E-Commerce

What is e-commerce?

It is the buying and selling of products and services over the internet. E-Commerce has allowed firms to establish a market presence, or to enhance an existing market position, by providing a cheaper and more efficient distribution chain for their products or services.

Some advantages of e-commerce for consumers are:

• Convenience: e-commerce can take place 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• Selection: Many stores offer a wider array of products online that they otherwise could not access.

HOW DO I get A SUCCESSFUL E-COMMERCE STORE?

Providing an excellent customer experience is one of the most important ways to improve retention and profitability in any business.

Today’s customers are clever, connected and terribly disloyal. They like to have various brand choices and competition has become fierce. In order to have a successful business, companies need to focus on delivering an outstanding customer experience and make sure that their customers always come running back for more.

Focus on getting the right products to your visitor and making the user journey to the shopping cart and checkout page as simple as possible.

What are the top online retailers doing?

Top online retailers are moving towards a much more content focused approach. Content is king and worldwide leaders in e-commerce have adopted a content-first strategy. Creating engaging, fresh content helps build and maintain relationships with existing clients as well as reaching out to a new audience.

It’s about engaging more deeply with your market and amplifying your message via social media.

What do I need to do?

You need an influencer list. Your influencers are going to be your shortcut into the market. Key influencers have authority and with the surge in social media usage, an influencer might be able to reach thousands of your potential customers. As you know posting to your own site is easy but you’ll also need to have a target list of external sites to get published to.

You need to think a bit. Take a step back and ask yourself “Who is your ideal client? Where do they live? What are their interests?” Knowing your clients is going to dictate the type of content you’ll create

Organise your content! Don’t leave it to chance. Commit yourself to creating content on a regular basis. Put it in a calendar to keep you focused on the right track.

Great content is key to the success of your e-commerce site. What’s better? 10,000 uninterested visitors or 1,000 motivated and engaged visitors? Of course, the latter.

So I have great content…What's Next?

You’ve got your influencers on board and you’ve created some great content. All that remains is to hit the ‘Publish’ button. Wrong! You’re not done until you have complimented your content with some great visuals. There are two main reasons for this.

• Firstly, if you want to get social media traction, then you need images. With nearly two-thirds of social media posts including an image it means images are not an optional—they are a must.
• Secondly, creating visual versions of your content gives you huge scope for repurposing  your content without having to start from scratch. If you have spent time researching and creating content then it makes sense to cater for different audiences  with different preferences for content.

What about conversions?

Content can be used to increase traffic, but it isn’t all about traffic. Conversion is an area where you can really get an advantage over less motivated competitors.

Mobile and tablet traffic together accounted for more than half of all website traffic and more than half of those users were repeat customers. At Incredible Web we encourage all development to be mobile-first because it has been established that mobile users are more likely to whip out the credit card.

For e-commerce merchants, there are loads of possibilities when it comes to content marketing, and this trend is only going to continue with the increasingly converging worlds of blogging, social media, and e-commerce.