Best eCommerce tools to make your brand profitable

While it’s an undisputed fact that the 2020 pandemic has severely affected the global economy, there are certain industries that are booming. One of the most prominent lines of business is eCommerce.

People want to stay safely at home while shop to their heart’s content and what better to satisfy this need than eCommerce. This has got a lot of business owners to start considering shifting from brick & mortar shops to the online arena.

A prospective consumer base of 1.92 billion should be enough to start your preparations to become a part of this lucrative venture. However, with great opportunity comes tremendous competition and you need to ready yourself and do your research beforehand.

Powerful tools to boost your eCommerce business

Without the right eCommerce tools, your brand will be hardpressed in making a name in this competitive market. These tools will help manage all facets of your business and make realtime decisions. Let’s have a look at some of the most popular tools in the market.

  1. GrooveHQ

GrooveHQ eCommerce tool might be one of the most comprehensive platforms for managing your customer service and support requirements.

This is extremely important because the success of your business largely depends on your customers and therefore the quality of service you provide to them. you would like to be absolutely sure every customer features a support experience which will make them want to return for future purchases.

GrooveHQ

Customers mostly leave because they don’t feel appreciated or couldn’t speak to someone who could help them. Having this routine of rude and unhelpful behaviour among employees and being passed around to different representatives also are some common reasons for leaving.

On the opposite hand, 86% of consumers will still do business with a corporation if they need an emotional reference to its customer service agents. this suggests that companies that specialise in delivering an honest customer experience tend to be more profitable overall.

The GrooveHQ ticketing system makes it easier for you to deliver personalized service and support experiences to your customers. With easy ticket assignments, you’ll make sure that customers get support from agents that they need to be connected with within the past. you’ll also maintain your customer conversations in one place so anyone can keep track of past communications and supply support accordingly.

  1. ClickMeeting

Now you’re probably conscious of how popular webinars are for B2B companies and academic institutions, as they’re mostly used for distributing educational information. So you would possibly be wondering how they’re relevant for eCommerce merchants.

That’s exactly why you’ve got leverage over your competitors – webinars aren’t yet capitalised to their full extent within the eCommerce industry. For eCommerce merchants, webinars are often highly effective for showcasing hands-on product demonstrations.

You could demonstrate the way to use newly-launched products and highly technical products, also as the way to make the foremost of certain features. This way, internet buyers can get the subsequent effective thing to in-store product demonstrations. Webinars also are a superb channel to conduct product deep-dive sessions while adding a person’s touch to your communication.

ClickMeeting

The ClickMeeting platform allows you to make a customized webinar room with just a couple of clicks. you’ll engage the audience with polls and surveys, moderated Q&A sessions, and simultaneous chat translations. You can make the foremost of the webinar recording feature and repurpose clips from the session for your brand’s YouTube channel, otherwise, you can prefer to simulcast your webinars to YouTube and Facebook for max live video reach.

Once the session is over, you’ll get a summary of its performance using the attendee statistics. Here, you get a transparent idea of the number of audiences and where they’re from, also about the top devices they used. You’ll then be ready to use this information for creating improvements to future sessions and re-engagement campaigns.

  1. BigCommerce

BigCommerce is an effective internet site builder designed for ecommerce stores. But what makes it a must have the potential to manipulate more than one income channels on a unified dashboard. This gives scalability for ecommerce traders who want to begin adopting omni-channel retail.

BigCommerce

These omni-channel clients have a tendency to spend greater than unmarried-channel customers. They spend 4% greater in-keep and 10% greater online, in comparison to customers who most effectively used one channel. In different words, you need to make the studies and buy approaches less complicated throughout each channel.

And that is where BigCommerce comes into  the picture. It’s a powerful eCommerce platform for syncing your stock with all of the channels you operate for direct income. BigCommerce helps local integrations with numerous key channels, consisting of Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Pinterest, or even the usage of the Square POS system.

