Thanks to “out-of-the-box” e-commerce solutions like Shopify and BigCommerce, the e-commerce world is EXPLODING. People are starting up stores left and right.
And who could blame them? An e-commerce store is one of the best starting businesses you can get into overnight. The potential to make a lot of money is definitely there, and you can also learn very valuable business skills while working on a store.
Today’s article is for the e-commerce store owners among our readers. If you’ve been looking for ways to earn some more money on your store, or increase conversions, this article should definitely help you out!
Bundle Products
When looking to increase sales, it can be tempting to simply throw more advertisements or popups in front of the visitor. Doing so may increase revenue in the short term, but is bad for the user experience and will likely lead to a decay of your brand.
Instead, we should never make a change without remembering the user experience. At the end of the day, the cornerstone to good business is VALUE. We want to sell more products, yes. But instead of thinking of ways we can manipulate our customers into giving them more money, we should simply provide them with more value. In return, they’ll be happy to purchase more of our products!
Bundling is a fantastic example of increasing revenue and value.
Bundling is very simple. When a customer buys a specific product, give them the option to add a product that matches perfectly with their order at a discounted rate.
For example, if you sell lawn care equipment, you could bundle fertilizer with a lawnmower (obviously, do your research before choosing items to bundle!).
The idea is simple. If someone’s buying a lawnmower, they’ll also likely buy fertilizer at some point. However, they may buy it somewhere else. To provide value and make sure the customer buys from our site, we can bundle both items together and give a slight discount.
Free Shipping
Another great way to increase sales is to offer free shipping. Now, this doesn’t mean you have to pay for the shipping. Instead, you simply take the shipping costs and add them to the product price.
So if your product costs $35 with $5 shipping, you would simply change the price of the product to $40.
Now, the reason why this is effective is psychological. When a customer sees a $35 price, that’s the price they fix in their mind. Then when they get to the checkout page and see they have to spend another $5 on shipping, they get a negative feeling. Why? Because they were never planning on spending that additional $5.
Instead of viewing the $5 as a cost they had to pay, they view it as a fluff cost.
Yes, this has caused customers to exit the checkout process (the last thing we want to happen).
By offering free shipping, we’re doing two things:
Differentiating ourselves from the competition that doesn’t offer it
Removing the negative psychological effect that comes with an additional price
Optimize your Search Bar
You may not have thought of this, but the search bar for your store is very important. Chances are, you have more products on your site than what’s displayed on your homepage.
This means unless someone sees the product they’re looking for immediately, the easiest way they can find what they want is to use the search bar. And if you haven’t made the search easy to see/use, then there’s a good chance they’ll bounce right off the site!
Therefore, it’s very important to make sure the search bar stands out. Take a look at how Amazon does it… the search bar is front and center. Now, since your site is likely not as big as Amazon, you probably don’t need the search bar front and center. However, highlighting it never hurts – try making it a complementary color and see if it has any effect on conversion rates!
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If you liked this article, you may also enjoy:
The “New SEO” and E-Commerce Stores
Google’s New “Trusted Store” Program
