Many of our business storage clients operate ecommerce stores or sell via online websites such as Facebook Marketplace or eBay. Today we will be giving you tips on how you can sell more online without having to spend more money on advertising.
Let’s jump straight into it.
Free shipping is a great way to remove friction from a sale and while the majority of stores and brands offer free shipping some still don’t. If you aren’t offering free shipping give it a try and watch your sales increase.
If you sell products internationally then free shipping won’t work as the fees to send items abroad can be very expensive, but for all domestic sales adding free shipping is a great way of getting your customers to click the buy it now button.
If a potential customer has never seen your brand before and isn’t too sure about you then you will have to build trust with them. A clear refund policy in the result of an item not being as described or broken is a good way of building trust and converting more potential customers into customers.
Not having a clear policy will stop people from buying from you. You can add your refund policy onto the footer of your website or on every listing on your store.
There are entire websites built for comparing your products so you will need to be competitive. You should have already done your own research before purchasing stock but if you haven’t check out what your competitors are charging and price accordingly.
If you work in an industry where products are similar and so is the pricing for them then you will still need to find a way of standing out. Adding custom descriptions and other user reviews to your listings along with photos and videos you have taken will allow your listing to stand out.
Showing the item and giving the user more information than other listings will increase your sales.
Ratings and reviews on the internet can make or break a company. To increase your sales regularly ask for feedback and respond to all of your reviews. You should take extra care with negative reviews and read through them to see what you could be doing better.
You won’t get everything right and sometimes you will make mistakes, be sure to apologise for these mistakes and learn from them.
Look for trends in your sales data to predict future trends. If you know you sell certain items during select periods of the year then stock more of those items the next year. It could also be the case that certain types of inventory don’t sell as well so avoid buying them in the future. This may seem like obvious advice but if you have a store with thousands of items you may not know which products do well and which don’t.
Sites like eBay and Facebook Marketplace work because they have so many people using them, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be promoting the items that you sell.
You can use social media to drive traffic to your listings in order to sell more of them. Social media is free too so it’s an excellent way of pushing sales when you are first starting out.
Running a successful ecommerce company can be difficult so use tools to make you more productive where possible. You can use tools to automatically reduce your inventory management or even print out your packaging labels automatically. When your first start off you won’t need to automate as much of your business but as you get more successful you will.
Most people won’t buy off you the first time they come across you so for these potential buyers you will need to get them onto an email list where you can contact them every so often to try and sell to them.
Building an email marketing list isn’t as easy as it sounds and you will need to incentify someone to get them onto your list. A good way of doing so is to provide them with a discount code for their email.
Giving someone a discount to purchase your products may not be something that you want to do but for a small discount, you have an email that you can market to every few weeks. This will increase your revenue and create repeat buyers.