Conclusion

Setting up an eCommerce shop might seem easy however there are many challenges in making your business successful. Which why need to use the tool for your brand. If you have any questions or you need some help in setting up your eCommerce shop, then simply drop us a line and we’ll get in touch with you in no time.

7 eCommerce Website Design Features that increase your Conversion

Do you have an eCommerce website that is visually appealing in design? In spite of aesthetic eCommerce website design, you are somehow struggling to get enough conversions? Well, do you know you can improve your conversions for your eCommerce store to a greater extent? Yes, you can do it by improving your eCommerce website design.

Here we present top 7 ‘must-have’ elements for your eCommerce website design that can skyrocket your conversions:

ecommerce website design elements

1. Keep your customer in mind before and during designing

According to Lindi Wheaton, when selecting an eCommerce cart to work with for online business, keep customer satisfaction at the front of your mind. This in return will reward you with customer loyalty.

Designing an eCommerce website that is usable and accessible often requires an investment. You need to invest in quality time and dedicated resources (consultants and Web designers). Of course, this investment pays-off good returns in the long run. In any circumstances, a customer-centric website leads to conversions over a website design that is not customer-centric. Great designs give great results since users feel welcome to your site and get inspirations to buy. Tip: Design your site in such a way that screen-readers can access it. Also, embrace screen-readable descriptions of the images displayed on the page to grab the attention of visually weaken visitors.

2. Double-check about website Security & Platform

Visitors who make a transaction on eCommerce websites are always concerned about the security of their personal and financial information. Just imagine, will you buy anything online from the site which people don’t trust? No, is it? The same way you should think of security concerns for your visitors. You need to let know your potential customers that their data isn’t going to fall into the wrong hands.

You can win the trust of your customers regarding their personal and financial information security by buying an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. This is because customers are more likely to reach for payment option while purchasing online if a website is secure. On the other hand, SSL is an effortless way to secure your website. SSL relies on encryption to make the transactions private. Its encryption prevents any malicious intent that can be dangerous for your credit card information.

Tip: You can quickly verify for SSL certification of any website:

  • A URL with https:// instead of http://
  • A green “lock” icon in the address bar

3. A mobile-friendly design full of creativity

We have already emphasized the importance of responsive designs. It is one of the most important website designing trends for the year 2017. Mobile-friendly designs are inevitable since mobile devices have become an indispensable part of our daily routine. Hence, as an eCommerce store owner, your eCommerce website design should pass a check of mobile-friendliness.

According to Statista.com, in 2016, global e-retail sales amounted to 1.9 trillion U.S. dollars, and it is expected to reach 4.06 trillion U.S. dollars by 2020.

Mobile-friendly E-commerce Website  Design

The above projections indicate how online shopping is one of the most popular online activities at a global level. And, impressive revenues are earned through mobile shopping.

As an eCommerce store owner, you need to ensure that your brand and online presence doesn’t reflect another business. Your first impression will be judged by your eCommerce website design during the first visit of browsers to your online store. Your design should be unique to visitors. They should find it worth buying from in it. Invest in custom website design for your shopping cart and enjoy conversions! Tip: If you have a traditional eCommerce website design, redesign it for handheld devices. Responsive designs will let you earn more traffic and revenue, and reach out to a much wider audience.

4. Website Hosting

Have you ever got switched to another website for shopping from your favourite one just because it did not load on time? Or, have you suffered irritation while doing online shopping because the website was too slow to load products or reach to check-out page?

A slow and unresponsive eCommerce website design is a significant restraint. This is because an average online user can only bear load time of up to 3 seconds.

Website_Hosting_E-commerce_Website_Design

From both perspectives, customer experience and search engine optimization, the loading speed of your website is crucial. Some hosting platforms provide dual advantages of native SEO traits as well as offer apps to strengthen their SEO efforts. Tip: eCommerce websites that load in less than 3 seconds have a lot of benefits over websites that take longer to load.

5. A strong and compelling Call-to-Action

A strong and compelling call-to-action (CTA) is a website element that encourages customers to take a particular action while navigating your website.

