As in any business, in e-commerce, the main goal is to increase sales. But also, as in any business, selling is not just engaging users in your product or making them visit your store. Selling is making people notice you, trust you, and prefer you over your competitors.

Unfortunately, many online store owners believe that selling more is based on getting more traffic, and they don’t realize that their low selling numbers aren’t a result of lack of visitors.

No, low traffic is not the problem. Besides, don’t you think that it is better to attract traffic to a store that actually sells instead of to attract them to one which doesn’t? That’s why it’s imperative that you learn a few tricks to boost your e-commerce sales.

1. Increase your average order value (AOV)

What? You don’t know your average order value? It’s just your total revenue divided by the number of completed orders: if your store’s sales were $3,000 and you had a total of 100 sales, your AOV would be $30. And why is that important? Because if you manage to increase your sales to $40, you’ll be making around $4,000 with the same number of sales, that is, you’ll be increasing your income 25%.

How to achieve it?

+ Offer cross-selling: when users add a product to their cart, offer related products, complementary items, or extra services. We all know the line “Customers who bought this item also bought” and we read it continually in many e-commerce. The more related those complementary items are to the products users have already added to their carts, the higher the chances you have to make them add those items to their purchase, even if they were not planning on doing so.

+ Remind users how much they need to spend to get free shipping: sometimes, users are a few bucks away from getting free shipping. If their cart reminds them so, they will probably add any other product to compensate.

+ Offer extra services along the purchases: technical support, gift wrapping, express shipping, even extending the manufacturer’s warranty. These details that have little cost to you might mean added value to users, and so they might add them to their purchase.

2. Increase conversion rates

Conversion rate means the number of orders that you get every 100 customers that visit your online store. It’s something worth keeping an eye on since you might think that you are selling less than you could, and then find out is not like that. Or you might think that you are selling a lot when you can really do better. What you should always keep in mind is: why do users look for my product, land on my website but leave empty handed? If your abandonment rate (number of visitors who leave without purchasing) is too high, you must be doing something wrong. You should try to make customers who are interested in your product and visit your store complete their purchase.

How to achieve it?

+ Enhance your store’s usability: if your online store is not easy to use, you will probably lose a lot of sales: either because your clients get lost in your web, they don’t have a clear idea of what they are purchasing, or they don’t trust your web because it doesn’t look secure enough. Keeping the “Purchase” button on plain sight, clarifying payment processes, specifying the characteristics of the products, or adding images can easily help uplifting your sales, even if the number of visits doesn’t.

+ Check the conversion funnel of your payment process: payment processes tend to be boring. Even if users already know and are fully aware of that, after clicking “Finish Purchase”, they can abandon the order. It’s easy to lose customers during this step. Mistakes such as asking for ridiculous data (identity document numbers, date of birth, etc.), adding charges to some payment methods, or forcing users to register to your web can make your conversion rate to drastically drop.

+ Monitor pages with higher bounce rates (visitors that abandon your web from the landing page) and with higher abandonment rates (pages from where most users abandon your web, even if they stay there for a while): you might realize that those pages from where most users abandon your web are those pages you are not even considering: shipping information page, home page, or category page. Once you identify them, you can center your efforts in optimizing the pages that are damaging your store.

+ Focus on your most relevant traffic: try to detect the most relevant traffic to plan enhancements to your store. It’s not the same a customer who accesses your web from AdWords (Google adds) using a relevant keyword than one who gets there from organic traffic (from a search engine, for example) using a keyword that doesn’t ring any bells to you. If you monitor the behavior of your most relevant traffic, the info you get will be way more accurate.

3. Improve relevant traffic

Well, yes. Now you can start trying to boost your traffic. Because that new traffic that you are going to get will result in more sales (conversions) made of more items (average order value.) But don’t fool yourself: it’s not just about attracting more traffic, but attracting the right traffic. There’s no use in having visitors that are not looking for your product or that don’t want to purchase from you. You should put all your marketing efforts in customers that are looking for your product and that are willing to buy it from your website.

How to achieve it?

+ Improve SEO positioning for your most relevant products: identify the most relevant keywords by traffic or by low competition. Don’t do it for the general sector, do it for specific products and by order of importance (by most profitable product or the one you really want to sell.) Determine that product’s keywords and adapt the product’s page (main features, content, images, etc.) A blog can also help optimizing your products’ positioning through reviews, videos, or product lists.

+ Improve the profitability of your SEM strategy (Google adds): try to lower your CPC (Cost per Click) while keeping the traffic. You can position on less competing words (long tail), invest in a variety of adds (yes, this will really affect your CPC), or try to give more exposure to your web in concrete product searches instead of in general sector searches. If you can lower your CPC, you’ll get a lot more relevant traffic for the same price.

+ Take advantage of email marketing: spam kills your brand. But well-designed email marketing can lead to fortunate conversion rates. Email marketing offers added value to your customers (content, discounts, news, etc.) and leads potential clients to subscribe to your lists. Send relevant updates periodically and watch your efforts turn into sales. You can also offer discounts to those clients who haven’t purchased in a while, or offer special discounts solely to clients if you want to get rid of remaining stock, and many other ideas that will surely pop into your head.

As you can see, most of these methods come from web analytics, something that, as I always say, is your store’s heart. To get to know your clients and their behaviors, and your store and its functioning, it’s crucial that you access the analytical data that, every month, will show you the way to get more and more users and increase your e-commerce sales.

Creativedog can help you with this. Not only with your online store (e-commerce) design but also with SEO and later analysis of your web and the behavior of the users that you need to increase your sales. Give as a call, that’s why we are here for.