselves should do.

Sales, limited time offers, any promotions with the tagline ‘while supplies last’ are all a culmination of urgency, FOMO, and social proof. And it is in the best interest of all eCommerce merchants to employ all these psychological selling strategies.

Get Customer Testimonials

The best time for all eCommerce merchants to start building a portfolio of clients that can showcase their best features is as soon as they start their business. The second best time; right now. The aim should be to get other consumers to read about the benefits offered by your company.

There must be a plan for reaching out to customers and obtaining testimonials of your services. These efforts should include all platforms and major online review sites. You can have great copy and amazing graphics in your marketing, but customer testimonials of actual experiences using your goods or services will supersede that marketing any day.

Testimonials should be in the form of both text and video and should be available on your YouTube channel, Facebook page, Twitter feed, Instagram reels, Snap stories, Pinterest Pins, Google Reviews, as well as the Better Business Bureau.

Plan Your Campaigns

Maybe it’s the holiday season that draws the most buyers to your eCommerce site. Consider planning marketing campaigns using mailing lists and data on past purchases. Holidays are gold mines for merchants who plan accordingly well in advance. Consumers are happier, more altruistic, and open to spending.

These seasonal campaigns need not always be discount promotions. Customer enticement can even be built around specific level of gift wrapping and holiday packaging that businesses can begin to be associated their brands with – think of Tiffany’s blue boxes.

Target Your Audience

There are numerous examples of creating multiple audineces by segmenting the clientbase. Permutations that can be used to set up client segmentation include age cohorts, gender, marital status, family size, spending habits, lifestyle habits, income levels, educational levels, alma maters, geographic base, psychographic details, cultural roots, religious beliefs, sports affiliations, and many more.

The biggest benefit merchants get by segmenting clients is hyper-focus on specific preferences, and potential buying behaviors at different times of the year. This data can be utilized to target audiences with different emailing lists, discounts, or recommendations for certain products. This level of audience targeting can also allow merchants to offer extremely specific options which may feel they are tailored specifically for the individual.

Retailers such as TJ Maxx have historically employed a strategy to buy up inventory at a discounted rate for sports team jerseys and apparel only to offer them at full price once those teams start performing well. That strategy can be used to build out campaigns around performance of specific teams, targeting the fanbase of those teams.

Implement a Loyalty Program For Customers

Implementing a loyalty program is another great way for eCommerce merchants to turbocharge their growth. These programs are helpful not only in establishing loyalty among the client base but can also help quickly gain market share for new product lines.

Merchants haven’t been keen on implementing such programs, focusing solely on the commitment of both time and money that they require. However, this growth hack can be very effective and in helping accomplish other goals. The treasure trove of data that loyalty programs garner of merchants’ most steadfast customers allow businesses to quickly segment their clients, understand the profiles and preferences of this audience, and allow for effective targeting and outreach.

Among U.S. merchants, 75% reaped positive results by implementing a customer loyalty program, regardless of the investment of both human and financial capital to set up the program. Based on results from dual research conducted by Bain & Company and the Harvard Business School, client loyalty programs increase client retention by 5% and yield a 95% increase in profitability.

Human Resource Planning

All these hacks that we’ve listed so far are a great list of options for merchants to test, but they are not one man shows. Just as customers and marketing has to be segmented, so do your employees. Different groups of staff must focus on marketing, security, sales, and numerous other tasks, and they must do it effectively. Merchants need to consider specific strengths, skillsets, engagements levels, and motivations of their team members.

According to research by Gallup, employees who are engaged have a 41% lesser rate of absenteeism and exhibit an increased rate of productivity by 17%. According to research from the Glassdoor Economic Research unit, there is a correlation between customer and employee satisfaction. An increase of 1.3 points in customer satisfaction can be attributed to a 1 point increase in the company rating on Glassdoor’s website.

Expand Payment Options

Consumer shopping habits have shifted towards online, while eCommerce and mobile commerce, mCommerce, have flourished. Furthermore, newer options for payments have become available as demographic trends have also shifted towards contactless and digital. At the peak of the recent market cycle, the most valuable VC-backed firm was a FinTech company, valued at $95 billion. Shoppers prefer to pay via a digital wallet or other payments apps in lieu of a credit cards.

