Whether you’ve just set up your DropShipping business, or been at it for years, it’s always worth keeping an eye on the year’s best practices for eCommerce retailers. To aid you on your quest for DropShipping success, the experts at Armaan Resales have put together a comprehensive list of 2022’s top ten eCommerce best practices.
How are you preparing for the future of your eCommerce business? What things can you do to facilitate success as we move through the next 12 months? Here are a few tips that’ll help take your business to the next level:
1. Make sure your business is on Google My Business
Google My Business is a free to use online tool. Setting up your account is important to build trust in your business whilst also providing an avenue to drive traffic to your eCommerce retail space and if any, physical store. Giving customers a physical address and contact details legitimises your business and helps push your business to the top of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).
2. Revolutionise your customer support
Providing outstanding experiences to your customers should be at the top of your priorities. Whether you’re a one-man-band or a team of employees, endeavouring to respond to your customers quickly and thoroughly is important.
Customers’ shopping habits aren’t limited to normal business hours. To help facilitate exceptional customer support at any hour, on any given day, consider implementing artificial intelligence-driven live chat. Chatbots can answer queries and provide customers with resources when it’s convenient for them. Whilst live chat can do some of the heavy lifting, providing customers with contact details so they can speak to a human is also important – as is the speed at which you reply to them.
3. Build trust through reviews
Building customer trust with your brand is a long-term goal that requires ongoing work. To help grow trust with your brand, turn to the world’s oldest form of advertising – word of mouth.
Nearly everyone shopping online refers to reviews before purchasing from a new company or even before buying a new product from a well-known brand. To capitalise on the power of peer reviews (or social proof), consider asking customers for their feedback or a review after they purchase.
An additional way to grow your brand’s trust level is through trust badges from identifiable companies, such as Norton, McAfee and PayPal. These badges boost your website’s credibility and help reduce basket abandonment from lack of consumer confidence.
4. Bring your brand to life with video
There are essentially two facets to adding video to your eCommerce repertoire – product and social media. First, let’s look at adding product videos to your listings. Product videos provide customers greater insight into a product’s real-life look and feel. They can increase product purchases while also reducing returns.
The second is social media. Videos on social media, on average, perform better than pure text posts. If you’re looking to grow your brand’s presence on social media, videos will boost follower engagement and be much more memorable than a standard long-form text post. Remember, it’s essential to have a good mix of all mediums on your social channel for the best follower experience.
5. Strike the perfect balance with SEO
Suppose you’ve been running your eCommerce business for some time. In that case, you’ll undoubtedly have come across the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO) to rank your business on a search engine’s results page. SEO can become a huge headache, from how much text should be on a web page to using keywords and ensuring your pages are architecturally correct.
Proceed into your SEO efforts with an element of caution. Yes, all the SEO efforts are worth it, but there is a fine line when adding content to your website. When creating product listings, avoid stuffing as many keywords as possible into the description. Your product might get picked up by Google, but you may, ultimately, lose customers if the product description doesn’t answer customers’ questions about the product.
6. Add accessibility to search with voice
Voice search is rapidly gaining popularity. With more households purchasing AI interfaces like Google Home and the Echo, businesses will need to adapt their SEO efforts to include this unique search type.
To ensure you’re optimising for voice search, it’s important to integrate voice search keywords into your website. Voice search is usually done in the form of a question. To help build your SEO agenda around a search term, include questions specific to your brand in your FAQ page, product pages and blogs.
7. Set goals for your eCommerce business
Setting short and long-term goals for your business is crucial to its overall success. Tailor your goals to suit your business and ensure they are SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and timely). Setting SMART goals will provide your business with clear objectives, ensuring nothing gets muddled along the way.
Once you’ve set your goals, make sure you’re measuring your key performance indicators (KPIs) to ensure your business is on track.
8. Provide engaging content for your customers
Providing your customers with engaging content builds your brand loyalty, social following and customers’ confidence that you’re an expert they can trust.
Do your homework. Write around keywords that are important to your customers. What are they searching for on Google or Bing? How are they finding you? Google Analytics can be your best friend. This content will be engaging for customers and if written correctly it can also help you rank better on search engines.
9. Enhance customer experience
Optimising your website for a better customer journey should be something you’re constantly doing. From trialling different types of delivery and different delivery lengths to personalising recommendations based on customer behaviour, optimising your customer’s journey will increase their propensity to purchase.
Understanding the best eCommerce practices is key to making the changes you need to ensure your DropShipping business’s long-term growth. Armaan Resales can help make your DropShipping dreams a reality. Contact our team of experts and download our latest eBook for more information.
