So you’ve finally gotten your online store all set up. It was quite a feat but your store has now been populated with products, you’ve tested it out and you’re happy with the overall look of your site (yay!).
Now start using these 20 ecommerce features to help you sell online.
Customize Abandoned Cart Feature
Make sure you configure your abandoned cart first as your store will begin to receive traffic and exposure from all the SEO efforts and blogging that you’ve been doing.
If you’re not sure about whether you’ve set up your store’s SEO properly, please check out these practical ecommerce tips for first time sellers which covers the overall work needed to get your store ready to sell online.
Being able to reach customers who have made it all the way to your store’s checkout process is a priority.
To find out the steps on how to set up your abandoned cart email, please view there’s a gold mine in your abandoned cart orders.
Offer Discount Coupons
Create some discount coupons as a way to reward first time buyers who sign up or register at your store to purchase something. It’s a great way to encourage them to complete their first purchase at your store.
You can offer different types of discount coupons ranging from percentage to dollar value or even free shipping with our ecommerce shopping cart.
Put yourself in the shoes of your customers and decide which is the best that you can offer them to complete checkout.
Offer Gift Certificates
Look at the yearly calendar and mark down the different holiday seasons or special occasions where you can offer discounted gift certificates to customers who could purchase them to give away as gifts.
Gift certs can be made available all year round but remember to set a reasonable validity time frame.
Creating a digital gift certificate is easy with our ecommerce solution.
A reasonable validity time frame is a way to encourage customers to utilize them soon.
Send Out Newsletters
Collect all those emails of customers that have registered in your store as you’ll want to send them periodic newsletters of your latest products, promotions and blog posts (which contains useful advice that will teach and add value to your customers).
Make it worth sharing to their other friends by including some discount codes for first time signup and purchase.
Creating newsletters is an easy process provided you’ve planned out your outline and have prepared all the relevant links and images.
Our ecommerce software makes it easy for merchants to create and send out newsletters to their subscribers and registered customers.
You can have a test copy sent to your email to see what it looks like first before blasting it out to your subscribers and customers.
Sell on eBay
Select some of your products to sell on eBay. Post them easily from your store to your eBay account if you want your product to be available in the marketplace.
InstanteStore is integrated with eBay so all you need is an eBay account to link your store and start posting some of your products direct to eBay.
You don’t have to post your entire store’s products on eBay. Only selected ones will do.
Sell Wholesale
Offer special wholesale pricing to customers who wish to purchase in bulk from you. We offer 3 different types of wholesale feature. Pick one that’s suitable for your online business.
If you have plenty of wholesale customers, our personal wholesale feature allows up to 9 different pricing tier per product.
That way, you can allocate different pricing to different customers depending on the different quantities that they want to purchase from you. These tier prices are not available to normal buyers.
Put Products On Sale
Put your store’s products on sale. Customers love a good sale. Do your price comparison with competitors taking into account shipping and tax to see whether you can match their pricing or offer a better deal for customers.
According to Nielsen, 41% global average of consumers will switch brand, retailer and service providers if there’s a better price offered. Makes sense as people are always looking for value.
Besides, who wants to pay more when they can get a similar product or service at a lower price.
All small business shopping cart software will enable you to put your products on sale.
Ours will even allow you to put entire categories or your whole store on sale.
You’ll have complete control and can even upload the On Sale image of your choice.
Cross Sell Your Products
Always add some similar or related products as cross sell.
That will serve as relevant suggestions to customers who are looking for the same type of products in case the initial product was not exactly what they were looking.
Configure the cross sell feature and cross sell layout to match the look of your store.
Being able to offer cross sell on both your product page and final checkout page will help to increase conversion.
Switch To Mobile Friendly And Responsive Templates
Google announced last year that mobile friendly sites will rank higher in search results.
To find out whether your site meets Google’s mobile friendly criteria, just enter in your URL in the mobile friendly test.
It makes sense as your site should load fast and properly across all devices so that users will get to what they’re searching for fast.
You’ll also want to make sure your site loads fast enough to meet Google’s Page Speed Insights :
If you need help configuring your store’s site but don’t know how to get it done, please contact us and we’ll help you out.
