Increasing online sales: strategies, best practices

E-commerce business owners are constantly working to increase sales and thus increase the profitability of their online stores. The team of the Shop-Express e-commerce platform analyzes current trends in e-commerce and the experience of its customers. In this article, the partners talk about what strategies and techniques can be used to sell more online. 

Key strategies for sales growth

First, we need to define what exactly "selling more" means. To whom exactly do business owners sell? What makes them want to sell more? The answers to these and other questions will determine the sales growth strategy and influence its results. 

However, even before launching sales or increasing them, many business processes need to be established. It is obvious that entrepreneurs will not be able to evaluate their results and change them without measurement. And it is precisely the ability to measure many key business metrics that the Torgsoft program provides. Well-established accounting will help to avoid problematic moments in the work that reduce the productivity and profitability of sales and business in general. 

After that, you can start working on a strategy to increase sales. Let's consider the main ones. 

Strategies for increasing sales of an online store 

A sales growth strategy is a choice between prioritizing sales to new customers and existing ones. However, these are not mutually exclusive options, but rather "poles" or benchmarks. Below, we'll talk about the possible options, their essence, advantages, and disadvantages. 

Active attraction of new customers 

The essence of the strategy is to identify groups of people who have not previously purchased goods from your online store and attract them to become customers. To do this, you use new marketing tools and change the approach to using the ones you already have. 

Advantages: 

• increase in market share,

• sales growth,

• growth of the customer base. 

Disadvantages and risks:

• relatively higher advertising and marketing costs,

• the risk that new visitors will, at least initially, be treated poorly

convert into buyers, or buy very little at all. 

Customer retention 

The essence of the strategy is to focus on retention. The strategy focuses on retaining existing customers by increasing their loyalty and satisfaction.

Advantages:

• lower costs: working with current clients is much cheaper than attracting new ones,

• a much higher probability of repeat sales. 

Disadvantages and risks:

• this strategy limits growth potential, as the business does not work to expand its customer base,

• the risk of focusing on a too narrow group of customers and making the business dependent on their loss and solvency. 

Increase in the average check

The idea is to encourage each customer to purchase more goods and more expensive items. Also, as part of this strategy, you can offer additional services, such as maintenance, a longer warranty, etc. 

Advantages: 

• allows you to increase profitability without increasing the number of customers,

• it becomes possible to maximize the potential of cross-selling and additional sales. 

Disadvantages: 

• buyers may perceive your business as ignoring real needs and trying to sell more at any cost, 

• customers may perceive your online store as too expensive. 

Cross-sale and up-sale: the main ways to increase the average check

There are two main techniques for increasing the average check: 

• Cross-sell (cross-selling). This is a sales technique in which online store owners offer customers additional and related products before the customer has already decided to buy. For example, you can offer a film, a case, and headphones to go with a mobile phone. 

• Up-sell. This technique means that the company offers the customer to purchase a more expensive version of the product than the one they plan to buy. At the same time, they offer additional benefits. For example, a customer may be offered a more powerful laptop model with more power and additional features. 

How to use these techniques in your online store? It is necessary to visually present related products or similar items in the catalog to customers. When developing and improving the Shop-Express platform, we took into account this need of store owners and implemented cross-sale and up-sale functionality. 

Each owner can collect and customize widgets with products that will be displayed during the purchase in a couple of minutes. This will increase the conversion rate of the online store and the average check. Simple and clear instructions are available here. You can try this functionality during the free trial period. 

Optimization of the product portfolio

The essence of the strategy is to sell exactly those products, brands, and models that are in the greatest demand in the market, which helps the business achieve sales growth. 

Advantages: 

• business competitiveness increases,

• more customers whose needs the company meets to the fullest extent possible thanks to a wide range of products. 

Disadvantages and risks: 

• significantly higher costs for market research and new product development,

• high risk of failure when launching new products on the market. 

Optimization of sales channels 

The essence of the strategy is to optimize the performance of each sales channel. The goal is to make your online store or social media efficient enough to generate more sales. 

Let's analyze this strategy using the example of an online store. Let's say that the analysis of business results has shown that the website generates very few sales for a long time, while offline sales outlets are profitable when selling the same goods at the same prices. This indicates problems with the online store. 

In such cases, it is necessary to audit this sales channel and identify the problems that prevent it from being profitable and efficient. Optimization may include: 

• Transferring an online store to another platform that better meets the needs of the business simplifies the management of the online store and makes the maintenance of the online store cheaper.

• Changes in the structure of the online store. They may include adding new categories and subcategories, new language versions of the online store. 

• Work on search engine optimization and launch of advertising campaigns, their additional customization.

• Redistribution of marketing budgets in favor of a particular channel.

Once you understand the strategy, you can discuss its advantages and weaknesses. 

Advantages:

• your products will become more accessible to a larger audience, including by simplifying the process of purchasing them,

• you have the opportunity to implement other sales growth strategies in parallel. 

Key risks and disadvantages: 

• relative complexity of strategy implementation,

• likely costs of developing and maintaining new sales channels. 

As you can see, each strategy has its advantages and weaknesses. It would seem that this complicates the choice. However, the strategies are not mutually exclusive. They can be combined, working in parallel to optimize sales channels, build a customer base, and retain existing customers. 

Key techniques for increasing sales 

Below are specific measures that will help you increase sales.

Implementing each of the items on this checklist will help you achieve your goal by increasing the average check, or by expanding your customer base, or in other ways. 

• Optimize your online store for mobile devices. It is now obvious that a lot of purchases are made on mobile devices. All modern platforms provide an opportunity for mobile optimization. It all depends on the developer of the online store and the business owner. Even minor flaws in the mobile version can reduce sales results. Therefore, treat this point very carefully. 

• Vicarious SEO. Search engine optimization doesn't have a quick effect. However, if you expect your business to operate for a long time, you should take advantage of the benefits that SEO provides. Thanks to organic traffic, you can significantly increase website traffic, reduce your dependence on advertising, and optimize the cost per visitor and customer. 

• Use social media. The distance between buyer and seller is the smallest on social media. They provide the tools you need to quickly remind a wide audience about yourself. Therefore, your business should be present on Instagram and other platforms where your customers are. 

• Loyalty programs. Encourage customers to stay with you. Offer bonuses and discounts to those who buy from your online store for a long time. It is only important to calculate the costs of the loyalty program correctly so that it is not risky for business profitability. 

• Create a unique selling proposition. Build your sales and marketing strategy so that every visitor to your online store sees why they should buy from you. 

• Simplify the checkout process. Collect minimal information about the customer, build the ordering process so that customers need to do a minimum of actions. 

• Use video content. Videos in product cards or on brand pages on social media increase trust in the seller, show the benefits of products that cannot be demonstrated in a photo. Even short videos will provide many answers to the questions that deter customers from buying. 

• Offer several payment and delivery options. The inability to pay or receive goods in a convenient way deters many customers from buying. Give them a choice of 2–3 options for payment and delivery. 

• Analyze competitors. Their actions will prompt you to make decisions in pricing, positioning, assortment, and many other aspects. 

You can adapt each of these techniques to the specifics of your own store to get the best results. 

Results

To improve sales results, set up monitoring and analytics of all significant indicators, build a system of goods accounting, using the capabilities provided by Torgsoft. After that, choose a strategy or a combination of them, using the recommendations described in the article. The capabilities of the Shop-Express platform will simplify the implementation of many sales techniques for you. In particular, you can quickly set up an online store for cross-selling and up-selling to increase the average check.

Thank you for reading, and we wish you success in developing your business.