Depending on the niche of your business, you may face stiff competition. This leads you to build and refine your sales strategy. This sales strategy encompasses three areas. Attracting new prospects, converting your prospects into customers, and increasing your average shopping cart. These three parts of any e-commerce sales strategy are cumulative and require the implementation of some techniques. These techniques can be organic or paid. In this article, we will present you the tools and means to increase your sales quickly in an organic way.

Optimize the content of the site

Numerous concordant studies have shown that the trust and loyalty that Internet users grant to an online sales website depend greatly on the speed of its page loading. In fact, a fluid and pleasant interface during navigation offers a good impression to prospects. On the other hand, when your website is not well optimized, there is a high risk that you will encounter a large number of shopping cart abandonments.

It is imperative that your website is intuitive, ergonomic and pleasant to navigate. Whether the prospect is browsing on his desktop computer, his MacBook, his smartphone or his tablet, you must be able to offer him the best possible customer experience.

Work on its reassurance elements

There are certain factors that inhibit a prospect’s willingness to purchase when he or she comes across a merchant site. These disincentives to purchase are not inevitable. You can act on them by assuring the prospect that he will not buy a product of poor quality, or on an unsecured site, or at an exorbitant price. To overcome the natural concerns of the prospect and encourage him to make a purchase, we often propose on our e-commerce site :

• a FAQ page,
• free shipping
• a page on the general conditions of sale
• a “satisfied or refunded” guarantee
• free or time-limited referrals
• free samples or trials
• several secure payment methods
• security badges for online payment

This list is far from being exhaustive, it is up to you to adapt these solutions to your field of activity without penalizing yourself or creating too great a loss of earnings. Your reassurance elements must be distinctly present on your pages and not only on the home page.

Offer several payment methods

Some users only make a purchase when they see their usual payment method. Contrary to what one might think, they are far from being a minority. By offering different payment methods on your site, you avoid any risk of abandonment linked to the payment method. In order not to miss any sales, you can diversify your proposals by even offering payment on delivery. Keep in mind that all these payment methods must be secure and easy to use.

Simplify the payment process

Usually, the shorter and more simplified the overall visitor journey, the more likely you are to get a high conversion rate. Optimizing the checkout process and, more broadly, the entire purchasing process allows the Internet user to get to the checkout. It is therefore necessary to shorten the purchasing tunnel, i.e. the number of clicks or pages before reaching the shopping cart. Simplification goes hand in hand with fluidity, because the purchasing process must be both intuitive and reassuring. Simplifying the contact information form, simplifying the account creation procedure or even the transparency of delivery costs without waiting for the order summary are viable options to act on this lever.

Work on your product sheets

 Content relevance is not only about search engine optimization. Your product sheets must be perfect. They are the showcase of your offer. They must be able to show the product in its best light and incite to purchase. It can be interesting to propose videos or photos in 3D to show the user what he is buying.

The title of your product sheet should be short, explicit and attractive. You can use bullets in your description to improve clarity and readability. To avoid long and boring product descriptions, one trick is to tell stories. Storytelling is a great way to differentiate yourself and capture the attention of users.

Finally, as they say, “people don’t buy a hammer, they buy a hole in the wall”. Therefore, emphasize the customer benefits of the product instead of focusing on its features.

Increase your average basket

An unavoidable technique, the increase of the average basket of your e-commerce site is an imperative whatever your sector of activity. The average basket is the average amount of an order on your website. The logic behind the increase of the average basket is that it is easier for an e-merchant to push a customer to buy much more, than to find new customers and keep them loyal. There are generally three techniques to increase the average shopping cart, but they all involve enhancing the user’s shopping experience.

• focus on up-sells
• work on your cross-sells
• and offer free deliveries from a number of items purchased or a threshold of basket.

Automatically process abandoned carts

Retargeting allows you to target shopping cart abandonment with an advertising campaign on Facebook or Google for example. Because a user who abandons a cart without finalizing is a potential customer, you remind the visitor that you exist through retargeting. 

For example, offering discounts on the product they left in the cart or free shipping are options you can consider. You can also propose a special offer on a product similar to the one left behind. There are many specialized marketing automation tools that help implement an effective retargeting strategy. But for this, you need the consent and contact information of your prospects, all of which you can get through an exit pop-up where their email is filled in.