Do not miss out to create your CTA buttons captivating and intriguing. Such CTAs can attract users and capture their interest in your eCommerce website design. Your CTA content should invite them to follow through by clicking on the button. CTAs facilitate you the prospect to engage users and keep them moving further down the funnel towards a conversion. According to HubSpot, by creating a CTA with a quote from a treasured customer, you can kill two birds with one stone.

CTAs should be industry-specific and far from generic. Use enticing copy that truly encourages the user to click on the button because there is a clear value in doing so. In terms of the design, buttons should be prominent on your web pages and stand out vibrantly so that the user never has to actively look for the button. Make sure your visitors get the option to take multiple actions with the influence of strong and compelling CTA.Tip: Most prominent CTA buttons in an eCommerce website design are“buy now”, “shop now”, “add to the cart”, and others. However, you should experiment a few of these with a few variations of colours, image, and content, on your own store to see which performs best!

6. User-friendly navigation

Your website navigation can lead a user either to continue his journey for long or leave the website forever. You need to ensure that your eCommerce website design is properly structured. A proper structure and easy navigation help visitors to browse and search engines to understand. As far as possible, avoid drop-down menus since it encourages visitors to skip important web pages. According to Kissmetrics, put your most important items at the beginning of the navigation and the least important items in the middle. “Contact” should be the last item on the list, putting it at the far right in top-level horizontal navigation, a standard location.

User-friendly E-commerce Website Design

The reason behind a neat structure of the website is to ensure that visitors should always be sure of where they are on your website. Your website navigation can have an impact on both traffic and conversion. If they are aware of what they want and where they are, a conversion will not be difficult to take place.

Tip: One of the best ways to boost website navigation experience is to append breadcrumb navigation and an HTML site map in the footer section.

7. Include Product Reviews

According to the study of CompUSA® and iPerceptions®, 63% of consumers indicate that they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews.

One of the highly important but quite underrated element to promote the reputation and evaluate an eCommerce store is Product Reviews. An eCommerce store has a good collection of consumer reviews on your products has the capability to widen its customer base. Brands like Samsung, Apple, Nike, Levis, and others have gained a significant market share in a short span on the basis of positive product reviews.

It’s safe and sound to stress the importance of customers’ reviews regardless of how well you promote your online stores and products. Customers’ reviews on your products will always have higher weight age and greater impact. They not only read online reviews but also compare positive reviews with negative reviews on the same product. According to Advances in Economics and Business, “85.57% of the participants stated that they read reviews often or very often before they purchase online.

Product reviews can either make or break the ultimate decision of the buyer to buy the product. Hence, in your eCommerce website design, choose a shopping cart that has a space for product ratings and reviews.

Tip: Suggestion on how to include ‘product reviews’ in your eCommerce store.

  1. Incorporate a five-star rating or a 1-10 scaling system below every product.
  2. Make it viewable and easy for the user to assign grades (with as few clicks as possible.
  3. For your top reviews, create a separate landing page featuring testimonials written by registered customers.

At last!!

The ultimate goal of your eCommerce website is to sell your products and generate revenue. This end goal can be drilled down into smaller goals. These goals include email subscription, signing up, increasing social media followers, or sharing a piece of content. You can achieve all these goals with a proper eCommerce website design in a place. And, this is now possible if most of the above-mentioned traits can be taken care of. However, there are a number of tactics you can apply to help with eCommerce conversion optimization and convert your browsers into buyers.

Do you own an eCommerce store? How far your eCommerce website design is optimized for conversions? Do drop in your words in the comments section!

How To Setup an eCommerce Store In Australia?

This post is by guest author, Umair Qureshi. This article has been edited and published with the author’s permission.

Australia is the 7th largest economy in the Asia-Pacific region and the 12th largest in the world. Since the last two decades, Australia has enjoyed uninterrupted economic growth, a result that is reflected in the per capita GDP of the country (the fifth highest in the world today). World Bank Group ranks Australia as the 15th easiest country to set-up and runs a business. Furthermore, the establishment process of e-commerce stores is so easy that you can set up a new business in just two days. Here, we shall focus on the process and potential hurdles of the establishment of e-commerce stores in Australia.

