If you are a business owner in Australia, you are required to focus on certain key factors to ensure that your online marketing avenues are a successful venture. Online retail in Australia has a recorded growth of up to $33 billion in sales, and more than 75% of the online consumers are aged between 35 – 44 years. Statistics such as these can be critical information in determining the type of audience to target with your products.
The following business strategies are more than likely to catapult your online presence over the rest of your competitors.
Essential Rule #1: User-Friendly Site Navigation
When a consumer visits your online store, they are either looking for recommendations on a particular product or know exactly what they want. Providing ample information on your home page can help the consumer navigate to the required item in a few clicks.
Ensure there is a search function that is visible and has a predictive input function embedded. This helps people that type a word to automatically fill the search box with their desired product and click the ‘Search’ button.
Personalised recommendations can increase sales by catering to a particular individual’s needs and interests.
Essential Rule #2: Information should be detailed and concise
An e-commerce site that lists information with simple, brief, and value-adding data allows its customer to shop with confidence. Some of the crucial components required:
- Price – Keeping the MRP of a particular product visible to the customer lets them easily determine their budget. Discounted rates can be provided nearby to allow the consumer to assess the sale.
- Compare – Many customers would like to compare products and their performance before making a purchase. For this reason, it’s highly advised to add a comparison tool to assist the customer in determining the value of a product against its price.
- Language – If your site is known globally, then adding a language feature might be a good idea as it can allow foreign buyers to navigate with the same ease as local consumers.
- Queries – Consumers will always have questions, having them answered in a section will help promote sales efficiently
Essential Rule #3: Stable Hosting Platform
Any downtime your online retail site faces are converted to lost revenue; this will also cause your customers to lose trust in your company. Ensure that you invest in a dependable server hosting company that employs the use of backup servers as well as dedicated servers with plenty of bandwidths.
The higher the bandwidth, the more traffic your site can withstand. Let’s say you decide to host a sale and the number of consumers that arrive at your site is significant, having a poor bandwidth would cause catastrophic errors such as slower load times, product pages showing flawed information, or having your website crash.
These days it’s a good idea to go with a hosting platform that provides cloud-based DDoS protection to eliminate exterior threats and to keep your data secure.
Essential Rule #4: Secure Shopping Experience
Every consumer that visits your site expects it to be free of malware and other viruses. The reason many shoppers stay away from online shopping is due to the risk of losing precious information such as credit cards, social security number, sensitive information on the computer, etc.
It’s important to keep the site secured with updated security applications and ensure that the payment gateway is encrypted. This allows the customer to checkout without any threat to their payment information.
Also, ensure that you warn your customers against fraudulent and phishing sites claiming to be your company.
Essential Rule #5: Actively Engage in Social Media
E-commerce businesses thrive on ‘word-by-mouth’ approach, and today the best way to achieve this is by posting promotional content on social media sites. You can build a consumer base by actively participating in social exchanges such as paying heed to user reviews, feedbacks, answering queries, etc.
Regularly posting rich content based on new products can interest consumers and pave a path to promoting your company in the right way. Posting photos on Instagram, a short post on Facebook, a tweet on twitter are excellent ways to communicate to your consumers.
Always remember that no company has ever built its way to the top without first advertising itself.
