Today, creating a successful online marketplace is more than just beautiful design and quality products. The process requires a strategic approach, constant optimization and a deep understanding of the needs and preferences of your target audience.
But don’t worry! We’ll share with you proven strategies and practical tips on how to boost your online store sales on BigCommerce. From SEO and social media marketing to improving behavioral factors and optimizing your sales funnel, today we will cover all aspects that affect the success of your store.
5 ways to increase sales of your online store on BigCommerce
Did you know that the average conversion rate for online stores is only 2.86%? This means that out of 100 visitors, only about three will decide to order a product on your website. Impressive, isn’t it? But don’t worry, we have great news for you!
We will reveal 5 proven ways to increase sales on BigCommerce and tell you how to turn casual visitors into loyal customers. Each of these methods has proven its effectiveness on real projects and has been tested by years of practice in different niches.
Optimize your site to work on a smartphone
Today, smartphones have become an integral part of our lives. Optimizing any online store for mobile devices is no longer just a recommendation, but a necessity.
It’s predicted that by 2025, 72.9% of all online sales will be made via mobile devices. This means that if your site is not adapted for smartphone and tablet users, you are missing out on a huge share of potential customers and orders themselves.
To ensure that your resource works properly, make sure that all pages have large and noticeable “Add to Cart” buttons. Remember that mobile users appreciate speed and convenience, so don’t test their patience.
Another way to improve the number of orders from gadget users is to develop a specialized mobile app. This will not only expand the accessibility of the website from a smartphone, but also increase loyalty to your brand by providing visitors with the most convenient way to interact.
Connect multiple payment options
BigCommerce is already integrated with a wide range of payment gateways – PayPal, Stripe, Square and Apple Pay. All you need to do is activate these options and give your audience the freedom to choose their preferred payment method.
In addition to traditional credit and debit cards, it is now also important to accept transactions from digital wallets (Apple, Google and Amazon Pay). Not only do they eliminate the need to manually enter payment details every time, but they also provide a fast, secure and convenient way to pay.
By providing multiple ways to pay for an item, you not only simplify the checkout process, but also demonstrate your concern for the convenience of the visitor. This, in turn, can lead to increased repeat sales and, ultimately, increased profits.
Optimize the checkout process
Imagine the scenario – a potential customer spends a considerable amount of time on your sales floor, browsing products and adding them to their cart. But at the very moment when you think the outcome is a foregone conclusion, they suddenly disappear, leaving their cart behind. It’s familiar, isn’t it?
In fact, the average abandoned cart rate in online shopping is a staggering 69.80%. This means that almost 7 out of 10 potential customers “disappear” at the checkout stage. But don’t despair!
There are proven strategies with which you can reduce shopping cart abandonment:
Simplify the checkout process by reducing the number of steps and fields you need to fill out. No one likes it when checkout feels like an obstacle course. Gather only the most relevant information to make the process as smooth and fast as possible.
Make sure that you can checkout without creating an account. Many customers don’t want to go through the registration process just to buy one or two items. Make their lives easier and save them time, and you’ll see your sales start to increase.
Don’t forget to work with abandoned baskets. Set up automatic email reminders to gently nudge visitors to come back and complete a targeted action. You can even include a personalized discount code in the reminder email to give them an extra incentive to complete the transaction.
Enable autocomplete for all forms. This is especially important for regular customers, as it saves them time and effort later on. It also helps you to enrich your database with valuable information.
Set up an online chat room
By implementing online chat software, such as LiveChat, you can provide the user with support when they need it most. Imagine a potential customer is browsing your product range and has a question about delivery times or whether a purchase is compatible with a particular device. Instead of leaving you to search for answers online, they can instantly contact a customer service representative and get the information they need.
Having online chat not only increases customer loyalty, but it can also directly impact sales team productivity. Studies show that customers who interact with online chat are 60% more likely to make a purchase and 27% more likely to spend money compared to those who don’t.
Connect loyalty program
Regular customers are your golden ticket to success. Not only do they spend more and return more often, but they become valuable ambassadors for your brand, attracting new customers through recommendations and positive reviews.
So, how do you turn one-time visitors into loyal fans? Here are a couple proven strategies:
Implement a rewards system. Create a loyalty program that rewards repeat purchases, referring friends, and other valuable actions. Fortunately, BigCommerce offers a wide range of add-ons for creating a loyalty program on the site, including Smile.io and LoyaltyLion. With these tools, you can easily set up a personal points system, VIP tiers, and exclusive rewards that will drive engagement and encourage repeat sales.
Pamper your loyal customers with exclusive offers. Give them early access to some of the content on your site, personalized discounts, product picks, and other perks that make them feel special. Imagine your most loyal fans eagerly awaiting your exclusive offers and proudly sharing their VIP status with friends and family.
