6 Must have Imperative Features That Every eCommerce Store Needs

eCommerce store features

This creativity, however, is short lived. Shoppers quickly pick up on things they like and then start to demand it from every digital shopping experience. The savvy eCommerce merchant is capable of building a robust user experience using industry leading practices while making sure to optimize it for their specific niche industry. 

Shopper preferences are largely fueled by five major preferences, and eCommerce sites that are able to build their features out to cater to these preferences are ultimately more successful. The preferences include: 

Merchants that are able to follow these five preferences will put themselves in a much better position to innovate further, as well as create a phenomenal customer experience for their shoppers. This guide is designed to prepare you with 6 features which eCommerce stores must have to stay relevant and continue to deliver a high-quality user experience to their shoppers.

1. A Mobile-Friendly Website 

Mobile devices have become a ubiquitous part of the digital experience, and eCommerce sites that are not optimized for mobile are severely behind. 

The necessity to have a mobile-friendly experience ranges back a few years, and shoppers view eCommerce sites with poor mobile experiences as inconvenient relics. 

The statistics behind mobile shopping are worth taking a look at: 

• 125 million U.S consumers own smartphones. 
• 50 million U.S consumers own tablets. 
• In the last 6 month period, 62% of smartphone users purchased something online. (This means 77.5 million purchases made from a mobile device!) 
• One out of every three online purchases is done on a smartphone.

2. Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) 

Every second your shoppers spend questioning or looking for an answer to a question erodes their confidence and chips away at their focus. A Frequently Asked Questions page is a great way to provide your shoppers with the answers they are looking for and keeps their eye on the prize. 

The best way to put together a Frequently Asked Questions page is to compile all the questions your shoppers actively ask and try to come up with questions that would help them make a better-informed decision. This helps to establish credibility and build confidence with your buyers. 

Your FAQ page is also an opportunity to add a human element back into the shopping experience. Even though the primary purpose of the page is to deliver information, you can still have fun with it and be expressive of your brand’s voice. 

3. User Reviews 

There are few ways that can establish credibility in the eyes of shoppers in addition to user-generated reviews. Roughly 92% of shoppers read reviews before making a purchase, and a review is the number-one factor shoppers use to judge a product and business.

It’s very important that your user reviews are organic and real. Shoppers tend to be suspicious of product reviews that are overly positive and seem disingenuous, and many merchants pin themselves into this hole by buying fake reviews and deleting negative ones.

Additionally, 44% of shoppers say reviews must be written within a month to be relevant. 

This is why eCommerce sites will go as far as to email shoppers to leave a review reflective of their experience. 

Depending on what type of eCommerce website you are using, you can use plugins from popular review platforms such as Facebook and Yelp. There are also many plugins available that create a rating system native to your page.

4. High-Quality Photos and Videos

Shoppers want to see more than a stock photo image and bullet points. 

Merchants that put in the extra effort to create high-quality photos and videos throughout their site and product pages show an attention to detail that ultimately wins over customers. High-quality photos and videos not only appeal to people’s visual desires, they also help to showcase a brand’s personality and product features in an engaging manner. 

Additionally, creating custom high-quality pictures and videos of your products will help your images to stand out in shopping platforms such as Google Shopping. Chances are there are dozens of readily available substitutes to your product, and a shopper’s decision usually comes down to which image inspires the most positive feeling. 

Make the investment in a high-quality camera or photographer to come up with some beautiful product photos. You will not only see an improvement in your conversion rates, you will also be able to use those photographs in social media promotions in high-gloss platforms such as Pinterest. 

5. Social Media Links for Social Proof 

By providing social media links and creating a bridge between your social media platforms and your site, you are able to showcase a living, breathing community of other humans who purchased your products. 

This social proof gives your shoppers a sense of community and social validation that your products and services are worth spending money on. Along with user-generated reviews, social media links allow merchants to build credibility to their site. 

Additionally, diversifying your audience across multiple social media platforms also helps you to retain and communicate with your audience better. You can turn your site into a powerful vehicle to help your social media marketing efforts become much more effective. 

Having social media links on your product pages not only eases whatever shopping anxieties your shoppers may have, but it also gives satisfied shoppers the opportunity to share your products on social media. This means your product pages will not only get more viewers and potentially more sales, but the boost in traffic could also render a jump in search engine results pages.

6. Online Chats

The rise of eCommerce online chats and chat bots has come about largely due to the desire to better cater to shoppers. Online chats help to add a human element to the digital shopping experience and can recreate the experience of having employees in a physical store.  