It significantly benefits merchants to start accepting payment methods preferred by consumers. That may include processing payments which include options such as P2P platforms such as PayPal and CashApp, or mobile wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Samsung Pay.

Invest in all The Right Tools

Yes, investing in your employees, securing payments, setting up loyalty programs, planning campaigns, segmenting clientele, propagating urgency, using cutting edge technology such as VR and AR, and expanding payment options are all great hacks. However, having the right tools at your disposal can make life a lot easier and enable your employees to be much more productive.

Meta and Snap have long touted their hardware products for VR and AR. Netflix has gone to Microsoft to seek their help in implementing an advertising campaign and platform. All the major card networks such as Visa and Mastercard have their iterations of the 3D Secure payment security mechanism. There is a plethora of options for appropriate tools for human resource management, marketing campaigns and instigating FOMO, and at Host Merchant Services, we have robust options to help merchants expand their payment options.

Conclusion

eCommerce has grown by leaps and bound over the past decade. Just in 2021, the business segment was up by nearly 50% and in 2022, the industry will surpass $1 trillion in sales revenue, ahead of some initial projections by two years. Declining tech stack costs, improving internet and payments technologies, and the budding of numerous eCommerce platforms, and a natural demographic shift to shop online have all served as tremendous tailwinds for the industry.

Most people understand that eCommerce can sometimes be complicated. However, as with most entrepreneurial endeavors, optimal results from the above mentioned growth hacks will require a certain degree of experimentation. Some may not render many results, other may not work out for your specific industry or business. However, after experiemeting, you will find certain methods an absolute must to propel your business forward.

There are many challenges that still remain which merchants often need to confront in order to power through a growth phase. Areas such as the eCommerce checkout, vigilance towards security concerns arising from changing payments and technology infrastructure, embedded payments, marketing initiatives, employee training, and customer loyalty, all demand a business owner’s attention. As a result, merchants will have to invest both time and resources to continuously improve their processes to address these individual areas. If given the right attention, these initiatives can serve as incredible growth hacks to turbocharge your eCommerce storefront.

A Guide to Starting an eCommerce Store

Have you always wanted to start an eCommerce store but not known where to start?

This guide will give you some of the tools you will need to get your very own online store up on the world wide web.

Let’s cover some of the things you will need to start your own eCommerce business online.

How To Start an eCommerce Business

An online eCommerce business can be a project that you can start from the comfort of your own home, or it could be an extension of an existing real-world business that you already have running.

Either way, it can be a simple enterprise that you can create and grow or a complicated task involving a large team.

You can target business-based markets that are:

B2B: A business that sells supplies or services to other businesses
B2C: A business that sells supplies or services to consumers

Or as a single operator business your markets could be:

C2C: Supplying goods or services to other consumers
C2B: supplying goods or services to businesses.

Which type of business you are in will be determined by your skills and the market that you want to serve.

Choose a Product You Want to Sell

If you have an interest in a product segment or service, then convincing customers about your passion for the product and what it will do for them is a lot easier.

Your online business could be providing a service or supplying goods. The goods could be something you create or a product you buy from a manufacturer or distributor and on-sell to the end user.

Find Your Niche

Your store won’t be the largest store on the internet at the beginning so select a niche market that you want to target and cover that well.

This focus ensures that when a customer visits your store the messaging around your products align well with the product offer you have.

Your niche should solve a need that isn’t being solved well by anyone else and be aimed at a group that has enough disposable income to spend it on things that make them happy or satisfies their requirements for an interest that they have.

Your niche could be based-on price/product quality mix where you aim to be cheaper than all your competitors or the quality of your product and service is so much greater than your competitors that the value your customer associate with your product drives repeat sales and customer satisfaction.

Your niche could be your neighborhood or city. If your eCommerce store is booking services like plumbing repairs you may not want to travel the country for a small job, or a pizza store may have a limited area that they offer the delivery service.