How to increase BigCommerce sales with advertising?
Advertising is one of the most effective ways to reach more people and increase sales on BigCommerce. A properly planned and implemented advertising campaign will reach the target audience, increase brand awareness and stimulate development.
BigCommers provides many opportunities for integration with advertising platforms and tools, which makes it easy to customize ads and track their effectiveness right from the control panel. You can use Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads to display ads. It is also important to set up search engine optimization to rank in organic search engine results.
Use SEO optimization
Search engine optimization is an extremely important aspect of promotion. The vast majority of orders on the Internet begin with a Google search query. Therefore, your task is to make sure that the pages of your sales resource occupy top positions for relevant key queries.
To do this, pages should be optimized for target search phrases. BigCommerce provides a number of built-in tools that can significantly improve SEO performance when set up correctly. Among them:
Automatic generation of clear and unique URLs. This has a positive impact on search ranking as soon as pages are created.
Adding Schema.org micro markup. This allows products to appear in search results with an up-to-date price and rating based on reviews. This increases clickability and user trust.
High page load speed. It uses CDN for fast content delivery, which speeds things up. Speed is an important ranking factor for Google.
Edit the robots.txt file directly from the control panel. This allows you to manage page indexing and customize SEO-strategy for your tasks.
Set up contextual advertising
Contextual advertising for BigCommerce is another popular tool for quickly attracting attention to an online venue. This method works on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis and shows ads to users who search Google for relevant queries.
The advantage of contextual advertising is that you only pay when a visitor clicks on an ad and goes to your website. If he is not interested in the offer, there will be no additional costs, unlike other types of advertising. Part of the cost of a click Google takes away if the user eventually made a targeted action.
Now the following contextual advertising formats are the most effective for online stores:
Google Shopping ads. They show your products with a photo, price, and your brand name in search results and other Google resources. This attracts the most interested people who are already ready to purchase a particular product.
Performance Max campaigns. This type of automated campaigns helps you reach your target audience across the entire Google ecosystem (search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, etc.) with different ad formats, optimizing their display using machine learning to achieve a given goal.
Remarketing. It helps to show ads to users who have been visitors before, added something to their cart, but did not make a purchase. This helps to bring potential buyers back and encourage them to complete the checkout.
Promote yourself on social media
This is a mandatory part of an online store’s marketing strategy. Studies show that 90% of customers are more likely to order from brands they are subscribed to on social media. So having an active presence there is critical.
Here are some tips on how to promote effectively on social media:
Increase brand awareness by publishing interesting and engaging content. It should demonstrate your company’s personality and values and resonate with your target audience. Use different formats – testimonials, memes related to your topic, tips on choosing and using products. Social media is about building relationships with your audience, not just advertising.
Connect integration with shopping platforms (for example, Facebook Shops and Instagram Shopping). This will allow you to turn posts into mini-storefronts where users can select and purchase products directly on social networks, increasing conversion rates.
Interact with your audience, respond to comments and questions, and participate in discussions. Social media communication is a two-way process. Be proactive to build a loyal community around your brand.
Integrate your site with popular marketplaces
Don’t limit yourself to just your website to attract customers. The platform provides access to easy integration with the largest marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, Walmart. This opens up access to a huge audience of potential customers and gives you the opportunity to significantly increase your reach.
By placing on these marketplaces, you will be able to find an audience that is already looking for similar products on the pages of world-renowned marketplaces. At the same time, you will be able to manage the product feed for uploading to each platform and process new requests in a single interface, because the data is synchronized between all channels.
In addition to marketplaces, there’s also the ability to sell directly on Facebook and Instagram social networks. BigCommerce integrations help import catalogs and create “selling” publications where users can choose and buy products without going to other resources.
How to boost sales with BigCommerce apps?
The ecosystem of extensions for the platform includes about 1000 solutions in 20 categories. They help expand the functionality of an online store and automate many workflows. But with such a huge selection, it can be difficult to find really useful tools. Let’s take a look at a few proven plugins that will help boost sales on BigCommerce.
Alloy Automation
Simplifies most of your daily store maintenance tasks, so you can focus on growing your business instead. With Alloy Automation, you can automate ad setup, help desk operations, order processing, shipping management, and more.
The app integrates with over 80 popular services you already use. And a library of 100+ ready-to-use customized workflows created by industry experts solves the problem of implementing automation. Simply choose the right script and customize it to fit your needs.
By automating routines, you can optimize operational costs, speed up interaction with visitors and improve the entire service.
dotdigital
This platform creates automatic mailings through various channels – email, SMS, push notifications, messengers, social networks. Integration allows you to synchronize data collected from different sources to personalize messages and launch trigger campaigns.
