E-commerce celebrated its 25 th birthday this year and is expected to reach 2 billion online buyers by the year 2020, this is nearly 50% of the internet user base. It has evolved drastically from providing just online catalogs for shopping to creating impactful customer experiences.

Due to the cut-throat competition in the e-commerce industry, customers now have near-unlimited choices to select from. It has also become extremely difficult for e-commerce stores to differentiate themselves from the competition and attract more customers.

The e-commerce stores have to communicate convincingly and consistently across all social media platforms to gain the trust of today’s customers. They need to highlight their key offerings, provide impactful customer experiences and create lifetime relationships with their customers.

The e-commerce market is all about what a customer sees on their screen. So, in order to win their trust, you have a whole widescreen to showcase what amazing services you provide and why your products are better than the rest. They also need to be assured that what they are buying is totally worth their hard-earned money.

So, if your e-commerce store doesn’t incorporate these characteristics, it’s time to give it a makeover!

If you are rolling your eyes, how to do it, take a peek at our suggestions for a successful makeover of your e-commerce store.

1. Design of your website & ease of navigation

Online visitors are usually pretty savvy and often judge your whole business upon what they get to see in the first 3 seconds. So imagine the response they will give to your products if your photos are of low quality, pages took a long time to load, have a confusing user interface, etc.

The first thing you need to do in the makeover process is to seek the help of the experts and design a professional outlook for your e-commerce store. Make sure the navigation across your store is simple. Also, the processes of signing up and buying your products are convenient for the customers.

2. Professional logo & its placement

Having a professional logo design for your e-commerce store is as important as its placement on the website. The accurate dimensions, attractive color palette, and placement at the top left-hand side of all the web pages give your website a professional outlook and create a place in the customer’s mind. Visit popular web stores, like Amazon, Flipkart, Ali Express and others, to have an idea about the design and placement of your brand logo.

3. Create a compelling brand story

The old-school concepts of marketing are not enough to satisfy today’s customer. Apart from using the 4 P’s, you need a compelling story behind your brand to connect it with their lifestyle. A compelling story articulates the purpose and meaning, effectively behind the existence of your brand. They prefer your approach to solve their problems rather than your products specifications.

Your website should engage with the customers before the sale by addressing their needs. For that, you should adopt the content marketing practices to bolster your standing in the e-commerce space. Reaching the customers earlier in the buying cycle through content marketing reaps far bigger benefits than only implementing the SEO techniques.

Image Credit: Pixabay

4. Mobile application

The number of smartphone owners is increasing with every passing nanosecond. Therefore, it is crucial for e-commerce stores to have a friendly user interface for all screen sizes. It’s all about creating impactful customer experiences and without a mobile browser view for your website, the navigation experience is terrible, to say the least. Mobile applications are the latest trend, and more and more businesses are launching their smartphone applications to attract more customers.

No matter what you own, be it an online leather jacket store or you sell homemade skin care products, it is crucial to have an app. A research study by Shop.org and Forrester shows, an enormous 135% growth for the store based retailers in 2013. So, in order to stay relevant in the market and increase your customer base, you have to adopt the latest trends in the market. Launching a mobile application for your e-commerce store to provide an impactful shopping experience for your customers is the way forward.

5. Ability to cross-sell

Gone are the traditional ways, gone are the days when e-commerce stores were getting success by just providing an online catalog of products and enabling purchases through a shopping cart. Now the success depends on the overall experience you provide to your customers and how impactful it is for them.

Your web store should allow customers to browse, discover, and interact with as many products as they explore around. Your site should have the tagging system in place to offer related products to the customers to facilitate their online shopping experience.

6. Social elements

Social elements on your websites can help you to divert traffic from your one platform to another. Social media share buttons, links to your social pages, and social proof are very important to gain the trust of your current and potential customers. According to a recent study, about 74% of the customers use social media to facilitate their buying decisions. And about 60% of them interact directly with those brands on the different social media channels. If you aren’t as active on these platforms and don’t engage your customers with tempting content, you might be losing a lot!

Social proof helps in building the brand’s credibility among the customers. Your potential clients look for genuine customer feedbacks across your various social media pages while making a purchasing decision. If you don’t have any yet, you can ask the digital influencers of your target market to give reviews about your product.

7. Welcome them back

Brands strive for creating long-lasting relationships with their customers by providing them with an excellent experience. This can only happen through a tailor-made approach by utilizing the data gathered by the customer’s last visit/visits.

A perfect way to rebuild and strengthen the relationship with your returning customers is to welcome them back on your site. It enhances their trust that the company remember them and acknowledges their past interactions as we know that attracting new buyers is more expensive in comparison with retaining the current ones through creating customer lifetime value CLV.

Conclusion

Intensive competition in the e-commerce industry requires the companies to successfully differentiate themselves with others if they want to stay relevant in the market. A successful makeover of your e-commerce store will help you to adapt to the latest trends in the industry and provide impactful experiences to your customers.