There are demographic groups that may be a target for your product. Baby clothes are best targeted at new mothers and mobility walkers for seniors.

You may also target a niche group with a common interest or attitude. You will always sell more golf clubs to people who like golf!

Research the Product

How Will You Sell Your Product?

If you are offering physical goods, will they be in single packs or bundles? Will your offer be for a service or a downloadable item like an ebook, course, or subscription service?

You may wish to purchase your goods from a manufacturer or distributor and re-sell them while manufacturing your own saleable items is also an option. Home-made goods like candles, jewelry, and clothes can be popular on specialist sites like Etsy.

Another popular selling method online is drop shipping. This is where you offer goods for sale on your eCommerce business website and when a customer orders the good you arrange for the distributor to deliver them directly to your customer.

By doing this you don’t have to carry physical inventory or have the hassles of organizing couriers and packing.

Drop-shipping can work with local suppliers or many international distributors will ship around the world on your behalf.

Legal Requirements

You will need to research your selected product for the local legal requirements in your state.

Does your business require registration to operate in your state and is there a need to register for sales tax?

A registration may be required if providing professional services and permits may be required for some types of production, like producing food items for consumption by humans or pets.

Consulting a legal professional or tax accountant may be required to ensure that you are compliant with the local laws before commencing operations.

Research The Market

Use tools like Google search to find other businesses offering a similar product to your own and investigate their price and service offers. What are their strengths and weaknesses? Where do the opportunities lie for your new business in this market?

This is referred to as a SWOT analysis. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

If you take a piece of paper and draw two perpendicular lines to divide the sheet into 4 squares, then write each of the SWOT headings in a box.

Next, write down each of the competitor’s strengths and weaknesses in the relevant box then formulate the opportunities and threats that this proposes for your business.

From the SWOT analysis, the threats give you insight and the opportunities help forge your direction forward.

You need to determine the size of your niche market and whether there is room for your new business to fit into the market.

If you decide the market is too crowded it could be that your product is just not niche enough and you need to drill down further to create a specialized niche of your own.

How Will you Differentiate Your Product and Service Offers From Others in the Market?

When you want to go deeper into research many online tools can assist you with evaluating what consumers are searching for online.

One of these is the Google Keyword planner. This will allow you to enter your search term and see how many searches have been made over the period you specified.

You can also specify a region to search as well. A high volume of searches for the keyword indicates a high demand for that good or service.

A low volume of keyword searches may indicate a low demand for your niche product or service, or it could just indicate that the public isn’t aware of your niche solution!

The keyword planner also includes related searches which can lead to showing you similar searches that have been conducted to your request indicating what the public is searching for.

Google Trends is a platform that allows you to track the number of searches on a topic over time through what has been searched on Google.

Enter your keywords with a date range and you will see the trend in searches for the keywords over time. This could indicate an increase or decrease in demand but can also indicate if interest in your product may be seasonal in nature.

Select a Business Name and Register it With the Government

Again, consulting with your accountant or a legal professional may be the best start to determine whether your new business will be a sole trader, a limited company, or a corporation.

Each of these structures may require registration to operate in your state. You will also need to consider whether you need an EIN with the IRS or any other registrations required to operate your business online.

Do your local laws require you to register for sales tax or any other specific registration required for your business.

Choose an eCommerce Platform

There is a wide range of eCommerce platforms available on the market each with its pros and cons, and a wide range of monthly and startup costs associated with each.

You need to select a platform that you are confident will scale with your business as you work hard to grow sales over time.

You also need to consider your (or your team’s) technical ability and how easy or hard the setup process may be for the platform you are selecting.

Sometimes the simple platforms don’t provide the flexibility to perform the customization that you want and the fully customizable platforms may have a steep learning curve.

If you already have a WordPress blog, then you can easily add a product like WooCommerce to your blog to have a fully featured online store system.

Other choices include open-source alternatives like Magento or OpenCart, or you may want to select an integrated online platform like Shopify, BigCommerce, or Wix.

If you plan to market some of your products through third-party marketplaces like Amazon, eBay or Etsy then make sure your selected solution has the tools to connect easily to these marketplaces to save you duplicating your work.

