Ecommerce Strategies to Improve Your Efficiency

To get to the next level in your business you need to set some goals and create strategies accordingly, right? To optimize your business strategy, doing some research and looking at what your competitors’ are doing can be helpful.

Today we will show you how to improve your efficiency while increasing your sales numbers and the satisfaction level of your customers.

Let’s start with making your customers happy! When a new customer decides to give you a try, they want the sign-up process to be quick. They would like to sign up and gain access as quickly as possible for shopping. To do that effectively you can give them a variety of sign-up options. This will give them the freedom to choose how they want to give you their information.

After signing up if they make the purchase your customers want the freedom to choose the best packages, pricing, and payment methods that match their needs. Make sure that you offer the best deals to your target customers for bundled goods.. Your pricing is one of the essential parts of your business. It should be consistent with your branding and business goals. Lastly, ensure that you offer a payment method you can give flexibility over how they will pay.

Remember that your marketing tactics have to give your customers the freedom to make choices. You would want your customers to trust you as a brand and your product’s quality. This is one of the core principles you should be following: Be transparent about what you do and what you don’t offer.

When you are marketing product and service comparisons, be sure to give customers a honest list of what’s available. If you’re including your product or service, make sure to include the pros and cons of your offer, too — not just those of your competitors.

To learn more about increasing customer satisfaction read our blog post: Give Your Customers Options. We love this article because it’s helpful and includes various points you should be considering.

Now let’s dive into your operational process. The first thing you or your team might be diving headfirst into is a huge workload including inventory management, product fulfillment, customer support, marketing operations, competitor monitoring, price adjustments — the list is endless… Especially if you run an SMB online store, you may directly deal with these repetitive tasks.

We assume all ecommerce managers or teams want to automate these daily repetitive tasks in order to improve their productivity and earn some time to focus on more growth and business development.

Luckily we will list the repetitive jobs which are mostly done by interns or virtual assistants to let you know before starting an ecommerce business. Some of them have an automated solution.

Before working with an automated tool that can solve your problems keep these two tips in your mind:

• Evaluate your repetitive tasks and go after the tasks that are not sustainable when done manually.
• Acquire a tool that can perfectly perform without or at least with occasional involvement of you. Otherwise, it won’t save you time and improve your efficiency.

Let’s tear down some of your daily tasks that can be automated.

It’s no secret that online shoppers are incredibly willing to compare your prices with your competitors’. Moreover, thanks to comparison engines, finding best deals has never been easier. Therefore, ignoring your competitors’ pricing strategies altogether is not a sustainable business approach. As the online world is highly dynamic, you should monitor the competitor prices daily and adjust yours in order to attract more customers. Unfortunately, most retailers do this research manually.

Another one might be tracking your own website performance. This is a well-known and highly prioritized task. But what about your competitors’? Do you remember the last time you checked their website?

You should continuously benchmark your online store against your competitors and industry, reveal your competitors’ online strategy and discover new opportunities.

To get the daily website performance data that helps you to generate actionable insights and make strategic decisions, you can use tools such as Alexa and SimilarWeb.

Moreover, tools such as Ahrefs, Spyfu and SEMrush help you to track your competitors’ most profitable keywords, paid ads and organic search and highlight them which are helpful for organic SEO traffic. They provide you an overview of any domain’s presence by analyzing Google.

Lastly, you should have been tracking your competitors’ social media and contents. Following dozens of industry and competitor blogs can be a time-consuming and untidy but also a must-do act.

If you decide to ignore what is happening in the industry in terms of content and social media campaigns, you can miss out on a lot of opportunities. Staying updated about the industry and the content strategy of competitors are vital tasks in e-commerce as it is evolving every day.

To turn this task into an automated one you can try to use automated tools that help you to discover which content of competitors has performed best and which social media channels are getting high engagement. Tools such as Buzzsumo, Mention you can save or manually gather data across multiple dashboards and channels and reach the necessary outcome just with a few clicks.

To learn more about diminishing your daily tasks to automated ones read our blog post: Repetitive Ecommerce Tasks:Aren’t You Bored Of Them?

Having an ecommerce business allows you to work with the products that you love. But the competition is really high, and you can’t just start without having some things clear.

One of the first things that you should do is making competitor analysis and competition mapping. Both entrepreneurs that are starting now, and e-commerce managers and SMEs owners that have been working on it for some years, have to know their own competitive positioning in this competitive market in every stage of business in order to make better strategic decisions.

Let’s create a checklist that makes sure to have a detailed competitor analysis covering the crucial aspects of ecommerce. Not only do we provide this checklist, we also give competitor intelligence tool recommendations that will help you to have better competitor monitoring abilities in a market where information is huge.

Without any doubt, the most popular place to promote your ecommerce business is Google. Not only is it just a promotional medium, but also your potential customers are first starting shopping there. So, it would be a wise start to make competitor analysis and mapping on Google and also understand the online behavior of your customers.

First, make a list of the keywords that are converting well and relevant to your business. Then start searching these keywords in Google and make note of who is ranking on the first page and similar to your business.

Do you know who your competitors’ are? If yes, you should’ve been knowing their weaknesses and strengths on their online sites. It’s now time to take a look at their traffic. Detecting which sources attract the most traffic to your competitors will help you decide where to focus your marketing efforts.

And last but not least, track your competitors’ prices! Ecommerce is huge and the competition is really harsh especially in price wars. As online shoppers have an immense variety in the online market and have great ability to find the best deals, they don’t hesitate even a second to prefer one of your competitors.

By tracking your competitor prices, you will know your real competitive positioning in the market. This is important to make your marketing campaigns fit with how the customers perceive your products.

Also, you’ll have great knowledge about the market. As you’ll have data from historical price fluctuations, you can better forecast the market evolution in terms of price.

To learn more about how to do competitor analysis read our blog post: Competitor Analysis: How to Guide with Checklist & Tools. This article is valuable to learn how to track your competitors’ moves and understand the strategy behind it.

What do you think about strategies we’ve shared this week? Let’s meet in the comments section!