As per the data, e-commerce grew by 25% once the governments laid down social distancing and lockdown protocols. People are relying on e-commerce platforms to get basic commodities, food and products.

As a result, the pressure on these websites has increased manifolds. And with more companies changing business modules, the competition has also increased.

If you are pursuing business management studies, you will get optimum assignment help from the points mentioned below. So, let us delve into the lessons that most businesses have learnt from this period as well as the measures one can adopt to stay on top of the game.

Valuable Lessons Learned from Unveiling Ecommerce Platforms

The COVID-19 pandemic has imparted invaluable lessons to the businessmen.

1. Sell Products that You Can Acquire at Low Cost

At a time, when the prices of every product are on the rise, you have to make your decision wisely. For instance, you must focus on selling essential products and the ones that you can manufacture or acquire at a low price. Do not choose a product because it is trending or you think it will sell well without having an idea on the approximate cost of the good. Moreover, you should keep the prices consistent as is available on other major platforms like eBay, Amazon, etc.

61% of people in the USA buy products after reading online reviews or hearing recommendations from friends and family members. Thus, you also have to look into the quality of the products that you are selling. Furthermore, you can also introduce discounts and additional perks, so that more people are interested in your product at a time when everyone is facing a financial crisis.

The products that you must have are food and milk, sanitizers, disinfectants, masks, electronic gadgets, apparels, etc.

2. Invest Time in Engaging with People

At a time when people are feeling hopeless and depressed, be the ray of sunshine. If you want to enhance your branding amid COVID-19, invest time for community building. It might be in the form of sharing tips, offering free products or perks, etc. You can engage with them through your website by writing blog posts or via social media. The second option makes sense as you can have real-time conversations on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.

You can let the people know what products are available at your online store, which items might be beneficial and more. You also post pictures of discount deals on specific products on a particular day. If you have a multi-brand store, it is imperative that you work on graphic identity to catch people’s attention.

With a unique brand image and regular content publishing on various platforms, you are bound to get a community of people interested in your products.

3. Conduct a Market Research

If you have launched an ecommerce platform amid COVID-19, you have to be extremely patient. It takes years for the websites to reach the status of major ecommerce platforms like Amazon, Target, etc. So, you can figure out the mathematics if you have just ventured into the ecommerce business. However, you can hasten the process if you adhere to certain steps.

You first identify which are your customer segments. Next, you check what people are interested in. Thus, you have to conduct a funnel study for lead scoring, and you have to keep at it as the trends change after some time. You should know what brands customers are interested in, the promotion process, purchasing process, etc.

Furthermore, you have to keep a close watch on big establishments like Amazon, Walmart, Best Buy, etc. You have to conduct research into the long-tail keywords to know what people are looking for.

4. Don’t Waste Time Enhancing Website Outlook

If you have just launched your website, you must be having a hard time deciding whether to focus on developing the website or checking the processes. Well, you need not spend hours modifying the layout of the website. Today, you have applications like WooCommerce, Magento or Shopify that help you with web designing and infrastructure requirements.

You don’t need to hire any personnel for programming, and you can set up online stores for a monthly subscription cost. And if you estimate the overall costs, you will find that the subscription platforms cost you less. You should know 75% of website credibility comes from design. And with these platforms, you can create an excellent first impression in the minds of the customers.

5. Have Patience

It shouldn’t take more than a month for the market analysis and concept preparation process. Because of the pandemic, production and shipping of goods have become a problem. It is here that you have to be patient as the processes are not happening at a quick pace. You need to guarantee the consistency, final design and prices with suppliers, if you produce or make up the goods in some way. But remember, there is a lot of uncertainty in this journey.

It takes time to generate sales on the web; nothing occurs instantly. To optimize the promotions, you have to invest in generating traffic on the web and wait for the algorithms until the publications are more successful in converting the consumer segments to sales. Usually, the first results in sales appear to be reflected, weeks or months after starting a campaign.

There are some tips that you should consider if you want to flourish in this tough time. I’m sharing this as many online ecommerce sites are facing issues in this sector. You can also consider these points as ‘lessons learned’.

6. Choose a Good Shipping Partner

COVID-19 has introduced complications in the field of coordination and transportation. Moreover, due to the transmission of diseases, many delivery agents are unavailable at this time. So, you have to choose a shipping partner wisely if you are about to launch an ecommerce site.