Each of these platforms has costs and benefits so research hard into the best solution for your product and proposed marketing offer. If you try hard and get a minimal package you can start your online store for as little as $100 a year.

Many of these solutions include a credit card payment gateway or you can choose an external Payment Gateway Supplier like Host Merchant Services that will work across all of these platforms for you.

Create your site

In much the same way as you would open a traditional storefront on a particular street or neighborhood, or in a shopping center, your online eCommerce business has a place and a look and feel.

Your physical shop storefront has signage outside to attract customers to enter and a certain look and feel once you enter the store.

Your online eCommerce business needs to cover all your brand artifacts as well so when customers are dealing with your brand, they are happy to buy.

Your selection of colors and styles for your online site is important to reflect the values of your brand and what you stand for.

Your logo, themes, and images are also a reflection of this brand.

It’s important to ensure you cover a couple of legal requirements on your site to show your customers you care about doing business with them. Your privacy policy, shipping and returns policy and other data retention policies (that may be covered by law in your area) will communicate with your customer how you will deal with their data and any issues with the transaction.

Load your Products

Now that you have selected your products and market and determined where you are going to source, or manufacture, your products it’s time to start loading products onto your site.

As part of your brand style that you determined when setting the site up all your images and colors must be consistent across your site. Depending on your product range it’s generally better to have all your images with the same background color and image style.

A site with a mixture of landscape and portrait images all with different colored backgrounds can look as unorganized as a dress shop without any clothes hangers.

This guide to eCommerce photography may help.

Launch!

With your site live in the world, don’t sit and wonder where the customers are.

Depending on your chosen platform you should have access to analytics for the visitors to your site. Sites like Google Analytics can give you lots of data on how many visitors you had to your site, where they live, how many products they looked at, and more.

Analyzing this data can help you target your marketing efforts and make modifications to your site. You will enjoy watching the visitor numbers rise over time.

You’ve early determined your target niche market for your site so now is the time to connect with them on their favorite social media network and let them know you are open for business.

Marketing Your Business

As part of your preparation plan, you should have put together a business plan that outlines what your business brand stands for and how you want your customers to view you.

Taking this data, you need to craft marketing for your business and start driving traffic to your eCommerce store.

You can pay for ads on Google and other search engines that will appear alongside people’s search terms when looking for your goods or services.

The amount you pay per click or per impression will be determined by how competitive your keywords are.

If your product fits into the demographic then have it seen with social media influencers that align with your brand values. This can lead to easy exposure for your product, sometimes at a minimal cost for the exposure that the influencer can bring to your brand.

You should run organic traffic and paid campaigns on social media like Facebook and Instagram. By its social nature, the idea is to get a viral message spread through these mediums and reach more people through their contacts and their contacts, contacts.

Most of the eCommerce platforms outlined above have an element that will allow you to collect email addresses from potential clients through a popup signup form or contact page. Also, look at getting people who buy to opt-in to future email marketing so you can retarget them in the future.

Email marketing is also a great way to make an offer to people who have already purchased to encourage friends and family to purchase from your store with a coupon or discount code, thereby increasing your customer base further.

And all through this marketing journey, you should be constantly working on organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO is the least expensive method to drive customers to your online eCommerce business. Every time they search on Google, Bing, or Yahoo and you appear on the first page of the results you are going to increase your traffic.

Therefore, it’s important to make sure that your products and blog posts contain the keywords that people are searching for online about your business.

Your blog posts should reinforce your product keyword strategy to ensure you are seen as an authority on the topic that your business is about.

Your eCommerce Store Online

Once you have your store up and running how successful it is is determined by how well you market your goods or service to your target market.

Your marketing doesn’t need to involve a huge monetary outlay, but it does need to be targeted and consistent.

Most eCommerce stores take around 18 months to 2 years to see results or even think about making a profit so don’t let the small hurdles set you back and keep pushing through with the enthusiasm that made you want to start your eCommerce Business in the beginning.

Once you are at the right point you can scale your business and take it to the next level.