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The Agency of the Future
written by
Mateusz Pliszka
Customer Consulting at SoftwareSupport
In today’s world, starting an online store is no big deal. The market provides you with plenty of dropshipping opportunities and e-commerce software, so you can even sell products that don’t actually belong to you, taking care only about the product’s marketing and delivery.
If you don’t own a store, yet, we’ve set up a separate guide showing how to set up an online store by yourself. But once you have your e-commerce store working or if you already operate a well-performing one, it’s time to think about ways to grow and sell more.
In this material, we’ve gone through the major e-commerce trends and data to provide you with the best e-commerce software recommendations which can help you grow your already operating online store.
Let me show you how to use modern technology to make your crazy e-commerce entrepreneur life much more pleasant and entertaining. Use it to grow your online store, having more time for yourself 🏖️
So, how to use modern software to your advantage in growing an online store?
Before we start, let’s look into a few tips which might be helpful in figuring out the way to grow your business:
Communications is at the heart of e-commerce and community.
- Meg Whitman, President and CEO of Hewlett-Packard
In today’s world, people have a variety of stores to choose from. Make your brand unique and make sure your visitors remember the customer experience on your website.
You will not experience much organic traffic shortly after the store’s launch. Still, in the long-term, traffic from Google might turn out to be the most valuable source of your business.
E-commerce business is pretty much about trust. Make sure your customers believe in your brand by showing clearly who you are. Using customers’ testimonials might be crucial for your final success. Running a blog can also boost your credibility.
Traffic on your website provides you with a valuable source of information about your users’ behavior. Use this data to create the best possible user experience.
There are many different channels to build the presence of your online store online. Focus wisely on social media, paid ads, or content marketing, depending on the type of your audience.
The best e-commerce stores don’t require special guidance. They’re user-friendly and navigating through them is easy for each and every visitor. The best store’s structure you’d like to have is the one that will keep your user smoothly cruising through your store. Still, there are moments when your visitor will want to contact you and in today’s world, no one wants to wait to be served. With so many alternatives available out there, people are most likely to buy from your right at the moment when looking at your store.
So how to provide instant answers to questions together with outstanding customer service?
One of the most common solutions to do that is a live chat software. Installing a chat window on your website might contribute to the significant boost in conversion rates at your online store.
How can that magic happen? There are a few ways you can use live chat software at your e-commerce store:
Installing a live chat window on a website can be as easy as one click, adding the application from the marketplace of the software you’re already using, or at hardest, copying a piece of code and adding it to your website’s code. Don’t know how to start? Just ask us anytime on chat.
There are quite a few live chat solutions available on the market. You might wonder: Is there any live chat which is simply the best one for e-commerce business?
There is probably no such answer, as each store and business might have its own needs, preferences, or design guidelines.
E.g. If you are looking for a very basic live chat solution (only to respond to customers visiting your store), there are a few free solutions you could try. However, if you’re searching for a software which will provide you with data analytics, automated messages, ticketing system, or queue management, you’d rather look at more premium solutions.
Let’s look into a few live chat solutions you could use in your e-commerce business:
LiveChat is especially well-known among e-commerce businesses. It focuses on delivering the value-added to online stores by additional e-commerce functionalities like sales and goals tracking. It also pays vast attention to user-friendliness with its simple and well-designed interface and step-by-step tutorial for new agents/operators.
Main LiveChat features for e-commerce:
Tidio Chat is a freemium live chat solution, which is especially known for its easy automation’ set-up. What does it mean? With Tidio, you will easily draft the flows of automated messages to be sent to your visitors, either by chat or by email. The only thing you need to do is to drag and drop particular triggers and actions which happen within Tidio. E.g. an agent doesn’t respond for more than 2 minutes -> send an automated chat message asking for a visitor’s email.
Another great thing about Tidio is its free version to try out and well-supported integration with the most popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify or WIX.
Main features of Tidio for e-commerce:
LivePerson is a solution designed for larger enterprises to help them communicate with their customers more effectively. It’s known for its built-in bot functionality, letting you handle simple customer cases automatically, without the engagement of a human being. It’s also one of the few solutions which focuses on connecting online chat with mobile messaging, integrating with SMS, iMessages, or Facebook Messenger.
Main features of LivePerson for big e-commerce stores:
Did you even know you’re able to “spy” on your store’s visitors and track the way they move through your store? Even if you know, I’m pretty sure you’re not making the most out of the data you gather at your e-commerce business. Knowing how users use your online store provides you a vast advantage. You can then use this data to move particular elements across your website and check the impact on the conversion rate. Using some analytical tools, you’d even be able to make specific optimizations within a tool, without the need to engage your developer, simply by dragging, dropping, or rearranging particular elements.
