Everybody wants to have an eCommerce business that runs on autopilot.
And you can… but you need to follow a structure.
Just like the pyramids, building anything of value takes time and effort — fun fact: it took a 100 years to build The Great Pyramid using 1.3 million stones by thousands of workers.
Luckily eCommerce doesn’t need 100 years or any stones (unless you are selling them, like this pet rock that made millions in sales)
But you do need to have a specific structure, otherwise it will all fall apart sooner or later.
Here is the eCommerce pyramid structure:
At the bottom is the foundation and what most online businesses neglect.
What do you need to get right for your eCommerce business foundation?
You can learn more about each by clicking on them.
But whatever you do, don’t build an eCommerce business without making sure you get those right.
If you don’t have the right software, how can you expand and upgrade in the future?
If you are not measuring everything, how do you know what’s working and not working for your business?
If you are not taking security measures, what will you do when your online store is taken offline?
After we take care of the foundation, we can take care of your Users Experience.
When we talk about User Experience here we mean your online store visitors understand what your online store is about, they can find and do what they want without hiccups.
What are some hiccups they might face?
- Slow or buggy website
- Poor navigation
- Difficulty to understand what you offer
And how can you measure your User Experience performance? You want to be looking at these metrics:
- Bounce rate
- Average time on site
- Exit rate
You can’t improve what you don’t measure
— Peter Drucker, inventor of modern business management
A poor User Experience would mean some of your pages have higher than normal bounce and exit rate with low average time on site — what that means is your visitors are leaving more than they should.
Now that we have a strong foundation, happy visitors browsing around your eCommerce store — we can talk about improving shopping experience.
Shopping experience is when your visitors start looking at your products and adding them to cart.
The thing is even if you have good foundation, user experience and amazing products to sell; your visitors might leave without showing interest.
Here are the top reasons your visitors might leave without shopping around:
- Lack of trust
- Lack of reviews
- Confusing product pages
To find you whether your online store has a good or poor shopping experience, you will be able to see it within these metrics:
- Add to cart rate
- Product pages bounce / exit rate
- Category pages bounce / exit rate
You got everything going for you and sales are coming in every month — how do you get more?
If you have managed to fix everything up until here, the challenge with increasing your sales really boils down to a few key issues:
- Poor checkout experience
- Shipping / hidden fees
- Lack of incentives and recommendations
And if you want to see how good/bad your sales situation is then you need to look at the following metrics:
- Conversion rate
- Cart abandonment rate
- Checkout abandonment rate
Together in this guide we covered your eCommerce business growth strategy from the ground up.
We started with a strong foundation that is a must for any eCommerce business to grow by choosing the right software, measuring everything and taking security measures.
Then we worked on the User Experience to make sure you are not wasting money on advertising bringing visitors that will only leave and shared a quick guide on how you can improve your eCommerce business User Experience here.
Having a good User Experience is a good foundation to improve on your Shopping Experience to convert more visitors into shoppers, we also shared a quick guide here on how you can improve your eCommerce business Shopping Experience.
And lastly we covered the most interesting part for you as an eCommerce business owner — how can you increase your bottomline, which again we have a quick guide here on improving your eCommerce business sales.
