Struggling to Boost eCommerce Sales? These 7 Powerful Tips Can Turn the Table

Do you own a beautiful, well-designed eCommerce store selling the best-quality products?

If yes, you probably would have tried many ways to boost eCommerce sales. But what if most of the tactics you’ve implemented failed to deliver the desired results?

As an online store owner, it can be hard to drive consistent sales, especially when the competition in the eCommerce sector has reached an all-time high. While the challenge to boost eCommerce sales is real, there is a workaround.

To help store owners improve their online sales, we’ve listed down some effective tactics that are certain to move the needle.

1. Leverage Reviews from Existing Customers

If you think online reviews from previous customers are not that important, you’re in for a surprise.

Approximately 72% of online shoppers are more likely to take action after seeing a positive review about the product/service they’re considering to buy, and around 88% of shoppers say that reviews influence their purchase decision.

So if your target customers come across two websites selling the exact same product and negligible price difference, the shopper will be inclined towards making a purchase from the website that has verified customer reviews for each of their products.

Words of praise about a brand or product from real online shoppers are valuable and can be instrumental to your business growth.

If you’ve never bothered to collect reviews from your old customers, a great way to do it now is by reaching out to them via email and asking for their unbiased reviews for the products they’ve purchased.

To encourage them to share their honest opinion, you can offer them a limited-period discount code or free shipping on their next order against their review. It can create a win-win situation for your previous customers and you, so do give it a try.

2. Create Launch Calendars

This tactic to increase eCommerce sales will work best for stores that keep launching new products frequently.

You should prepare a launch calendar and make its link available on your store’s products tab, homepage banner, or any other section you feel will attract the visitors’ attention. Before doing so, ensure that you’ve created separate product pages for each of the listed products with a countdown timer and an email collection form with the message, “Signup to get notified when then the product goes live.”

If you have trending products lined up, you’ll see a significant rise in email signups. It will also help you identify the products having a ready buyer base even before the official launch, so you can plan your inventory accordingly.

The best part of this method is it helps you get more email subscribers, helping you create a need for the upcoming launches via a strategically designed email nurturing sequence.

You can also do this before launching your festive collection, holiday collection, etc., and see visible results.

3. Add Video Demonstrations & High-quality Product Images

One drawback of online stores is the inability to physically touch the listed products and check for quality. If a visitor has reached your store for the first time, he will be skeptical about the quality of the listed products.

If you want to boost your eCommerce sales, you have to put an end to any hesitancy that can potentially stop the visitor from making a purchase from your site. A great way to end most doubts is by adding high-quality pictures of your products taken from different angles and uploading a video demonstration highlighting the product’s features and the best way to use it.

You may be surprised to see how massive difference such small changes can bring. For example, the likelihood of online shoppers adding a product with video demonstration to their shopping cart increases by 144% compared to products that don’t. You can expect similar results when shoppers get to view high-quality product images compared to blurry product images.

4. Simplify the Checkout Process by Removing Unwanted Steps

People are turning towards online shopping because of the ease it offers.

But if you try to complicate the online shopping process by adding complex or time-consuming steps that can be avoided, you are sure to push your prospective customers towards your competitors. One such step that is taking away much of online sales is a poorly designed checkout process.

You will be amazed to know that around 78% of visitors leave an online store without making a purchase. Though there are multiple reasons behind it, having a confusing and long checkout process is a prominent one.

To reduce your cart abandonment rate, try to eliminate all unnecessary fields from the checkout form and don’t limit their action by making it time-sensitive. For example, if your customers have to go through the entire checkout process again as the previous attempt took more than a minute or two, you’re guaranteed to lose sales.

Remove all these things from your checkout process, and notice the sales going up.

5. Provide Multiple Payment Options

The easier you make it for online shoppers to make a purchase, the better.

Because the last thing an online store owner would want to see is a customer willing to make a purchase but leaving the site due to limited payment options.

People now have more payment options than ever, and giving them limited payment options at checkout can turn away quite a lot of them.

So if you’ve always been accepting credit cards as a payment mode till now, it’s time you add more options. You can consider adding payment options like debit cards, PayPal, online wallets, etc.

You can take a quick look at what payment options your competitors are offering before finalizing the list of new payment methods. Optimizing your store for multiple payment methods will take time, but it is certain to give you way higher returns in the form of increased eCommerce sales.

6. Use FOMO Tactics

Whether you visit giant eCommerce marketplaces like Amazon or head to small online retailers selling niche-specific items, you can spot FOMO tactics applied by most of them.

The Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) creates an urgency among potential buyers, which often translates to higher eCommerce sales. While the end goal is to induce urgency to make people buy now instead of a later date, the ways to achieve this goal can be plentiful.

Also, the ways that work for certain online stores may or may not work for you. It all depends on your target audience and the products you’re selling.

The most common FOMO tactic used by eCommerce store owners is using timers on discounted items. Another way is to bundle products to increase the Average Order Value (AOV) and sell them under the limited edition category.

To get more FOMO ideas for boosting eCommerce sales, check out as many online stores as possible to see what they’re offering. However, don’t copy the exact tactic. Once you’ve got some good ideas, come up with something unique that will give your store an edge over other competing stores.

7. Run Highly-Targeted Paid Campaigns

If you’re comfortable spending money to attract engaged shoppers, you should start running highly-targeted paid campaigns. It can boost eCommerce sales pretty quick.

It is one proven tactic that gives quick results if executed correctly. Paid ads give you the option to laser target shoppers who have previously shown interest in the products you sell or are active online shoppers.

You can either run Google ads, Facebook ads, Snapchat ads, and other available options or outsource the same to professionals for best results.

Since running ads requires a lot of investment on a daily basis, be sure you have enough working capital to run ads without halting other business operations. If you want to start slow, start with Google shopping ads, and venture to more ad platforms as and when you start getting results.

Wrap Up

If your old methods to generate eCommerce sales have stopped working, it’s time to resort to newer and better ideas.

Since not all strategies to increase sales work equally well for stores across niches, we’ve listed some evergreen tactics that can be implemented by most store owners.

The list contains a mix of some budget-friendly and investment heavy methods to boost eCommerce sales, so pick the ones that fall within your budget and start implementing them right away.

Do let us know which methods you liked the most or which methods worked the best for your store.