You can also rely on eCommerce tools such as Big-Commerce, GrooveHQ, ClickMeeting etc., for optimizing the business operation flow.

7. Invest in Customer Service Technology

As per Sammy Gibson, Director of Neon Poodle, customer service is of the utmost essence. In his own words, “Our focus is customer service, and fast email and social media response are critical for building brand trust.”

It is imperative that you have a good customer support team at your disposal to take care of the grievances of the customers and address them as soon as possible. And if the statistics are to be believed, 54% of all consumers stated that they expect optimum customer service than they did a year ago.

8. Use Videos in Your Ecommerce Sites

Around half of the marketing experts worldwide have stated that video has the top return on investment compared to other marketing tactics. The reason is simple. Short videos appeal more to the customers, and they get the gist of the product within a minute without having to go through 20 lines to get the crux of it.

Videos lead to an increase in engagement and make people intrigued about the products. It has been seen that sites having videos can get the consumers to spend 88% more time on the pages. Thus, if you had been wondering why you are getting a few orders, try this approach.

9. Be Specific with Product Categories

It can be tempting to bundle all your products into generic categories in the early stages when you only have 15 products. However, you’ll want to be a little more precise in your product categorization as you expand your shop. For SEO purposes, having product categories such as ‘Women,” Men’ and ‘Children’ don’t do much, yet they’re prominent in many virtual shops.

What’s worse is that, some stores lump all of their female fashion products under ‘women’ with no subcategories at all. Most people don’t want to search for the whole catalog. Look at how eBay, or Amazon categorizes their items. You can find unique objects easily. The simpler you make it to find out what a customer is looking for, the more likely they’re going to buy from your shop.

10. Focus on SEO

As per the statistics, 39% of the global e-commerce traffic comes from search comes from SEO. With the rapid growth of the e-commerce economy, more and more companies will enter this increasingly crowded space. And that is clear from COVID-19. In order to improve your place in search engines, you have to constantly explore different ways.

You have to avoid cluttered, complicated URLs. SEO guidelines indicate that URLs should be as transparent as possible and that keywords related to what appears on the resulting page should be included in them. You should also use alt text in images, refrain from using duplicate content, and improve the website loading time. And you should register your website with Google webmaster tools. This will help the consumers to quickly locate your business.

11. Offer Free Shipping

Many people are facing distress and financial constraints in this pandemic. If you offer at least some services free of cost, the consumers will likely favor your e-commerce. It’s easier to offer free shipping to promote the purchase if you have a new store with a small social follow-up. People may be tired of paying for a business they do not trust yet, but providing free shipping makes it a smaller risk.

Around 50 per cent of online retailers offer free shipping, which makes them stand out from the other e-commerce websites that don’t. There are many suppliers who offer low cost shipping services. It is wise to get hold of them (UPS, FedEx, XPO, etc.), which allows you to offer affordable shipping. This won’t have a huge impact on your marketing prospects and margin.

12. Invest in Advertising

Advertisements bring in the traffic that turns into lead scoring. However, once you do your smooth sailing, you’ll need to experiment with various items to find your winning ad. You’ll need to spend around $4,000 on advertising if your target is to make $11,000 in sales. Initially, the start-up ad costs would be challenging, so feel free to start and build on a smaller budget.

It takes around 3 to 5 days for an ad to optimize. Your company will expand rapidly if you keep reinvesting your profits in your ads. It takes a few weeks to find out which products will have the best ROI. It will also take time to figure out whether commercials are sustainable for your product price.

13. Focus on Backlinks

It’s important to establish external backlinks to minimize ad spending while increasing revenue. You may do this by advertising your goods or writing guest posts on blogs on important and popular blogs or magazines. The more channels you have that push traffic to your website, the less advertising you spend.

For instance, you might not have a particular product. But, if you write a guest post on another blog, you might get clicks on your website. You can re-target them with your best-selling product once you have gotten clicks on your website. This would be much easier than trying to find new customers. Most top-ranking pages get ‘followed’ backlinks from new websites at a pace of +5%-14.5% per month.

As you can see, COVID-19 has provided important lessons to businessmen and women. So, if you have already launched an ecommerce site, you should take a look into the pointers shared above.