Switch On Ratings And Reviews
Switch on ratings and reviews so that you can share your customers’ positive shopping experience on your store.
Having positive customer ratings and reviews is part of a good ecommerce solution onboarding process to convince customers of the quality of your products and shopping experience.
Our small business ecommerce software allow merchants to set their own review settings.
Merchants can even upload a list of offensive or censor words as part of the filtering process.
Sell On Facebook
Pick some of your most popular products and sell on Facebook.
Just follow the setup Facebook Social Store steps to make your products available for purchase on Facebook. Customers get to complete the checkout within Facebook without being bumped around to other sites.
Offer Reward Point System
Give customers an incentive to redeem free products from your store via a reward point system.
It needs to be attainable as a way of rewarding loyal customers.
Keep the conversions simple and intuitive as you want to give a very good first impression to customers that you’re rewarding them from the very start.
Just activate the reward point system and decide which reward type you would like to set for your entire store.
Setting up a reward point system is fast and easy. Just be sure to inform customers of your reward point conversion rates upfront.
Offer Free Shipping
Did you know that 77% of online shoppers say that free shipping remains the most important option during checkout??
Customers are usually attracted to free shipping. It will encourage them to spend more to qualify for free shipping.
Any shopping cart software for small business will allow merchants to configure and offer free shipping to their customers.
You could increase your online sales just by changing your shipping strategy.
Set Up Your Social Media
Link your social media accounts to your store and turn on social media sharing so that customers can easily share what they like or what they’ve purchased from your store.
Social recommendation by trusted friends will definitely go a long way to market your products for you.
Offer Or Sell Downloadable Products
If you’ve got some really awesome advice, tips or how-to instructions on a particular subject which you think your customers will find really helpful, you can offer that as a free or paid downloadable product.
It can be in the form of a pdf file or document which users can download from your site.
Be creative as downloadable products are not just for those who are selling digital products, photography and software files.
Downloadable products could also be digital files, serial numbers and license keys.
Our ecommerce shopping software allow merchants to upload their text file of serial numbers or license numbers easily.
When a buyer makes a purchase, the number will be marked as purchase automatically so there will be no duplicate purchase.
Use The Content Slider
You’ve got awesome products that you want to highlight and bring visitors’ attention to. Put them on your main page using a content slider.
Customers who are interested in a particular product can go straight to the product page by clicking on the respective slide.
Feature Certain Products
Configure your store to show certain featured products which could well be your best sellers and products that you want to draw customers’ attention to.
These featured products will normally appear on the main front page of your site.
Add these featured products easily and arrange their sequence on your store.
You can configure them to appear on every single page of your site to keep the customers’ focus on the products that you wish to promote to them.
Offer Affiliates
If you need help getting the word out about your product or services, you can offer affiliates to influential sites or bloggers.
It’s a win-win as you get to promote your site and product on their site and they get paid for successful referrals.
Our affiliate feature is quite comprehensive so you could configure and specify how and when you want to pay your affiliates.
Create your own affiliate banners or our designers can come up with something creative and amazing for you.
Create Auto Responder Campaigns
You’ll need a few to cater to the different visitor response to your site.
This will require you to customize your email messages that can be automatically sent out at specific time frame to different customer segments.
Use Free Live Chat
Being able to communicate with your customers directly to answer any question they may have about your product is important.
You could also find out what are their needs and interest to recommend different types of products and suggestions to them.
There are many different types of live chat software in the market. Some are free while others are chargeable.
Our InstanteStore Live Chat Software is absolutely FREE for anyone to download and use. And when you’re offline, customers can easily send you an email direct from the chat box.
This is one of the ways to improve communication without having to speak over the phone.
Start Selling Now
Utilize all these features with our ecommerce solution software to help you sell online. Treat these features as your arsenal and implement them on your store.
Some may work better than others but make the necessary changes and adjustments as you go along.
Constantly work on promoting your site and products to your target customers and existing customers.
The important thing is that you start selling now with all these features so that you can tweak them better to suit different shopping seasons and occasions.
Don’t have a store yet? Start building your store with a free 15 day trial on InstanteStore.
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