The e-commerce industry keeps expanding over the years, and the trend doesn’t seem to be going away. Although the market value is rising, the competition is more fierce than ever. There is no ultimate advice on how to build long-term success in e-commerce. But, you can always make it grow and follow trends that are relevant at the moment.
Technology solutions, like an e-commerce recommendation platform, can go a long way with the average order value. Also, making your brand recognizable will help you gain new customers faster. Let’s check out several important factors that will help you start your online store successfully!
Choosing Products for Your E-commerce Store
Of course, there is no e-commerce without trending products. You might have already settled on what you’re going to sell before reading this article, but you might want to give it a second thought. There are two ways to do it:
- selling lots of items at low prices
- selling a few expensive items at high prices and margins of profit
People are ready to pay small amounts of money on everyday items. Also, they might be inclined to purchase tech gadgets for the sake of trying them out. On the other hand, if you want to sell expensive products, it better be high-quality, hand-made, and unique.
Source: Screenshot – AliExpress
AliExpress is one of the world largest marketplaces, especially for cheap electronic gadgets
Product pricing is also a tough decision to make, and it doesn’t get simpler with time. A general rule of thumb is that, out of the total product price, 30% should account for your product expenses. You might think that a 70% profit margin is a dream come true. However, it’s crucial to highlight marketing expenses that tend to be the highest in the beginning. Also, you might encounter some shipping costs.
Building a Your e-Commerce Brand
For long-term success in e-commerce, building a recognizable brand in a short time is imperative. Sure, you might have a few good months during your first year, but e-commerce stores can’t withstand the test of time without branding. Thousands of online stores sell the items you have in your inventory at the moment. Why should someone buy it from you?
The key is to develop a recognizable and memorable brand. Your first customers need to leave your website with positive thoughts if you want them to return. Also, you need to tell a personal story, something they will remember in the sea of stores that look and feel like yours. The story is not just a small text explaining who you are and why you sell the things you sell. It should be wrapped up in a visual identity that will remain inside the heads of your customers.
Acting Based on Customer-Generated Insights
All e-commerce stores should analyze the behavior of their customers. It’s a concept that benefits both parties. E-commerce owners get to find out what their customers want, and customers will enjoy a store personalized for their needs.
Here is how the process goes:
- Customers visit your website and interact with it. It includes viewing items, adding them to their cart, or purchasing them.
- You gather information about these interactions and store them for all customers.
- Using AI, you can analyze this data and generate various insights.
Source: The Beginner’s Guide to Analyzing Shopify Reports and Analytics – Shopify
Using this information, you can do any of the following:
- Check which items are doing better than others
- Optimize inventory management
- Target customers with personalized ads and promotions
- Use a smart e-commerce recommendation platform
E-commerce data holds many mysteries. However, real data science can unlock the secrets and optimize your store’s conversion rate. The list above is not complete, and there are many ways to exploit this information.
Exploiting Tech Solutions for Long-term Success in E-commerce
Technology is exciting, and various tech solutions can transform your online store. Here are some of the most exciting applications we know about!
Recommendation Engine for E-Commerce
An e-commerce recommendation platform is crucial to increase the average cart size. It helps customers discover relevant items in your store. Recommendations can be generated based on the current item, customer insights, or both. The recommendation engine can work based on product descriptions, textual tags, or by extracting information from product images. This is also known as deep tagging.
Source: The Ultimate Guide to eCommerce Product Recommendations – Acidgreen
Deep Tagging in Fashion E-Commerce
Deep tagging is a process of analyzing an image and tagging it with detailed information. In fashion e-commerce, you scan a photo of an outfit and learn detailed information about every fashion item in the photo. Deep tagging in e-commerce can be useful for many scenarios, including:
- Visual recommendation engine for e-commerce
- Visual search
- Generating automated product descriptions for e-commerce
- Boosting SEO for e-commerce
Visual Search E-Commerce Engine
We’ve already mentioned visual search capabilities as something that uses deep tagging. Image search in the fashion industry means you can upload a photo of someone wearing an outfit as a search query. In return, you can find all similar items from the online store as a search result.
The solution is perfect for mobile users. For example, you see your favorite celebrity wearing a cool outfit. You can take a screenshot, upload it to the visual search e-commerce engine, and browse similar or identical items.
Working on User Experience in E-Commerce Store
The answer to how to be successful in e-commerce also depends on your store’s UX. User experience is so subtle yet so clear if you browse different e-commerce stores in a short timeframe. Some stores are so easy to navigate, and others will annoy you. Apart from other details, the most important thing for e-commerce UX is to minimize the time needed to find the right product and purchase it. It’s very simple, but the process is needlessly complex in many online stores.
Here are some tips on how to be successful in e-commerce by improving your user experience:
- Think about mobile users. Everything is smaller on a mobile screen, so make sure you don’t cramp it with too many options. Mobile users don’t like heavy filtering and searching, so you should consider using visual search in e-commerce.
- Decrease the time needed to discover items. Don’t let your customers wander around and show them what they want instead. This requires a smart e-commerce recommendation platform.
- Simplify item searching. Product searching is a key feature that affects first-time visitors. Invest in a good search engine to avoid customer frustration. Not everyone speaks your language and knows how to spell perfectly. For maximum simplicity, use visual search in e-commerce.
Final Words
If you’re wondering how to build long-term success in e-commerce, you should know there is no single universal truth. It’s a process that differs from store to store, and it’s something you’ll have to try yourself. However, some important factors directly affect whether your store will become a brand or just another e-commerce in the endless sea of online shops.
The list of factors we extracted is short, and many might feel the need to add extra items. However, these five factors are universal for every e-commerce store:
- Choosing products
- Branding
- Using customer data as insights
- Take advantage of tech solutions
- UX
If someone asks you how to be successful in e-commerce, the correct answer is “I don’t know!” Still, there are important factors that will affect whether you’ll make it or not. Maybe you will settle for products that will get banned worldwide in a year, or a global pandemic might strike and render many products useless. There are no rules, only advice founded on facts and statistics.