Establishment of an eCommerce store in Australia

For people who like to crunch numbers, here are some interesting statistics and facts pertaining to the Australian economy and eCommerce scenario in perspective:

Australia’s eCommerce sales were more than $20 billion in 2016 and, are estimated to exceed $24 billion by 2018.

eCommerce store in Australia

Australian eCommerce customer demographics are mostly dominated by the youth with the age curve around 30 years. This means a somewhat limited market as of now. However, this also implies that there is a huge potential for growth in the upcoming years. The number of online buyers is steadily increasing. At the moment, the number of online transactions is low, but the cart size is on the rise. All these cumulatively indicate that more and more people are comfortable with online shopping.

Australia is fortunate in terms of eCommerce and online business because it has a clear-cut high demographic yield that responds well to the market. 90% of online transactions in Australia involve three or fewer brands. This can also be interpreted as brand loyalty because customers trust the brand for the quality of products/services and remain loyal to the chosen brand. Therefore, it is important that an online store should establish itself as a trustworthy brand in the market.

Now, running an eCommerce store in the competitive Australian market is not that easy. Although there are a number of platforms that streamline the process of setting up and managing online stores, you as the owner/manager should also be well versed in the relevant fields such as logistics, referencing, and customer management.

So, if you wish to launch and manage an online store in Australia, read through this blog. This blog will help you to avoid the hurdles that have the potential to sink many online stores.

The process to Follow to Establish an E-commerce Store in Australia

The success of any business is dependent on proper planning and following a well-prepared plan. Setting up an eCommerce store in Australia is a step-by-step process that requires thorough planning and attention to minute details.

I will now present several important pointers that will help you come up with proper planning and action items for your business setup process.

1. Choose Your Legal Form

Opening an online store begins with the legal recognition of the brand/store. You will have to define the legal status of your store before registering it with the relevant services such as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). This authority allows a registration number to your business. You could choose any legal status you see fit. However, I recommend that you opt for being registered as a self-employed entrepreneur or a sole proprietor. It is always best to consult an expert (an accountant or a business advisor) at this point.

2. Draft a Business Plan

A business plan documents all the required details about how your store will be established and how will it function. Many people skip this important step because creating a business plan appears too cumbersome to follow. However, following this step allows you to analyze your action plan and ensures that your project is on the right track at all times.

3. Choose A Domain Name

The choice of the domain name pretty much determines the future of your eCommerce store. Plan to invest several hours in discovering the right domain name for your store. A number of online tools (like Mashable, shopify) help you in choosing the best name for your new store. Remember that your domain name has to be catchy and unique.

4. Choose Your Hosting Service

Very few people actually know how to set up and manage servers. Even if you are among the very few of such technical experts, it is still a tedious and time-consuming process for you. I recommend that you opt for managed cloud-based hosting for your online store. This way you will be able to sidestep all server related issues (including security) and focus on your business full-time.

You are definitely wondering: which hosting provider to choose for your e-commerce store? A very legitimate question indeed! Choosing the right eCommerce web host, as Cloudways helps you by providing:

● 24x7x365 chat supports so that you are able to get quick help at all times.
● A powerful stack comprising of high-performing and optimized caching technologies.
● Auto-scalability with almost zero downtime.
● Dispersed data centres to reduce latency and target your audience more effectively.

5. Create the Store

There are many platforms in the market which you can use to open an online store. Depending on your requirements and technical expertise, you can choose Woo CommerceMagento, Prestashop, Opencart, or others. Some of these platforms offer turnkey e-commerce solutions, while others require extensive design and development skills. Other platforms request for HTML and CSS skills. A competent developer who specializes in eCommerce solutions could prove to be an ideal partner.

