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Expanding Your eCommerce Store
If you’re an eCommerce store owner, you’ve likely spent hours thinking and trying to earn more. As a business owner, you naturally want to expand your reach and sell more products.
While the idea sounds great, expanding your business can be difficult. Where do you start? How can you sell more products? How do you reach more clients? Check out the following three key steps that will teach you how to expand your eCommerce business.
Get Better Hosting
When it comes to having a successful eCommerce store, most people think about products and suppliers. People remain concerned with how much money they can sell something for and how much profit will they make off it.
However, the products and shipment are not the only factors of success that an online business owner must consider.
eCommerce store owners must have a well-built website with quality hosting.
Nobody can have a prosperous online business without the proper components to support the website. Imagine you had an eCommerce store that used a poor web hosting company that couldn’t maintain security or had issues with servers failing.
That would lend to a poor user experience on your website—something that goes hand-in-hand with a lack of users.
Furthermore, web hosting providers are not equal in terms of speed, uptime, reliability, and support. Some web hosting companies have reputation for providing fast load times, near 100% uptime, and great customer support. That is the kind of company you want to host your online store.
On the other hand, other web hosting companies have been unable to guarantee website user’s security or provide the necessary uptime that a professional online store needs.
The bottom line is that online shoppers are not known for their patience. When they have seemingly endless other websites to buy products from, they will not return to your site if they have a poor experience shopping.
Thus, eCommerce store owners who want to expand their business need to ensure they have a quality setup that will allow for retention of users through a quality user experience.
If you’re set on expanding your eCommerce store, you should be set on checking up on your web hosting provider. Check out this review to find the best web hosting. You’ll be able to find an option that’s affordable, well-known, and reliable.
Improve Your Marketing
The digital world is competitive. There are thousands of websites selling services, goods, and products. If you’re trying to start an online store, you can’t simply put products up on a website and expect to be successful. If you did that, and you are successful, then hats off to you, as you are not the norm! Instead, it takes lots of planning and work.
All businesses, no matter how well known they already are, spend money on marketing. They advertise new products through social media, Google, TV ads, email campaigns, and much more.
Think about all the successful companies that you buy goods from—Apple, Amazon, Nike, The North Face, and many more.
You’ve likely received emails from them, seen sponsored posts on social media, or seen their commercials on TV. The goal of which is to build awareness about the company and its products.
This is exactly what you need to do to expand your eCommerce store. Expansion by definition means the act of becoming larger. You must expand your reach to the public to build a larger audience. The most effective way to do this is to either start marketing or increase your marketing budget. Consider the following methods to enhance your marketing efforts.
Start an Email Campaign
Email campaigns can be effective ways to sell products to repeat customers. As you have someone’s email, it is likely because they’ve already purchased something from you. Now, whenever you have new products, promotional material, or important news, you can send out an email to notify your past customer.
The goal of which is to sustain their interest in your company, and to bring them to your site to peruse new products. If you’re interested in email marketing, but you don’t know where to start, consider paying for an email marketing service. These companies take away all the hassle for you.
Use Social Media
It’s no secret that social media is an extremely powerful tool. Millions of people from around the world and of all different ages and backgrounds use social media. Most of those people probably use several social media platforms as well.
Luckily for you, eCommerce store owner, social media companies provide the perfect platforms for advertisements. With just a few clicks of your mouse, you can reach tens of thousands of potential customers through social media advertisements.
Use Google Ads
Google Ads is another excellent place to put your money into. Virtually everyone uses Google as their main search engine. Think about how many people you know that use Bing or Yahoo—it’s probably very few if any at all.
When you use Google Ads, users will see your eCommerce site at the top of the page whenever they search for a product or area of goods that overlap with your business. Customers will see your website listed with your desired meta description.
Similarly, you can use Google Product Listing Ads to list specific products from your eCommerce store. This method allows users to see an image of your site’s products on the first results page.
Regardless of which method you choose, it’s likely to be effective at reaching a large audience. And again, your purpose of expanding is to increase the number of visitors to your site, so you can sell more goods.
Diversify Product Selection
The last step to expand your eCommerce store is to diversify your product selection. Likely, when you started your online store, you began selling products in a specific niche. Maybe you started selling performance athletic gear for men.
Or perhaps you started selling environmentally friendly rock-climbing gear. Whatever niche you started in, you need to expand your store to include more products.
You don’t need to leave your niche, and, in fact, you shouldn’t leave your niche. If you’ve reached the point where you’re making a regular profit and you have a strong brand presence, you should not change your brand. All you need to do is add products that fit into your brand.
For instance, if you’re in men’s athletic gear, you can expand your product selection to include different types of gear. You could include shoes, socks, workout equipment for men, and much more. Additionally, you can expand your niche to encompass women. While you’re not leaving your niche, you’re expanding your reach.
It’s important to be careful about your offerings. You don’t want to add products that don’t align with your customers’ needs and wants. If you’re focused on selling athletic gear, it doesn’t make much sense to start selling loafers or dress boots. Rather, you should sell running shoes, trail running shoes, or even hiking boots.
Expanding your product selection is something you can do regularly. Each quarter or each year you can assess how well certain products are selling. From there, you can either remove new products from your store, or you can add similar products that are likely to sell well.
Additionally, you could also reach out to previous and regular customers, use social media, or promotional emails to gauge interest in new products and new categories of products. With that information, you’ll know what products are likely to sell when you bring them to your store.
The Bottom Line
Business is all about growing and expanding whether you have a physical store or an online store. As an eCommerce store owner, you need to constantly think and plan for the future. How will you compete with other online stores? What are your goals for the website?
If you’re like most online store owners, you want to expand, so you can sell more products to a larger audience. To do that, you should utilize the three key methods mentioned above.
