How to Encourage More Online Sales?

If you have an online store, you may be struggling to stand out and make enough sales to grow as a brand. It seems as though the competition is becoming fiercer every day, and you’re constantly having to find new ways to adapt. If you’re looking to encourage more online sales, consider these four tips.

1. Ensure Payment Processing is Done Right

Using the wrong company to process payments leads to excessive costs for fraudulent transactions as well as hassle when selling anything online.

You can avoid the headaches by using a reliable payment processing company that knows what retail sites need and expect. Rather than relying on a generalist processing operation, find one that is familiar with retailers both online and offline.

Don’t go with a company that doesn’t understand your unique business needs or the industry that you’re in. It’ll make growth even harder to achieve.

2. Create a Loyalty Discount Program

Loyalty discounts aren’t just for retail stores. There is an upside to encouraging customers to return more than once to a website too.

Getting customers to the site is only the initial step. It’s necessary to capture their interest beyond securing that first sale to encourage them to return. While providing a discount across the entire product range is a tough ask, think about discounting the most popular items or repeat purchases.

Before you reject the idea out of hand, consider the cost of new customer acquisitions. Most of the time, it’s cheaper to keep an existing customer happy through a loyalty discount program than to try to find a new customer to replace them.

3. Find a Way to Make Shipping Affordable or Free

Paying for expensive packing and shipping is a decision point where many potential buyers exit the website. This is especially the case with low-value items where the shipping expense near doubles the price.

Consider how best to approach shipping costs for customers to receive the product. In the face of stiff competition from the largest online retailers, it’s necessary to see it from the customers’ perspective. Why should they order from you when other sites provide free shipping?

See if you can adjust your product pricing to include a portion of the shipping costs within them. Alternatively, offer free shipping when the shopping cart value is above a minimum value, such as $50.

4. Offer Products That Others Do Not

Trying to compete by selling essentially commodity items available at hundreds or thousands of other websites is not easy.

Differentiating your online brand from others will be even more difficult. Instead, find products that aren’t sold at many of your competitors’ sites.

Let customers appreciate that your brand offers something different and more interesting. In time, this will encourage them to seek you out when they don’t find what they’re looking for and wish to be inspired.

Also, use a mailing list to engage the subscribers on any interesting products that are newly available. Encourage them to return and see what has arrived.

Providing more value in a variety of ways allows customers to see why your brand and the website offer a reason to return. This provides greater longevity and growth opportunities than chasing the one-off sale.

5. Try Out Alternative Payment Methods

Accepting alternative payment gateways can help you. In the US, different customers use various payment methods. Around 30% use credit cards customarily. Another 30% use digital wallets mainly during payments. Thirdly, 21% of the US people use debit cards. Lastly, 8% rely on bank transfers. 

So, having all these payment means in your ecommerce app is better. 

Moreover, it is time to adopt advanced and more flexible payment methods. 

As we can see, fewer people prefer to enter their card details and process payments each time they pay. You may use this scope to list more digital wallets, e-wallets, and similar options.

Here is a list of the most popular digital wallets in the US?

Apple Pay: More than 383 million users favor Apple Pay globally. Out of that, 44 million users are there in the US only. Apply Pay offers more security features than other wallets. That’s why Apple Pay has no parallel regarding the number of users.

Google Pay: Google Pay is gradually gaining popularity in the US market. It also uses an advanced security feature called DPAN. Moreover, you can add duns to Google Pay’s wallet from various sources. It may be your credit, debit, or internet banking directly. 

Paypal: PayPal is the oldest digital wallet and is still the most globally accepted payment gateway. If you aim for international sales, consider adding this payment option to your ecommerce app. Paypal’s discrete server allows quick cross-border fund transfers. Hence, PayPal is a unique and exclusive option in the payments market. 

Today, we have many cross-border selling platforms in the online market. A few of them are Alibaba, Amazon, etc. 

Amazon Pay: Amazon Pay is an app that stormed the US market. Many consider it the most scientific digital wallet of the time. But how does Amazon Pay help?

It simplifies order administration and processing. So, your checkout time is reduced. Most US customers prefer less checkout time. Hence, your users may like it as well. 

6. Make your payment gateways simpler

The checkout experience is a concrete part of any user’s experience. However, most of the customers drop their orders on this page. Hence, a simple payment gateway may help. 

Market data suggest that 23% of customers would have bought products from their wishlist if the payment gateway were faster.

Here are some ways to make your payment gateway simpler:

• Offer a checkout option for customers who are using a guest profile 
• Don’t have a loop-in payment page. Instead, have separate pages for the payment steps.
• You may also have a continuous page with all the steps in chronology.

However, the key is not cluttering the customers with too much text on the payment page. Clauses for payment caution can be added as thumbnails at the sides of the page. 

End Statement

There are ample ways to Encourage More Online Sales. However, all ways focus on the customers’ convenience only.

Site operators must have a clear idea of the customer types. Thus, they can decide which option will be more suitable for them. Check out the options here. 

Comment below if you need further suggestions to increase your online sales.

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