23 Ecommerce Best Practices to Increase Sales in 2024

When starting an online store, the first step is to determine what you want your store to be. There are many different ways to do this, but one of the most important things to consider is eCommerce practices. E-commerce practices are how you run your business and interact with your customers.

By following these practices, you can make sure that your customers have a positive experience and that you can grow your business.

Many different eCommerce practices can be followed when selling products online. However, following Ecommerce best practices can help make your online sales more successful.

So, without any further ado, let’s get started.

Some of the Ecommerce Best Practices You Should Follow

1. Don’t Clutter

Yes, you read it right. The first thing you should do is to get rid of clutter from your website. Visitors who obtain lots of information when they come to your store might get baffled. It’s one of the eCommerce best practices every marketer should implement.

Showcase your best-selling products front and center, and let your users learn about any current advertisements and campaigns on the landing page. Make sure you keep the focus where it should be: on your products. If you own a blog, link to it appropriately so visitors or prospective buyers can get the required information.

2. Tap a wider audience with influencer marketing

Word-of-mouth, including the use of influencer calculator, is still one of the most effective advertising techniques. The pandemic permitted social media platforms to grow, making influencer marketing appealing to brands. Marketers will likely expand their influencer marketing spending and grow their business.

One of the great platforms to tap for influencer marketing this 2024 are TikTok and Instagram Reels. With their immense user base and engaging content formats, they offer unparalleled opportunities for brands to reach their target audience authentically. Leveraging influencers on these platforms can significantly boost brand visibility and drive conversions, attracting more TikTok followers in the process. As the social media platform earns more and more cross-generational appeal, it’s predicted to take over most of the market share this year.

Moreover, while reaching out to your audience, find out the right time to post on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc to improve reachability.

3. Assess your sales data with A/B testing

A/B testing or split testing lets brands compare two versions of their webpage and measure the performance difference. This permits them to evaluate their conversion funnel. Statistics indicate that A/B testing can improve the average revenue per unique visitor by 50%. An industry that expands yearly will likely be worth over a billion dollars by 2025.

You can utilize A/B testing on different parts of your website, from product descriptions to promotional content. Consider adding testimonials links to companies you’ve worked with, achievement stats, and social proof. These will enhance your trust rating among customers who rely on social reviews. 

4. Make Your Website Trustworthy

Unless you are a reliable brand, most customers won’t know what your brand is about or even have heard of it. So they have no basis for trusting you yet. Here are some recommendations you can add to your website and boost the trust level:

• Trust Badges
• Positive Press Coverage
• Reviews/Testimonials
• Contact Numbers
• Physical Address

Also, ensure you hold a valid SSL certificate on your website. Most people will not shop from you if the SSL certificate is invalid. For the non-tech and marketing part, you can also embed TikTok video on the website. This TikTok Widget, a combined effort of of user-generated content will become the social proof you need for your website and business.

5. Use Attractive Images

According to Jeff Bullas – a content marketing influencer and social media strategist – 67% of online shoppers state the images of any product are more significant than customer reviews or product descriptions. So select the most attractive images and capture your customer’s attention.

To ensure the best quality of the pictures, adhere to your style and build your content instead of relying on third-party images. Since the customers cannot physically feel your product, high-quality images allow them to imagine owning it. It enhances your conversion rate drastically. It’s one of the most common eCommerce best practices you should consider.

Moreover, ensure you take eCommerce product images from multiple angles so prospective buyers can make an informed decision. Limited imagery shows a lack of effort and will discourage buyers.

6. Create a Streamlined UIUX

Ask yourself, How easy is it for an average user to interface with your store? A seamless user experience and interface are essential for the growth of your website. For example, keep product recommendations at the bottom and comprise “frequently bought together” options.

Make it effortless for your buyers to shift from one product to another.

Your ultimate goal is to get people to spend more time on your website. The more time they spend on your site, the higher their chances of purchasing from you. It’s one of those simple ecommerce website development service practices to follow.

7. Keep Navigation Simple

Cognitive load is the mental effort needed to process and learn new information. Likewise, cognitive load in user experience is the amount of mental processing power needed to use your website. Simply put, the higher the cognitive load, the harder it is for the users to find what they want.

Then they will jump off your website and never return. To simplify your navigation bar, use best homepage practices to direct visitors where they need to go. You can also use digital storefront programs to build your eCommerce website, as they guarantee convenient navigation that will allow your customer to quickly find what they want

Keep navigation as straightforward as possible; let users move from one product page to another with comparative ease, and track their behavior across the site to offer them customized recommendations.

8. Cover a Range of FAQs

Since it is not possible to be available always and answer every other customer’s question, therefore providing every piece of information will allow customers to decide. Don’t overvalue what your buyers know. 

