If you are one of the thousands of small businesses who are using e-commerce services to compete in the global market, this article is for you.
In the ever-changing digital landscape, e-commerce is a huge factor dictating the success of small and large companies. Mass amounts of consumers are now buying products online – and they expect companies to provide them with an excellent e-commerce service.
Here are 3 e-commerce tips for your small business that will maximize your profits and increase your brand awareness.
1. Make sure you have e-commerce shipping insurance
When you are shipping products to customers, it is vital that you have insurance – as accidents do happen. This is even more important when your products are more susceptible to damage.
Let us say, for example, your small e-commerce business sells glass products. You simply cannot ship products like this without insurance – it’s crazy. If you ship a batch of 100 coffee glasses to a different country and they are damaged during the transportation process, you are looking at severe financial damages – which could easily have been avoided with insurance.
To get your business shipping insured, check out https://ecabrella.com/ to get started.
2. Provide live chat support
When you are selling products online, you need to provide live chat support. Customers want an easy-to-access, convenient point of contact with your business – and this is where live chat support comes in.
The modern consumer does not want to have to search tirelessly on Google to find your contact number. Instead, they want to visit your website (or social media pages), and be immediately greeted with a live chat support option.
Now, your business has two choices here:
- Employ real people to be chat support agents
- Or, use an automated chatbot system
Both options come with pros and cons. As a small business, you are likely focused on saving costs where possible – so an automated chatbot system is probably your best option.
3. Market low shipping costs and free returns
Two of the biggest influences in the highly competitive world of e-commerce are these: low shipping costs and free returns. If your company can provide them, then you have already won own half of the battle!
Consumers want peace of mind. Just a quick search of ‘shipping costs’ on Twitter sheds light on this – the number of people who say that they have visited an online store, put all their products into the digital basket, and then decided not to go ahead with the purchase simply because of the shipping costs is staggering.
Modern companies and businesses have caught onto this; and have started making changes to satisfy customers in this department. Now, they do their best to provide free shipping (or extremely low shipping costs) as well as ‘returnable packaging’ with free return tags. What this means is, if customers are not satisfied with their product when it arrives, all they need to do is put it back into the packaging, stick on the return tag, and send it back to you – no hassle, no worries.
In the e-commerce world, you need to establish any advantage possible – particularly during a time when Amazon are dominating the market – and low shipping costs and free returns are one of the ways to achieve that.
Conclusion
Use these pro tips on e-commerce to make your small business more successful. Remember, e-commerce is only going in one direction: up. Focusing on it now is going to benefit your business massively in the long-term.