Online chats are essentially an omnipresent FAQ section, waiting to help customers with whatever they need. Customers love the mere thought that there is another human being at the other end of the conversation willing to help answer any questions, but also create value in new ways such as offering opinions on specific case-by-case situations. 

Originally Published At www.visiture.com

12 Best Practices of Social Media for Marketing Your eCommerce Business

eCommerce Social Media Marketing

If you run an eCommerce business, you're probably very much aware of the increasingly significant role Social media plays in the development of online shopping. With 93 percent of buyers going to Social media to help settle on purchasing choices—and 90 percent of them saying they trust product proposals from their companions—maintaining a strategic distance from Social media basically isn't an alternative in the event that you need to contend on the web. 

Start With the Basics 

The eCommerce universe is driven by Website traffic, yet pulling in customers to your site through web-based social media is actually quite difficult. Making supported progress requires something beyond strategies; it considers an internet based life showcasing a system that takes the following:

Defining Goals: 

You have to set benchmarks for what achievement will look like before you even consider handling strategies. Be as explicit as conceivable by setting quantifiable goals that include the: 

1. The measure of traffic you need to get from social media
2. Number of fans and followers
3. The ratio of visitors to conversions
4. Number and type of presents compared to the measure of engagement
5. The ratio of audience growth and engagement to sales.

Understanding Customer's content needs: 

You need to know what your possibilities and customers need before you can begin posting content that addresses those issues. Get knowledge by asking customers what they need to find out about and screen your intended interest target audience’s via web-based social media sites.

Utilizing information: 

Your site's analytics give a wealth of data on customer behavior, including where your Social media traffic is coming from, which kinds of content get the most perspectives, and when visitors connect with the content. You can utilize this information to post specific content on the occasion that get the most engagement on each respective platform. Before you make your social media marketing strategy, make sure to return and audit historic performance to perceive what was best and join that conduct with new activities moving forward. This is the way you find best practices. 

Sharing, not selling: 

Although an ever-increasing number of customers start their purchasing journey via Social media, most don't visit internet based life locales with the expectation of shopping. Social Media is tied in with building relationships first; selling is a far off second. That implies you have to concentrate on sharing helpful data and building up trust before attempting to make a sale. In the world of B2B sales, leaders collaborate with five bits of content via social media before they're prepared to talk with a salesperson. A similar guideline extends to B2C eCommerce marketing. 

Following advancement: 

As you build up your social media strategy, characterize how you will approach following advancement and evolving conduct, for example, making reports, revising your plan, and imparting updates to colleagues consistently. Trends change and your social media strategy need to represent them. 

12 Top Social Media Tactics

When you've built up your system, utilize these twelve web-based life advertising strategies to help traffic and become your eCommerce business:

1. Optimize social media posts: 

Using high-conversion keywords in your posts can build their visibility in look and in this way empower you to contact a considerably bigger group of spectators than your direct followers. Perform keyword research to find the terms shoppers are looking to discover content identified with your industry, business, and products/services, and afterward strategically incorporate them into your posts.

Additionally, at whatever point conceivable, add a visual component to your presents on help snatch the eye of your occupied with, checking readers.

2. Share the right content: 

Sales pitches are a certain fire approach to dismiss customers. Rather, give helpful, a share-commendable substance that increases the value of your possibilities and customers. Keep the experience social, intuitive, and logical, utilizing your presents on recount to customers-stories, share news, and give supportive tips. Offset limited time posts with ones that instruct, illuminate, engage, and put customers' needs over your own. 

3. Use your reviews: 

Let your fulfilled customers do your online life showcasing for you by sharing their surveys of your products. Surveys are powerful tools since possibilities are bound to be available to an item evaluation when it originates from a goal outsider, for example, a reliable customer. Truth be told, 88 percent of purchasers state they trust online audits as much as close to home suggestions.

4. Add social sharing buttons in strategic places: 

Adding sharing gadgets like Facebook's "Like" catch to the entirety of your product pages can be valuable for attracting customers who are further along in the purchasing cycle. Furthermore, consider setting sharing buttons in a prominent area in your site's design. For example, empower customers to impart their audit of an item to their Twitter devotees or Facebook companions, or enable them to share a business offer or even a business confirmation email.

5. Use visual content: 

Image-based content is normally more captivating than content-based posts, making it ideal for showcasing your business via social media. Actually, I think about the show that utilizing pictures is the most significant strategy for enhancing social media posts. Make your product pictures shareable on locales that support picture driven marketing, for example, Instagram and Pinterest (i.e., incorporate Pinterest's "Stick It" button on all pictures). You can likewise get creative and include customer selfies with products on your product pages. 