From Frequently Asked Questions to Return Policies, Shipping Dates to your Shipping Policies, be precise and transparent in your conversations and dealings with them.

Put yourself in a customer’s shoes and then determine what their questions are likely to be. Make sure you include everything that you can imagine.

9. Don’t Force Shoppers to Create an Account

One of the most widespread eCommerce best practices to follow is to provide users with the option of a guest checkout. Don’t push a shopper to create their account, particularly on the checkout page. Your shopping cart abandonment rate will increase by a considerable margin.

Users don’t enjoy it when stores pull up such techniques.

What if someone doesn’t want an account? They shouldn’t need to create one. Just ask for an email address to create your list and send them an order confirmation email, and you are all set.

10. Add Quality Product Descriptions

Product descriptions are paramount. Excellent copies differ between a sky-high conversion rate and a normal one. They are the reason why people will boost your brand or why they even remember you.

SEO product illustrations for eCommerce stores are even more important. You should concentrate on writing product descriptions that tell, create value, and rank well on search engines.

According to the Nielsen Group, on a full Amazon page, just 18% of the time was spent considering photos. The remaining time was spent on the text. Therefore, not optimizing your product descriptions is like flushing your money down the drain. 

Given that most of your contenders are lethargic and just copy-paste descriptions, this is your ideal chance to stand out. How? Narrate a compelling story about your product that’ll relate with your audience on a more personal level. Don’t forget, people love stories! We pass on information from one generation to another through stories. Describing a captivating story on your Ecommerce product pages will improve their value for your customers, boosting your conversion rates in the process.”

11. Create Engaging Product Demos

Numerous studies have demonstrated that putting up product demos is a wonderful way to boost sales. Essentially, you need to put up videos of products rather than simply putting up photos.

You can shoot videos of products and then put them online. This will enable an average buyer to make an informed decision about whether they should purchase or not. Your job is to supply them with complete information about your products.

12. Opt for the Best Possible Hosting

If you have a fast hosting server for your store it can boost your sales. You push customers away if your store takes a long time to load.

People don’t want to wait more than a few seconds to view a product. If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load up, you are simply making things more complicated for yourself. You will lose users, and your bounce rate is likely to rise.

13. Offer a Range of Filters

Some customers bounce onto your online store because they already know what they want. But the majority of them have no idea. Think of it as the online version of window shopping. They want to notice what you’ve got. And that’s why product filters are essential.

Product filters sort your products so visitors can concentrate on the items they’re curious about. Think about what is essential to your visitors and form filters that apply to them.

According to Smashing Magazine, 42% of eCommerce sites don’t utilize category-specific filters, not even for their core products. You’ll undoubtedly be ahead of the curve if you do this precisely.

14. Capitalize on business-to-business (B2B) transactions

In 2024, B2B e-commerce will accelerate toward a more digital platform. 80% of B2B consumers have no plans to return to in-person sales even after the pandemic. This year, sales will grow by 12% more from 2024.

The fundamental goal for B2B brands this year is improving brand awareness. A majority of B2B marketers support influencer marketing. Meanwhile, 50% aim to create case studies and learn from other businesses. It’s crucial to remember that there’s no one-size-fits-all in B2B e-commerce. Expressing how your brand can help another will require your B2B strategy.

15. Send Emails for Shopping Cart Abandonment

People who left your shopping cart probably had a rationale for doing so to remain fresh and relevant in such users’ minds by sending them follow-up emails. 

Request for their feedback about what made them abandon their cart, or give them a small discount if they decide to complete their purchase. It’s one of the most commonly overlooked eCommerce best practices that could maximize revenue.

16. Work on Improving Loading Times

According to KissMetrics, 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less. A simple 1-second delay can lead to a 7% reduction in your conversion rate. It can potentially cost a $100,000/day eCommerce site to lose $2.5 million in sales every year.

Your visitors tend to feel frustrated if your website loads slowly. You should look at these elements:

• Minimize HTTP requests
• Lower server response time
• Allow compression
• Enable browser caching
• Minify resources
• Optimize images
• Optimize CSS delivery
• Prioritize above-the-fold content
• Reduce the number of plugins
• Reduce redirects

17. Enhance Your Website’s Responsiveness

Your website has to be responsive to load up easily on additional devices with varying screen sizes. Google pays great attention to your website’s responsiveness and rewards this with visibility.

You must always look at different ways by which you can optimize your website’s responsiveness and maximize performance. You can do this by lowering the size of your images and utilizing responsive web design practices throughout your website. Also, ensure you eradicate unnecessary page elements from your website.

