How effective is your eCommerce store?
Over the 10 years uc4 have been building eCommerce store our clients have taken over £7million in revenue.
To begin with many of our clients have been happy to keep taking and shipping orders from their websites but we’ve noticed a trend. As purse strings tighten because of the recession our clients are spending more time analysing the behaviour of their shoppers, trying to work out what is the most effective way of spending their advertising budget.
We’ve been working with clients for some time to help them understand the habits of their shoppers but since we started building eCommerce sites the tools at our disposal to do this have come a long way and we can now get some really detailed information.
What kind of data we can analyse?
What you are selling and how much?
We are aware that for all the talk and strategies eCommerce comes down to what you are selling and how much of it you are selling. Do you know what your top lines are? How frequently do you make a sale? How much do customers spend on average?
Where are your buyers coming from?
Most merchants have an anecdotal understanding of where their buyers are from because they have to put address labels on the packages. Have you analysed this? Do your foreign customers buy specific types of item? Do you know if your London customers spend more than your customers from Birmingham?
When are your customers buying?
Are their seasonal, monthly, weekly, or daily trends to the orders you receive? For instance could you make the most of any Pay Per click advertising by trying to catch the people shopping in their lunch time, or pause it over sunny weekends?
Some of you may be wondering how anybody can run a shop and not know this information but our experience shows us that sometimes there just isn’t the time.
That’s why we can help analyse our sales figures by summarising sales, spotting patterns or giving you the tools to help.
How about data from my web site?
You can collect a mind boggling amount of information about your customers by using ‘Website Stats’ tools like Google Analytics. We can help you pick the information that is important.
- How many visitors are you getting: The simplest way of assessing a web site
- Conversion rates: What percentage of your visitors is converting to sales? It might be more effective to increase your conversion rate than recruit more visitors.
- The sales funnel: If shoppers don’t buy from you at what point do you lose them?
- How do visitors find your site? The major routes are from offline marketing, search engines, pay per click advertising or email marketing. Do you know what the mix is and which route leads to sales?
- Your first impression: You haven’t got long to convince a shopper you have what they want. Could you do better and keep your visitors on your site, generating more sales.
- Do visitors return? If your visitors have used your site do they come back and if so are you making the most of that opportunity?
- Are you using the same language as your shoppers? If you aren’t they won’t find you, or buy from you. There is no point selling the ‘Nut Rotator 2000’ if your customers want to buy a spanner.
- Pay per click advertising: Are you making the most of your pay per click advertising? Can you spend less for the same number, or more, orders and increase your margin?
This list could go on and will vary for each eCommerce store. The key is to make use of the data you already have and supplement it with some of the great tools now available.
If you would like to talk to us about an analysis of your current eCommerce site please give us a call on 0121 323 3636. We’ll be happy to help.
This article was written by Ben Lomax
I am a senior developer and have been working on websites with uc4 for twelve years. My job is to make your website ‘do things’. I spend a lot of time working with Content Management Systems, Ecommerce and working on special projects. I have a particular interest in making a website match the way your business operates and, of course, making sure it works in the best way for your customers.
