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How To Get The Best From Your eCommerce Website
Achieving true excellence in eCommerce is about more than selling enough products to sustain your business. eCommerce excellence is about developing a business model that both maximises your competitiveness and safeguards you against all possible eventualities.
All of which may sound like a daunting prospect, but is actually quite simple to achieve. For the most part, it’s a case of taking things back to basics and focusing on what matters most.
Which, for most eCommerce businesses, means prioritising the following:
1. Putting Together the Perfect Platform
Today, the perfect eCommerce platform is one that delivers the ultimate in simplicity, responsiveness and user-friendliness. The short attention spans and collective desire for instant gratification shared by most consumers must be taken into account and leveraged. The days of overly complicated and ostentatious eCommerce sites came to an end some time ago. These days, you need to take a stripped back, no nonsense approach to your online retail activities. Do so and you are more likely to be rewarded with your customers’ long-term loyalty.
2. Know Your Audience
That said, you cannot realistically expect to build a loyal audience if you don’t truly understand your audience. This is actually the number-one rule for online businesses – don’t launch an operation online until you know everything about your customer. Everything you do and everything you stand for should be a reflection of what your audience wants, expects and demands. Getting to know your audience is the only realistic way of being able to step into their shoes and take a look out what you do from their perspective.
3. Identify and Push Your USPs
There has to be something about your business that differentiates it from those of your closest competitors. If not, you’re doomed to fail as yet another generic operator on the pile. Your USPs are what separate you from the crowd and enable you to engage your audience. It is therefore essential to not just identify your USPs, but take every opportunity to showcase them to your customers. Remind them what it is about you that makes you fantastic and why they should choose you over your competitors.
4. Deliver an Outstanding Customer Experience
There’s a lot involved in delivering an outstanding customer experience, but most of it is pure common sense. Examples of which include quality customer support, a fair and flexible returns policy, guaranteed low prices, a streamlined user interface, the simplest possible check-out process and so on. Take into account each step of the customer’s journey from start to finish, making the effort to improve anything you cannot confidently claim to be 100% flawless.
5. Listen, Learn and Improve
Last but by no means least, there is always plenty of room for improvement. This is where a proactive approach to the collective customer feedback, recommendations and even constructive criticism can be worth its weight in gold. Reach out to your customers on a regular basis and let them know their opinions matter to you. Promote open dialogue and demonstrate your commitment to continuous improvement at every available opportunity.