How often do you drive past a shop closing down and wonder what the reason was? A lot of the time, the answer is that they just can’t compete any longer with online competitors who have an online store.
This massive switch to online shopping been slowly creeping up for years, and it’s really sad to see local stores go out of business, but this is an unavoidable change in the industry. Ecommerce is smashing the retail market, and statistics show that around 3 out of 4 people believe they will get a better deal online rather than going to a physical store.
So, if you own a small business, then you NEED to engage ecommerce website development to help your business grow and tap into the online shopping market. To do this, you need an effective ecommerce web design specialist like Simple Pixels.
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The Benefits
Benefits of Ecommerce Websites
Reengage Customers
Effective ecommerce website development is about understanding your customer’s behaviours and building an online shopping experience that caters to them.
Did you know that over 70% of online shoppers abandon their carts before making a purchase? Digital analytics make it easier to understand how and why customers behave a certain way when shopping, something that is simply not possible to accurately measure in a physical store.
If and when a customer abandons their online shopping cart, there are plugins we can set your online store up with that will remind your customer about the product they were about to buy or sending them some kind of additional incentive. This can help you recover around 30% of lost sales.
Attract New Customers
High-quality ecommerce web design will also help you advertise more effectively. You will be able to run targeted ads that reach your customers directly. With 1 trillion searches per day on Google alone, there is a massive opportunity to reach potential customers and drive them to your online store so that they can buy your products.
Pay per click (PPC) advertising is where you can be assured your online store will be placed at the top of the search engine’s results page. With PPC, you only have to pay for your ad when someone clicks on it.
There are heaps of ways to advertise any online promotions to your customers through tactics like content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and more!
When you begin ecommerce website development, you open up a whole new world of opportunities for marketing your products online. Sit back and watch your customer base grow!
Get Discovered More Easily
Search engine optimised ecommerce web design means people who have never visited your physical store can easily find you online. If someone performs a Google search containing targeted keywords that match your products, your website will show up in the search results. This will give your prospective customers the chance to visit your website. The higher your website is ranked, the more easily discovered it will be.
There are ways to get your website rank higher up, and this process is called search engine optimisation (SEO). At Simple Pixels, we can help you with this. We will analyse your content and tweak it so that it is friendly to search engines when being indexed, earning it a higher place in search results for the keyword your customers are using.
To summarise, the advantages of engaging ecommerce website development include generating new leads, more effective advertising, and more easily attracting new customers through search engines. The benefit to your customers is that your online store means they can shop when they want, where they want, and how they want!
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Selling Products Online
Why Should You Sell Your Products Online?
Lots of people prefer to shop online nowadays
If you only sell your product from a physical shop, then you are greatly limiting the number of potential customers you can have.
Digital sales grew by 49% in the first month of COVID19. Since people have had less opportunity to go out shopping at stores, there has been a massive shift towards online shopping. If you don’t have an online shop, then you are missing out on a huge slice of the market!
While there are some shoppers out there who always buy certain items like clothing or furniture from a physical store, there are many more who love the convenience of online shopping. Why should someone travel and find parking when they can order it online (which is much safer during a pandemic).
What are your competitors doing? If they’re online, you need to be too!
An online store costs less to run than a physical one
Naturally, a physical store is going to have greater overheads than one that is purely digital. Renting the physical store space, paying/training store staff, insurance, cleaning, maintenance, utility bills etc. are all costs associated with running a brick and mortar store.
On the other hand, an ecommerce website has minimal running costs in comparison. While web hosting, marketing, and shipping logistics will incur a cost, they are collectively much cheaper than a physical store.
People use the internet to research products they want to buy
Have a look at which methods people use for shopping and product discovery:
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Facebook – 27%
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Retail websites – 36%
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eBay – 38%
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Amazon – 72%
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Google – 85%
As you can see, Google search is the #1 platform people use to find products they want to buy.
You need use SEO in conjunction with ecommerce web design to have a chance of showing up in a search. Every product you sell will be indexed by Google, and if you want them to show up on the first page of search results, you will need to make an investment in SEO.
People are more impulsive when shopping online, especially from their phones
More than 25% of online purchases are performed via a mobile device, and this percentage is set to continue increasing. The immediacy of a mobile device means that people are making purchase decisions more impulsively, and you need engage ecommerce website development to tap into this market.