Built-in email editor and ready-to-use automation templates make customization of newsletters easy and fast even for beginners. You’ll be able to create segmented campaigns with dynamic content that changes based on data about subscriber behavior and preferences.
Using machine learning, dotdigital analyzes user actions and sends messages at the optimal time through the best channel. This improves open rates, clickability, and conversion rates of mailings. BigCommerce stores using dotdigital achieve record ROI in email marketing.
Regular mailings to your subscriber base bring people back to you, encourage repeat purchases, inform about new products and promotions. Therefore, this extension will definitely help you achieve your goals with the right approach.
Google Shopping by Sales & Orders
With this add-on you can maximize the impact of your paid advertising campaigns. It allows you to seamlessly connect your online resource to Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Instagram advertising accounts to automatically import product feeds.
You can quickly create and manage campaigns to attract visitors from new platforms, including Snapchat or Google Shopping. Customize audiences, categories, keywords and feed format for each individual site to maximize conversions.
You can upload up to 10,000 products for free. So you can immediately start optimizing your advertising campaigns without additional costs.
re:amaze
A service for optimizing customer service performance. It offers a wide range of tools to communicate with the audience, such as:
Live chat with flexible design customizations;
Ready-made and customizable chatbots;
Widgets with frequently asked questions.
Deep integration with BigCommerce gives you access to order data for quick problem solving. Operators will be able to see the complete history and instantly provide the right information right on chat.
Besides support, re:amaze also helps automate some marketing tasks. For example, tracking traffic sources and collecting reviews. Combine this data with order information to get a holistic view of each audience interaction.
ReCharge
If you have products in your catalog that are needed on a regular basis (for example, pet food or sports nutrition), ReCharge will be a great solution. The service allows you to implement a subscription model, when a client binds a card once and automatically pays for services with a specified frequency.
ReCharge integrates with popular payment gateways and takes over the processing of regular transactions. Customers will always be provided with the right products and will not forget to pay for the next shipment, and you will get a stable source of repeat orders.
In addition, ReCharge helps reduce subscriber churn by:
The ability to skip a purchase if the customer still has a stock of the required product;
The ability to exchange an order if the product does not fit;
Automatic notifications of order shipment to both buyer and seller.
Refersion
The solution will help you attract an audience through an affiliate program. It allows you to connect the affiliate sales accounting system in a few minutes and start working with affiliates who will promote your products for a percentage of the transaction.
More than 5000 potential partners are already registered here, so you can immediately find those who are suitable for promoting your products. The platform automatically tracks conversions and interactions for each partner, calculates their commission and generates reports. You will only have to process the information.
Affiliate marketing is becoming an increasingly effective channel for attracting attention, especially for young projects. With the help of this tool it is realistic to get high-conversion traffic, pay only for results and scale up quickly.
Sezzle
Sezzle implements a “buy now, pay later” model, where customers get what they want immediately and pay for it in installments over several weeks. This approach increases the affordability of purchases for those visitors who do not have a credit card or have a low limit. They can afford more expensive solutions by paying gradually.
Sezzle protects the interests of both buyer and seller. The platform takes over the assessment of solvency and guarantees payment, reducing the risks of fraud and non-payment. And a built-in reminder system helps customers make their next payment on time.
By adding the extension to checkout pages, product cards and marketing newsletters, you will be able to attract an audience that used to put off buying because of the high cost. This is especially true if you have relatively expensive products in your assortment.
Skubana
If you have multiple offline locations or trade through marketplaces, synchronizing inventory balances becomes a critical task. Skubana solves it by combining inventory data from all channels with actual orders in a single system.
In-stock and retail information is automatically updated, so you always have an up-to-date picture of products in stock. You can replenish stock in a timely manner, minimize costs due to inaccurate accounting and focus on service instead of manually managing logistics.
The solution also helps improve demand forecasting and purchase planning by analyzing multi-channel data. Algorithms predict which products will sell better in the future and recommend optimal stock levels.
In this way, you can keep your assortment matrix in an optimal state, reduce overstocking on some items and shortages on others. As a result, you will increase inventory turnover, customer availability and business margins.
Yotpo (SMSbump)
SMS marketing is experiencing explosive growth right now because it can be used to communicate directly with your audience. Yotpo allows you to automate your messaging and improve engagement and sales.
In some niches, SMS open rates are as high as 35%, which is many times higher than email. Customers are more willing to respond to personalized messages that come directly to their smartphone. Therefore, adding SMS to multichannel communication can increase the overall return on marketing investment (ROI) several times over.
