Your ecommerce store is your baby. Having put so much time and effort into it, all you want is for it to do great things. But lately, you’ve come to a plateau. No matter what you try, you can’t seem to find effective ways to grow your online store. Luckily, there are some tested ways to attract more business to your e-store. Consider these eight very different ecommerce expansion strategies.
Hyperlocal Business
It’s common for people to equate ecommerce with shipping products long distances. After all, this is one of the most common reasons why people shop online. They see an item they like for a good price, and buy it. The fact that it’s on the other side of the country doesn’t really matter, now that transit costs are so low. However, try going the other direction with your ecommerce store: hyperlocal. This can be highly effective for delivering goods that people want within a few hours—such as perishable foods and beverages.
Growing Social Media
There’s no way to overstate the importance of social media to ecommerce. Even if you already have a social media strategy in place, you need to be continually reviewing and revising it to keep up with industry trends. For example, think about the potential benefits of social media influencers. These are people who will post about your products in exchange for payment or other compensation. A well-matched influencer can do wonders for your brand.
Mobile Friendliness
Mobile search continues to gain relevance. Already, more than half of shopping time is spent on mobile devices. Due to this, you need to make sure your cloud ecommerce platform offers mobile responsiveness. In addition to losing out on customers if you fail to do this, Google will actually punish you in search engine results.
Optimize Your Site
There are so many ways to optimize a website. And considering that slow load speeds can spell disaster for ecommerce stores, optimization is a necessary consideration. Make sure your cloud ecommerce platform offers a variety of ways to optimize your site for both speed and search engine friendliness.
Building More Ecommerce Stores
Often, people are too consumed by their ecommerce stores to think outside the box. One concept to consider is creating additional sites. These can be subsidiary to your main site (such as a high-end product line). However, you can also attempt to build altogether new stores. Diversifying in this way can allow e-store owners to better understand what strategies work best for them.
Partnerships
Businesses too often think of themselves as up against the rest of the world. This doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. In fact, partnering up with other ecommerce vendors is a great way to boost sales for everyone involved. If you have overlapping customers with a complementary store (that isn’t a direct competitor), try collaborating with them. You can each send more business to the other—generating added revenue.
Niche Marketing
One mistake people often make when getting into the ecommerce world is trying to be too broad. While it would be great to have the whole world as your customer, some people will not be interested in your products. Therefore, it’s essential to narrow down and define your niche. Failure to do this will result in a ton of wasted marketing capital.
Try New Delivery Methods
There’s a standard operating procedure for ecommerce; a customer orders a good, it arrives at their door a few days later. However, some companies have found subscription delivery methods are a hit with many customers. In other words, consumers pay a recurring fee to receive shipments at a given interval. Companies like Dollar Shave Club have disrupted their industries by adopting a subscription model. Consider this, or other ways, to come up with novel delivery methods.
Ecommerce is certainly going to continue growing in scope and relevance. This means e-store owners cannot be complacent and continue to find success. Implementing these eight ecommerce expansion strategies will keep you riding the crest of the wave.