6. Interact with followers: 

Social media is the perfect platform for connecting straightforwardly with possibilities and customers. Screen posts and connect with them regularly to pose inquiries, react to their remarks, express gratitude toward them for sharing your content, and take an interest in exchanges. It's an incredible method to show you genuinely care about them and are keen on serving their needs, which can go far towards building trust and shortening the business cycle.

7. Be consistent: 

Posting content all the time is basic to improve customer engagement and drive more traffic to your eCommerce site. Frequency can differ dependent on your market, yet consistency is critical to show your group of spectators that you're keen on always sharing significant content. To make this procedure simpler and spare time, use a marketing automation tool such as Around.io, for example, Around.io so you can plan posts ahead of time. 

8. Start a blog: 

Not having a constant flow of new content is a typical complaint of many eCommerce businesses. Probably the most ideal approach to cure this is to keep up a functioning site with educational and inspirational content so you generally have something to discuss. In addition to exhibiting your organization's one of a kind viewpoint or aptitude, a solitary blog post can deliver many social media posts that connect with followers and compel them to navigate to your website. 

9. Use hashtags: 

Hashtags help your content get found all the more every now and again via social media platforms. They sort out content, extend the compass of your posts, and advance collaboration. Abstain from utilizing such a large number of hashtags in one social media update, constraining them to one to two for each post. 

10. Be short and sweet: 

Concise and convincing updates pull in more engagement via social media than longer posts. Your followers are significantly more likely to share your short, visual posts since they can rapidly be processed and went along. For instance, bother a blog entry with a connecting with a picture and an interesting headline.

11. Add tweetable quotes to blog posts: 

In addition, empowering perusers to tweet a whole blog post, take a stab at including "tweet this" usefulness all through your post to make statements and expressions tweetable. Apparatuses, for example, ClicktoTweet convert code for you to make this procedure quick and simple.

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12. Use paid advertising: 

If you have the budget, take your Social media marketing to the following level with Facebook advertisements, LinkedIn promotions, or Promoted Tweets that you interface back to a product page for a change. For whatever length of time that they're profoundly focused on, these paid alternatives can help you significantly boost website traffic.

Integrating social media into your advertising blend is basic to be focused on eCommerce. On the off chance that you put the correct right strategy and social media marketing tactics set up, you can improve brand awareness, drive more traffic and changes, increment customer engagement and faithfulness, and eventually grow your business.

Social Media Marketing Tactics to Drive More Traffics to your Online Business

If you run an eCommerce business, you’re probably well aware of the increasingly important role social media plays in the evolution of online shopping. With 93 percent of consumers turning to social media to help make buying decisions—and 90 percent of them saying they trust product recommendations from their peers—avoiding social media simply isn’t an option if you want to compete online.

eCommerce Social Media Marketing

Start With the Basics

The eCommerce universe is driven by website traffic, but attracting consumers to your site through social media is easier said than done. Achieving sustained success requires more than just tactics; it takes a eCommerce Social Media Marketing strategy that takes into account the following:

• Setting goals: You need to set benchmarks for what success will look like before you even think about tackling tactics. Be as specific as possible by setting measurable objectives that include the:
  
  
  • Amount of traffic you want to receive from social media
    
  • Number of fans and followers
    
  • Ratio of visitors to conversions
    
  • Number and type of posts compared to the amount of engagement
    
  • Ratio of audience growth and engagement to sales
    
    
    • As a benchmarking example, according to HubSpot’s 2015 Social Media Benchmarks Report, companies in the consumer goods/retail/eCommerce industry average 6.02 posts per week, have 370,321 followers, and average 11.4 interactions per post
      
      
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Grow Online Presence with Social Media Marketing Strategy in eCommerce

As social media and ecommerce become increasingly enmeshed in our lives, the opportunities for them to interact with and bolster each other are innumerable, considering that the average person spends around an hour and 40 minutes browsing social media every day, and the number of internet shoppers in the US will reach 217 million this year.

eCommerce Social Media Marketing

Evolving Role of eCommerce Social Media Marketing

Back in the old days, a business’s presence would be signified by advertisements in the paper and a physical storefront. Now, in the digital age, business reputations live and die by their social media standing. Right now, social media is used by brands as a way to advertise, increase their online presence, and deliver high-quality customer service. In 2017, we can expect those trends to continue, as some new ones emerge. Let’s take a look at the growing role of social media in ecommerce.

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