6. Standards and Technical Regulations

Suppliers and manufacturers have a legal and moral obligation to ensure that their products are safe for consumers to use. All products must comply with the appropriate safety standards, contain clear instructions for proper use, and include warnings about probable abuse. If a product does not meet the mandatory standards as set by Australian authorities, there is a risk of legal actions against the business.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) requires compliance with product safety, information standards, and the prohibition of dangerous goods as declared in the Trade Practices Act. The “Fair Trade Offices” also play an important role in the safety of products.

7. Finding and Dealing with Suppliers

As an eCommerce store owner, reliable suppliers should be of utmost and important priority. For this, explore your industry to discover wholesalers. Once you have the suppliers lined up, you need to set up logistics.

Many people prefer handling the supply lines through the post office. However, third-party logistics partners such as DHL are also popular business partners. Whatever your choice is, it is essential to negotiate an advantageous contract in your favour.

8. Manage the Inventory

No customer, willing to buy, likes the “Out-of-Stock” notice. To avoid this (embarrassing) situation, it is important that you pay close attention to inventory management. This is an ongoing process and requires good relationships with your suppliers and logistics partners.

Sales data analysis is an important part of inventory management. Over a period of time, you will acquire the skill of juggling between often contrasting requirements of inventory management.

9. Define (Legal) T&C and Policies

Well defined and easy to understand policies are one of the essential requirements for any eCommerce store. Many customers often check out the payment and return policies prior to finalizing their purchase decision.

In order to come up with an ethical and concrete set of terms and conditions, ask a lawyer to go through your draft of T&C and policies. He will ensure that your draft complies with the existing Australian consumer protection laws.

10. Build Your Online Presence

“You can’t just open a website and expect people to flood in. If you really want to succeed you have to create traffic.”- Joel Anderson, Walmart CEO

Once your e-commerce site/store is ready, you have to build your online presence in order to reach new customers and build rapport with them. This step demands careful planning and working with vendors and suppliers so that you could build a solid and trustworthy online presence on social media channels. This necessarily involves good digital marketing strategies that include an email campaign, a customer loyalty program, a blog on a persistent basis, and a proactive presence on multiple social networks.

Closing thoughts – Now Realize Your Dream

As I mentioned earlier in this article, Australia is the country where people are not at all stranger to online shopping. Proper planning and meticulous attention to details are the real keys to the success of your online store in Australia.

Top 10 Things: eCommerce store owner should know about Magento

Magento is a leading eCommerce platform, helping millions of online retailers generate higher revenue. It can be used for businesses in all shapes and sizes. On Magento, you do not need to be worried even if you are just a new kid on the block. The platform offers complete scalability and offers optimal performance for all types of business websites.

There are two versions of Magento:  Enterprise and Community, the latter being free while the former comes at a price. There are numerous tweaks and modifications that you can do both on the frontend and the backend of the platform to optimize marketing and analytical techniques to improve your administration options. It offers several features for improving the shopping experience of your customers.

Here are some of the main aspects that you need to know before you get onto the platform:

Available for everyone

Magento-open-source

– With the help of Magento, anyone can open an eCommerce store as it is an open source platform. This means that anyone out there can modify or update the customizable features on the platform owing to the complete access that has been provided for the users.

– It will help you to set-up and maintain the website very easily. However, if you need to hire a developer to build your website, Magento can help you to run estimates to see if the cost of a developer is cheaper over time as compared to the cost of a hosted eCommerce solution.

Customer Support

magento Customer Support

– Magento is the best solution as compared to other eCommerce platforms, owing to the fact that it has all the necessary resources that can help you get started on the platform and create your own website.

– The platform houses numerous resources like blogs, forums, customer support teams etc., to answer questions and provide all kinds of services for customers and developers.

– Stay up to date with the latest features in technology as well as security. Magento keeps updating its existing features and also adds new features, modules and security applications, thereby keeping the playing field constantly versatile and exciting.