18. Interact with customers live

Influencer marketing popularity has made the live stream selling boom. Now, 78% of businesses employ live commerce to connect deeper with audiences. Moreover, companies say that conversion rates from live commerce are up to  10x higher than in traditional commerce.

Customer interaction is live selling’s most significant highlight. Additionally, it comes at little to no cost. Just log on to a platform like Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon and pick the live stream feature. 

19. Present various payment methods

Convenience is a primary driver in today’s e-commerce market. Make sure you offer different ways to pay for your product design, a seamless and exceptional customer experience. This, in turn, lowers cart abandonment and facilitates consumers to purchase more.

Credit and debit card payments are common, but shoppers are looking for more flexibility. Understanding your audience’s location and cultural shopping patterns can enable you to limit other modes to include on your e-commerce platform. Also, this helps eradicate channels that your customers might not trust.

20. Automate your email marketing campaigns

During the pandemic restrictions, the average global email open rate rose to 20% year-on-year. Automating your email marketing campaign allows you automatically send an online newsletter to your subscriber using pre-formatted commands. Useful email automation can improve investment returns by 80% and yield more than 26% more leads and 86% higher open rates.

Email marketing automation tools can support you grow your email list, track and monitor your email campaigns in real-time, and encourage your leads. Choosing the right email marketing automation tool, such as TinyEmail or ActiveCampaign, plays a significant role in the success of your campaigns. Each platform offers unique features that can help tailor your strategy to meet your audience’s needs better and improve your overall results.

21. Prepare a video marketing campaign

A huge part of inbound marketing, video marketing is now a critical investment. At the pandemic’s peak, video content reaches expanded across all social media platforms. 91% of advertisers have asserted that videos are now more critical for brands, thanks to the pandemic. Experts indicate that 80% of all traffic this year will consist of video.

In 2024, short-form video content will defeat the video marketing industry, aka TikTok and Instagram Reels. Other trends have shoppable content, interactive features, and live streams. Your audience’s preference should always come first while selecting a platform and format. Make sure you always optimize your videos for search engine optimization.

22. Run on mobile

79% of smartphone users purchased online using a mobile device in the past six months. In 2024, 75% of all online purchases during the holidays were from smartphone users.

Concentrating on mobile commerce this year can cause more sales and connect with customers across various channels. Some of the trends for mobile commerce this 2024 contain one-click ordering, voice shopping, AR, and progressive web apps (PWA). 

23. Embrace a more resilient supply chain

2024 is the year for future-proofing supply chains. From a low-cost supply chain, nearly 90% of companies plan to invest in resilience within the next two years. 

Some business strategies contain elastic supply chains (flexibility to satisfy demands at any time) and supply chains as services, which show a virtual supply chain team. 

Greener supply chain management will also handle consumer preferences for sustainable businesses. Likewise, circular economies will be on the rise to mitigate environmental impacts.

24. Create Scarcity

Customers are attracted to exclusivity. What’s rare is valuable. And holding such things becomes urgent. Creating product scarcity or urgency is a helpful conversion optimization strategy. Why give your buyers time to think over their findings? 

Implement scarcity! Plenty of instances are available of implementing lack to achieve profitable results. Developing a sense of urgency motivates your customers to act immediately. It is a commonly used tactic for booking websites. They usually highlight the phrase “Selling Out!” to make customers purchase faster.

There are different ways to implement scarcity. It’s up to you to test and determine the most effective for your online store. For starters, here are some recommendations for this best practice:

• Flash Sales
• Last Day Offers
• While Stocks Last
• Limited Release

Conclusion

Online eCommerce is a growing industry that offers consumers a variety of choices and options. Businesses must follow eCommerce best practices to be successful in this industry. These practices include having good ecommerce support services, creating a user-friendly site, and using online tools to increase sales.

If you also want to take your online business to a new level, then consider using NotifyVisitors Automation marketing tools that will help you succeed. To know more about it, have a look at our products. 

FAQs

1. What is Ecommerce?

eCommerce is a type of online business in which customers purchase and/or order goods or services online. This can be done through a website, a mobile app, or even social media.

2. What Are Some of the Ecommerce Best Practices?

Some of the best practices are:

1. Make your website responsive

2. Make use of an automated email marketing campaign

3. Don’t forget to do AB testing to find the best one to work with.

4. Create Urgency.

5. Interact with your customer’s live

6. Make use of images.

3. What Are the Four Traditional Types of Ecommerce?

There are six types of eCommerce models:

1. Business to Consumer (B2C)

2. Business to Business (B2B)

3. Business to Government (B2G)

4. Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C)

5. Consumer to Consumer (C2C)

6. Consumer to Business (C2B)