Important Steps to Follow for Successful Ecommerce Implementation
Last updated on November 29th, 2023 at 08:16 am
An eCommerce business’s success depends on implementing and adopting several key steps to perfectly execute an eCommerce business. Every step positively affects other steps, and it’s vital to implement each with priority and importance.
For an eCommerce business to get the maximum ROI for their investment, doing these seven steps is critical:
1. eCommerce Outline for Roadmaps
Strategy is all about making the right choice when you build an eCommerce website to achieve your business objectives.
A successful eCommerce strategy needs to align with the current needs and plans of the eCommerce industry. Every tiny detail contributes to its overall success, from creating milestones for your business to setting priorities and analyzing the results.
Your eCommerce business has a much better chance of thriving if you go with these two strategies:
- Growth hacking– It means leveling up your sales by running tests on different areas of your business
- Lean management- This requires repeated improvement and application in your analytics, marketing, and the usability of your online store.
2. Mobile Supported eCommerce
Many people now use their smartphones to browse stores and make purchases. Thus, your eCommerce framework has to support an excellent shopping experience across various devices.
Moreover, you could hurt your growth prospects if you don’t provide a mobile-friendly checkout process.
Choose a framework that allows you to create a highly simplified and user-friendly mobile checkout. Make sure you opt for fewer fields and prominent buttons and integrate popular mobile payment methods like PayPal. Amazon Pay, Google Pay, Apple Pay, etc.
3. Business Analysis and Optimization
This is an ongoing process, and the actions involved in optimizing your eCommerce store include analyzing key metrics. It includes the percentage of customers converted, the percentage of users entering the site through various channels, the percentage of revenue that every profitable customer contributes, etc.
You’ll also need to gather and analyze customer feedback. You may also need to return to your list of objectives as essential metrics. It may vary depending on your business goals. When required, some actions need to be taken to improve eCommerce solutions to achieve your goals.
4. Understanding Your Customers’ Needs
Another critical step is understanding your customers. The entire goal of your eCommerce strategy is to make your customers’ lives a lot easier. If the new online process you introduce is more frustrating than they’re intuitive, then your whole strategy could backfire.
Thus, it would help if you asked yourself these critical questions:
- What’s the information needed to make an informed purchase?
- What kind of shopping or checkout experience is best fitted for your product?
- What do your customers need in their login and self-service portal?
- How can you make everything more accessible and intuitive for your customers?
5. Extensive Plugins or Integrations
Every eCommerce platform will provide you with themes, features, and templates. However, you’ll need some other functionality, too, especially when you already know what your shoppers want.
If possible, find out what features or functionalities you’ll need that don’t come with the platform. If you’re running a brick-and-mortar store, you can integrate data from point-of-sale systems and online storefronts. Doing so allows you to gain a more holistic view of your customer’s shopping behaviors and inventory in real-time.
6. Enhancing the Key Metrics of eCommerce
Your online revenues can be affected by your average order value (AOV) conversion rate and the number of sessions. Boosting just one of these variables leads to greater revenue. Thus it would help if you made these performance metrics a priority.
To improve your site’s overall customer interaction, you need to create an organic SEO strategy. To boost the percentage of visits, use analytics tools to find where customers are leaving in the conversion funnel.
Finally, you can use promotions and cross-sell and up-sell strategies to increase AO.
7. Data Security for the Website
Online stores are now a desirable target for hackers. The drastic move to online shopping during the pandemic has made it a more lucrative venture.
It is your responsibility to keep your customers’ information secure. Thus, the viability of your business and online reputation need to avoid data breaches. Data shows that 58% of customers will temporarily stop buying from a website after a data breach.
Frameworks such as SaaS and headless eCommerce with SaaS back-end provide some security levels. On the other hand, more open solutions like Magneto allow you to manage security controls independently.
It may mean protecting your servers with managed security or installing security patches in a timely way.
8. Retention and Loyalty Building
It would help if you also implemented loyalty programs like discounts, redeemable points, free shipping incentives, and customer tiers.
You can also personalize the customer experience based on their purchase history and behavior on your site. Similarly, you can also allow automated cross-selling with features like related products.
Another essential tool used for retention by a lot of marketers is email marketing. It is a vital component of the whole eCommerce experience. So, create highly personalized email campaigns based on your customer’s behaviors.
Doing so allows you to stay relevant and on top of the minds of your customers. You’re constantly adding value to their lives through these promotions. It will enable you to turn your new and existing customers into life-long fans.
Over to you
As you know, eCommerce is an industry that’s constantly changing as technology continues to advance. Most eCommerce frameworks are highly flexible so that you can quickly adapt them to the specific requirements of your business.