Performance

magento Performance

– Magento will help you get more attention from potential customers by ensuring circumstances that guarantee high performance as well as tailored solutions for your customers

– It is very important to understand that the speed of your website can easily affect the rank of your page in Google search results. Moreover, a slow website can adversely impact the user experience. Today, if a page takes long to load or fails to perform to the user’s expectations, it will certainly face the wrath of low traffic and considerably lower conversions. In order to ensure that a business website does not have to go through this, Magento constantly updates the features on the platform, thereby providing businesses with the required solutions and the necessary parameters for taking care of problems.

Third-Party Integrations

magento Third Party Integrations

– Magento can help you use other tools, databases, extensions or custom modules. It has a great third party interface which can help you in faster development of your eCommerce site as compared to other websites.

– You can explore various databases, search engines, applications, shipping methods, and even payment gateways, with the help of various third-party integrations that can be used very easily with Magento.

–  Owing to the considerable freedom that you have on the website, you can personally introduce your own database onto the platform, including elements such as external payment sources as well as new shipping methods.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization

– You would certainly want your page to be on the top of the list of search results. Well with Magento, it just gets easier. Magento is search engine friendly and has inbuilt structures and checks which are essentially designed to optimize your web content.

– It comes with a bucket full of preloaded features to make adding keywords to descriptions, URLs, sitemaps, rich snippets, etc very easy and convenient.

How does it do all this? Well, each category and product has a unique HTML URL, keywords and Meta tags. This will give you a higher search engine ranking as major search engines are not able to crawl through the dynamic URL. The purpose of dynamic URLs is to create a temporary page on the basis of the dynamic navigation that is a part of the Magento platform. For instance, if you enter a product called Acer in the category “laptop”, Magento creates a dynamic page for the query, owing to which the search engine takes it as a unique page even though it does not exist in online reality.

Magento for Mobile

Magento for Mobile

– Mobility is one of the hottest business characteristics in today’s world. Every retailer would certainly like to keep their customers’ convenience very high on their wish-list, which in the case of mobility is quite high. Well with Magento, building mobile compatible web sites becomes very easy. With Magento, integration of features with responsive design is much easier as compared to integration of websites through other platforms.

– By utilizing the powerful customizable features of the platform, you can make sure that your customers are able to access your website through various mediums PC, Laptop, Smart Phone or a Tablet.

“According to some major stats, it was found that Magento as a platform is being used by approximately 26 percent of all the sites which are in the top 1 million categories.”

Flexibility

Flexibility

– The amount of flexibility that Magento offers you as an eCommerce platform is unparalleled to anything you can experience on any other platforms.

– The numerous extensions, as well as the heavily customizable features on the platform, can help you literally design your own “Magento”. What we mean by this is that the degree of customizability is so high on the platform that it can allow each and every business to create its very own unique brand or experience with relative ease.

Multi-Lingual, Multi-Stores and Multi-Website

Multi-Lingual, Multi-Stores and Multi-Website

– Magento is the online platform which provides you with a single admin dashboard from where you can manage multiple ecommerce stores, in multiple languages, as well as multiple websites, with convenience and ease. This can make you feel like a supreme being controlling the workings of numerous sections of the online world through a touch a few buttons,

– The backend system in Magneto empowers webmaster to make necessary changes in catalogue items, and make required updates across multiple eCommerce sites. It will help you to track inventory, billing, product updates, customer info, and many more from a single administration panel.

– The scenery from this central point of control is beautiful, especially because it can help you integrate and manage third party interactions with the multiple websites and the stores that you manage.

Scalability

Scalability

– Magento can be used without the fear of having aspects like the traffic volume and quantity of content affecting the performance of the website.

– Magento can handle the change in traffic volume in your website with ease, allowing you to add features without taking the entire system completely offline during an overhaul.

Content Management System

 – Magneto is the most flexible and feature-rich of all the content management systems available in the market.

So, if you want to be in total control, managing multiple e-commerce stores, tracking their growth and development, and literally changing the online landscape in order to facilitate upgrades in their functionalities and features, you know where to go. Are you up for God Mode?