For e-commerce and marketplace platforms, user experience is king

Being in the e-commerce marketing industry, people often have a barrage of questions to dump on me as soon as a conversation is started.

• How do I make customers spend more money?
• Why should users keep repeating inputs while shopping?
• Why aren’t some shopping sites as exciting as brands’ own platforms?

Let me come to the underlying point that all these people are trying to find an answer to.

How do I increase sales volumes for my online store?

Kids, fellas, and fellow professionals, here are some tools — five to be exact — that will give you everything you need to increase your online sales.

1. Product recommendation

Do you know that you can increase your sales by at least 50 per cent with a product recommendation engine?

A product recommendation engine is like a virtual sales assistant, which prompts users for related products that they might be interested in. A product recommendation engine can also pitch in additional product suggestions like accessories or matching outfits that will ‘complete the look’ for the customer.

It’s basically an upsell, which is automated based on users’ preferences or browsing history, if available.

2. Social sharing: Ask customers to share what they have bought

“Yay! Just got a Nike!” tweeted Jonathan with hashtag for #Nike #Shoes. Tweets like that from all over the world helped Nike to increase its sales as much as 8 times its offline sales.

Social sharing has an explosive power. When your customers share with their social circles something which they bought recently, the chances of viral demand creation is higher. In the earlier days we used to call it peer pressure.

Also Read: 5 moves to leverage social proof and convert visitors into buyers

That is the psychological aspect of customers that a social sharing extension can exploit. When you equip your online store with a social sharing button, it can add momentum to your conversion rates.

3. Auto-complete

Keeping your customers engaged until they reach the checkout page is a battle of its own. Once that battle is won, don’t worsen things to an extent that they will decide to abandon the cart.

Keep the checkout process simple and if possible, within the same page itself. Ask for minimal information — only ask for what is necessary for completing the order and its delivery. Do not force customers into a position wherein they have to type in repetitive information in several pages.

It’s really irritating, I tell you.

Thus, there is a need for an auto complete feature in your online store. Auto complete will reduce keyboard strokes and mouse clicks (or taps) for your customers — something that mobile users will appreciate. Auto fill can fetch information from either your database (if they are existing customers) or their social profile. This results in a zippy online shopping performance.

4. Product videos on the landing page

Cisco indicates that by 2020, 82 per cent of online traffic will come from video pages. So it makes sense to prep your product landing page with a product video. A landing video slider not only looks snazzy; It can also hook interested customers and increase average time spent on the website.

5. Gamified in-store experience

Gamification is addictive to customers. And addicted customers are great! They will spend more time and money on your store. eBay had a clever way of gamifying its sales process. As you might already know, at eBay you simply don’t buy something — you win it with a competitive bid. Customers are ready to spend long hours at the site to win a bid that they have gotten into.

Also Read: How companies can learn from Pokémon Go to engage employees

Although I don’t recommend replicating what eBay is doing, an inventive way of gamification will definitely push your online sales volumes drastically. Try to make the buying experience more fun and engaging.

Parting thoughts

Selling online is a mammoth task. Even without  direct customer confrontation — which is prevalent in brick-and-mortar stores — there are serious challenges involved to improve conversion rates.

With these five tools, your marketplace users will be able to increase sales volumes easily. Don’t forget to let me know how these worked out for you.

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