E-commerce involves more than just setting up your platform and selling products: Your e-commerce store’s success depends on your passion, expertise, and marketing strategy. According to a report from Statista, global retail e-commerce sales for 2020 hit an all-time high of $4.280 trillion. Experts project the retail revenues of e-commerce stores to reach $5.4 trillion by the end of 2022. These figures explain why many businesses are going online and want to solidify their online presence. The success of e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba and Amazon also acts as a driving force to other online merchants. But what secrets do these platforms hold? What are some crucial insights online merchants can learn from the success of such platforms? Here are six critical factors to abide by.
1.Understand E-Commerce Fraud
As an online merchant, you need to understand what e-commerce fraud entails so you can protect your payment systems. Generally, much of e-commerce involves commercial transactions happening electronically in online stores over the internet. As an online merchant, adopting a Card Acquiring system is in your best interest. This ensures you can receive payments from your customers from across the globe. In most cases, your customers will be making these transactions through electronic gadgets such as phones, tablets, or computers; They want to be assured that your system is safe. When you have a secure transaction system in place, it eliminates the chances of an e-commerce fraud happening.
2.Users Shopping Experience Matters
Let’s take a closer look at an e-commerce platform like Amazon. What makes them stand out in the e-commerce industry? Besides having a massive selection of products, they offer customers a personalized shopping experience. The user interface (UI) is also fantastic and easy to navigate, even for a 4th grader. As an online merchant, you can learn from Amazon and personalize your users’ shopping experience.
3.Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
An API allows interlinking between two or more web-based applications. As an online merchant, you can use APIs from vendors to improve your store’s features. With APIs, you can also add site content or communicate more efficiently with partners and customers. This makes your store better refined for business operations. For instance, let’s say you want to add customer reviews from a third-party platform to your site. In this case, a web developer will likely use the vendor’s API. You ever wondered how your site gets real-time shipping rates from FedEx? You guessed it right: API.
4.Determine Your Shipping
Amazon offers free shipping and speedy delivery timelines. However, it’s not every e-commerce platform that can afford to provide this. As an online merchant, start by figuring out your shipping rates. Next, you want to evaluate how the rates will impact your overall profits. It wouldn’t make sense to lose a sale because shipping is expensive. On the other hand, you don’t want to lose cash because you’re offering free shipping. As an online merchant, try and determine a strategy that provides value while exceeding your customers’ expectations.
5.E-Commerce Mobile Experience
Mobile usage is taking over. Today, many people make their purchases from their mobile gadgets. As an online retailer, tap into these opportunities that mobile commerce (m-commerce) offers. According to a report from Iflexion, smartphones outperform PCs and tablets among online shoppers. Mobile shopping has gained popularity because it makes the e-commerce customer experience smooth. It eliminates physical and emotional barriers, such as paid parking, poor customer service, and checkout queues.
6.Relational Databases and How They Work
Relational databases connect with the internet and are a necessity for any e-commerce platform. Generally, these are digital repository solutions for robust variable data and hold an e-commerce platforms’ data and information. The database needs to store information to be captured, distributed, retrieved or edited quickly. In most cases, online merchants don’t design these databases or even interact with them on a day-to-day basis. However, understanding how they operate is crucial for any e-commerce business. Why? This is because they can affect business decisions such as hiring web developers or choosing an ideal shopping cart software. Additionally, your e-commerce platform relies on these databases to hold information such as:
- Tax rules
- Product descriptions
- Customer information
- Customer reviews
As a digital retailer, you have a lot on your table. From dealing with tax laws to understanding e-commerce fraud to customize sales funnels, you need to ensure everything flows smoothly. While this post doesn’t cover everything, the above six tips are crucial to any online merchant. Once you have embraced the above, you can sit back and watch your business grow. Over to you!