5 eCommerce Productivity Tips That Will Boost Your Revenue

Running an eCommerce store can be one of the most lucrative endeavors, period. But even the best stores can suffer from slow sales from time-to-time.

When this happens, it can be disheartening. But there are some tips that you can use to help increase your productivity and rejuvenate your sales slump.

Below, we’re going to highlight five eCommerce productivity tips that will definitely boost your store’s revenue.

Are you ready?

Automation

The first step in becoming more productive is finding a way to reduce your workload. Employers tend to hire more employees to handle simple, mundane tasks to help. For you, you’ll find a way to automate your tasks rather than offloading them on a “costly” employee.

In eCommerce, you can use plugins designed to increase your productivity. For instance, two great plugins designed to increase your sales while reducing your workload are Oberlo and Recommendify.

Oberlo is an eCommerce solution that helps with product integration and simplifies the dropshipping process. You can find all kinds of products to list using the product search feature. From there, you can import products directly into your website with all the necessary information in just ONE click.

Screenshot of the Oberlo Search Products Page

Recommendify is another product solution that helps to match your visitors with products that they’ll want to buy. Recommendify can automate your product recommendations based on your customer’s search queries and/or product selections.

A study by Barilliance determined that a customer was 5.5x more likely to buy a product that was recommended to them. Would a 5.5x boost on your total sales help?

And there are a lot more ways to automate your eCommerce store. The more you can automate, the more time you’ll have to focus on other areas of your store and/or other endeavors.

Give Discounts To Make More

This tip goes against traditional thinking, but it can be used to give your bottom end a little boost.

A recent study performed by Valassis discovered that 80% of brand-loyal customers would be willing to use another brand if offered a coupon and/or discount. And Psychology Today discovered that shoppers will spend more if they are offered a coupon, even if the price is more after the coupon is applied.

So, while this tip goes against traditional thinking, it has research and backing to support it. Which means you can actually make more money even though you are giving “discounts” to your visitors.

Let’s look at two scenarios:

Scenario # 1: If you sell sunglasses for $20.00 each, but your sales are stagnant, mark them up to $25.00. Next, give your customers a 10% discount if they use your “limited time” coupon code.

Instead of making $20.00 per sale, now you are making $22.50 per sale. Which equates to 12.5% more profit per sale. If the customer is about to leave, offer them a 20% “don’t leave” coupon and you’re still making what you would have and they didn’t leave without buying.

Scenario # 2: Again, if you sell sunglasses for $20.00 each, but your sales are stagnant, use a “buy one, get one” campaign to capture more sales. For instance, buy a pair of sunglasses and get a $5 case for free.

Since the case only costs you $1, you aren’t really losing much and you’re still making more sales. You could even raise the price of your sunglasses to offset the $1 loss if it was necessary to maintain your margin and/or profit level.

As you can see, you can use discounts and/or BOGO’s to help increase your sales conversions and give your store revenues a boost.

Use Re-Targeting To Maximize Slow Seasons

Retargeting is a marketing method that reconnects with customers who have previously purchased from you. It’s an exceptionally effective method that is underutilized by many eCommerce retailers.

When you make a sale, there should be an opt-in option for your email subscriber list. It should automatically be checked (where they have to uncheck it). When your sales are starting to slow down, you could use your email subscriber list to retarget your previous customers.

You could send an email like this:

“Bob, thank you for being such a loyal customer with ABC Sunglasses. We really appreciate your business and hope you are enjoying your Unbreakable Sunglasses. To show our appreciation, we want to give you a 10% customer loyalty coupon (OFF10) that is good until May 20th.”

As you can see, you would be incorporating two tips (discounts and remarketing) to boost your revenues.

If your email remarketing campaign is falling flat, it could be because your emails are being marked as spam. To check for this, you can go to Gmass and type in your email. In just a moment, you’ll know if your emails are being filtered out or your campaign needs to be redesigned.

Screenshot from Gmass

If your emails aren’t being marked as “spam” or “promotions”, then you need to start looking at your delivery and call-to-action.

Focus On Your Call-To-Action

Your call-to-action is where you ask for the sale.

In sales, there’s a saying that you should “always be closing” (the ABC principle). If your store sales are low, then your call-to-action may not be very well defined or your layout may be confusing.

Which is why should use A/B testing on your website and your call-to-action. Maybe you need to move the call-to-action above the fold. Or maybe you need to move the call-to-action closer to your product images. Using A/B testing, you can determine if your sales go up, go down, or stay flat – and make adjustments as needed.

Going back to the first tip (automation), you can use another plugin to keep your call-to-action (the “Buy Now” button) on the page, no matter where your visitor is. This will definitely help to increase your store sales and boost your revenues.

Make Sure Your Website Is Performing Well

And finally, make sure that your website is loading fast.

Google just recently released their “Speed Update” that ranks websites using speed as one of their critical factors. If your website loads slower than your competitors, you may be ranked lower in the SERPs.

To see how well your website is performing, you can go to GTmetrix and type in your URL. In a few moments, you’ll see how your website is performing, what you need to do to fix any performance issues, and you can even check out how your main competitors are doing too.

Screenshot of Performance Results for Sunglasshut

If Sunglasshut was your competitor, would your website perform better or worse than 9.6s of load time? Addressing performance issues with load times will help increase your SERP rankings and even help with your user’s experience (UX) making it easier to convince them to buy from your website.

Dropshipping

It is always a good idea to look at the top stores in your niche for inspiration. For instance, if you’re into shopify dropshipping, then you should always know the top shopify dropshipping stores in your niche and beyond, for inspiration. The easiest way to get this information is from ecommerce tools and more specifically dropshipping tools, such as SaleSource, which is a tool designed to help e-commerce businesses grow faster and more securely via the use of things like competitor comparisons, trend evaluations and product analyses.

Conclusion

If your store sales are lagging behind, these five tips will help to increase your productivity and give a boost to your store’s revenue. While these tips aren’t glitzy and glamorous, they are effective.

So, what tips are you going to focus on?