Installing an analytical software is very similar to adding other tools to your website, it simply requires copying and pasting an additional piece of code on your website.
If you have an analytical tool already installed, you have started collecting the data. With analytical tools, you can collect the following information:
So how to use these data to grow your business?
To gather the above data, all you need is the right analytical software to use. You don’t require software expertise to use one. Actually, all you need to do is to add a single line of code to make it work.
Google Analytics is the most popular analytical software. About 70% of the top 10k websites available online are using Google Analytics, and the rest is likely not using it to not provide the data about their website to Google.
Google Analytics provides online store owners with a special e-commerce module, letting you dive even deeper into the data.
With E-commerce Analytics, you can easily gather information about:
There are numerous ways you could use this data to your advantage, including:
E-commerce Analytics can easily act as a basis for your store’s analytics with additional tools providing deeper insight into vital information.
Hotjar is a tool that can enhance your online store’s information with insight into detailed visitors’ behavior. It lets you see exactly what your visitors do on your website with automated session recording and heatmap analytics.
So what can you get with Hotjar what you don’t get with Google Analytics?
All of these can be a valuable data source for you to use in optimizing your online store:
There are many more ways you could use the above information to grow your online business but these highly depend on the type of your operations. Go through the data and think! How can you improve based on this information?
So you have all the data you need to draw the right conclusions. Based on this, now it’s time to optimize your store and see your business growing 🚀 CrazyEgg is the analytical tool that will help you in optimizing the way your store works with the built-in optimization software.
What will you find in CrazyEgg, which is not available in other tools?
What can you do with the above data?
Installing the analytical tool is the first step to data-driven decision making (it’s not that difficult, it’s just adding one additional line of code or installing plugin e.g. at your Shopify store!). Unfortunately, gathering data is only the beginning. It’s all followed by aggregating the information and its skeptical analytics.
And while it’s the most difficult step, the right analysis of the data is crucial to your store’s success, if you’re aiming for outstanding user experience for your customers and increased conversions.
Using a CRM system when your store is still small might not be necessary. But when your operations start to scale and tasks multiply, it’s not difficult to get lost in all the issues. So how can a CRM system help your online store solve some of the problems you’re likely having?
Having an easily accessible CRM system lets you communicate with your team more effectively. All the data about your customers and suppliers become available and synched for your employees, which will save you and your team’s time on cross-checking the data every time you need it.
Having abandoned carts at your store is quite a common thing but are you doing everything you can to turn abandoned carts into the actual customers? With a CRM, you’d be able to make abandoned carts appear on your pipeline and handle them in a structured way. When a new customer abandons the cart, a new card will appear in your CRM, automatically scheduling an email or call with a customer for you.
Cancels and refunds are likely not your favorite tasks. They take time and money but they’re likely here to stay for a long time and the more customers you have, the better you have to plan your refunds and cancels. With a cloud CRM solution, you’d be able to easily structure the way you handle canceled orders within your team by automating the process on the pipeline. Also, anytime you move the item to the next stage in the pipeline, an email can automatically be sent to your customer, notifying about the status update.
Setting up and using a CRM system for e-commerce is likely not very different from other businesses. Let’s look into some tips on implementing and using CRM software to your advantage:
As with any other type of software, there is no one solution that would be suitable for every business.
It’s important to make sure your software can easily integrate with other ones you’re already using. That’s what makes Pipedrive a great tool to create a synced and effective software environment within your company. Connect it with Shopify, MailChimp, and dozens of other tools and make your work even smoother.
Setting up an online store is not a problem these days. A few years ago, you might have needed a development team’s help and support to create one. In today’s world, it’s not a problem to create one, even for a less tech-savvy person. With the help of the e-commerce platforms, you will be able to easily create your own brand, add products, descriptions, set-up the payment, delivery method. You’d also be able to connect it with Amazon, Facebook or Etsy to sell via multi-channel.
When selecting the e-commerce platform, you’d better take a look at:
While there are many e-commerce platforms available (you can browse through them at SoftwareSupp or ask about our recommendations on chat), only a few of them offer a decent quality of service and are worth considering, when setting up a store.
It’s an extremely popular online e-commerce platform letting you design an online store by yourself.
Shopify advantages:
Shopify disadvantages:
BigCommerce is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms for those looking for a more advanced solution to build a larger online store. It’s quite common among developers and software houses looking for a tool to help them design an e-commerce store for their customers.
BigCommerce advantages:
BigCommerce cons:
written by
Mateusz Pliszka
Customer Consulting at SoftwareSupport
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