6 Factors That Affect e-Commerce Sales
6 Factors That Affect e-Commerce Sales
Despite of its growing popularity, we cannot deny the fact that ECommerce is an extremely competitive market. E-commerce business owners must constantly stay on their toes and keep an eye on their competition. Despite of a promising market and the recent splurge in the online shopping industry, there are several things that can affect eCommerce sales. For those who are still adjusting to the turbulent market of eCommerce, here are some of the major factors that can improve or lower your sales and conversion rates.
Photo by Maria Elena, CC BY 2.0
1. Website Navigation
The first and foremost thing that every website owner must take care of is the website’s layout. If the website takes a lot of time to load and the pages aren’t categorized properly, there is a huge chance you might not get many customers. As easy as it might sound but making an easy-to-navigate website, takes both time and money. The simpler layout you have for your website, the more number of people will visit your website. The top names in the eCommerce business spend thousands of dollars to create a perfect website. You can also visit FinestShops and other eCommerce related websites for professional e-Commerce hosting.
2. Product Quality
This is a major force that can have a huge impact on your sales. The better quality products you will sell the more people will trust you. Gaining the customer’s trust is first and foremost step towards brand building. Selling inferior quality products for cheap prices can sure get you a lot of initial attention, but will only hamper your goodwill in the long run. Although keeping a check on the quality is not possible for all the products but delivering high quality products is a must if you want to stay in business for long.
3. Returns Policy
There are times when the customer buys a particular product but later on decides to return it. This would’ve been a serious problem a couple of years ago but with the growth of the industry, all the major eCommerce businesses offer a convenient returns policy. But at the same time, it is also important to make a set of rules so that people do not abuse the returns policy. The rules must be clearly stated to the customer before the purchase and should not be confusing to understand. If you miss out on any important clauses there might be a chance of increased customer dissatisfaction which can lead to lower sales.
4. Shipping
The major reason for the growth of eCommerce in the recent years is mainly due to the flexible shipping options that websites offer. The shipping time and the rates make a lot of difference in the number of customer’s you get. Unless it is a specialty item that needs to be shipped internationally, most customers are not very happy about paid shipping. Hence, most companies provide free shipping on orders that exceed a particular amount. The amount of time it takes to deliver the product is also a major factor that can affect your sales. Depending on location, the products should be delivered within the promised time during purchase. Customer satisfaction is all that businesses want.
5. Pricing
The biggest challenge of any eCommerce business is to keep the pricing competitive. If your websites sells higher priced products than your competitors do, there is no way you can expect huge sales. The price wars seem to have grown in magnitude after the economic depression in 2008 and the introduction of cheap yet durable Chinese products. Hence, it is highly important to know the prices offered by your competitors and working accordingly. Nevertheless, selling the products too cheap can also create doubts about their quality, so one always needs to be on their toes.
6. Easy Checkout
Once the customer has decided what to buy, they are not very interested to spend a lot of time in the payments. Designing a quick and easy to navigate checkout page is something that most online shoppers want. Just like the rest of the website, the layout of the checkout screen should be simple and should not require the customer to enter a lot of frustrating details again and again. According to experts, the simplicity of a checkout page contributes to about 20% of the conversions and also determines whether the customer will return to your website or not.
While the market is also dependent on a lot of social and economic factors, the above factors are some of the main drivers that can make it or break it for business owners.
