Scaling an ecommerce business can be a complex process with many moving parts, but your path to growth can be less overwhelming if you stick to a set of proven principles. By getting the fundamentals right, you can also mitigate the risks of attempting to scale too quickly, such as overinvesting in areas that don’t deliver a return on investment.
To help set you up for success as you scale your ecommerce business, we’ve identified seven key principles:
- Optimize your website and customer experience
- Hone your data measurement
- Establish a cohesive marketing strategy
- Tap into the power of reviews
- Offer excellent customer support
- Invest in automation
- Streamline your fulfillment and inventory management
Let’s dive into each principle.
1. Optimize your website and customer experience
Before you spend big money on marketing campaigns to boost traffic to your site, make sure the customer experience (CX) on your site is as good as it can be. One way to check if your CX is truly delivering is by evaluating your conversion rate. If it’s lower than it should be based on established baselines or growth forecasts, there could be an issue with your CX.
No matter how many advertising dollars you spend to drive impressions and clicks, the volume of completed purchases on your site will likely be low if the customer journey flow isn’t optimized for simplicity and ease. Additionally, without an optimized CX, your checkout abandonment rate can increase, and would-be customers might walk away with negative impressions of your brand. These issues can be avoided by following best practices and strategies that deliver proven CX results.
From ensuring visitors to your site understand your brand story to iterative testing to find opportunities to streamline the flow of your site, below are some tactics to help ensure shoppers have a positive experience with your brand.
Refine your brand story
Baymard Institute found that users tend to rely heavily on homepage content to inform their holistic understanding of an ecommerce brand. There are many ways to tell your brand story, but at a minimum, consider:
- Highlight core product and brand features on the homepage.
Help visitors get to know your brand by showcasing core brand information and key products, with details about their best attributes and unique features. According to the Baymard study, when visitors felt a brand’s homepage lacked enough detail about key product or brand information, they quickly lost interest and were more likely to abandon the site. Featuring a “best sellers” category on the homepage - or only one click away - can be a powerful way to help shoppers explore your product range. - Offer supplementary pages about the brand and product attributes.
Nearly two-thirds of users engage with content found on “About Us” and “Our Story” pages. Provide dedicated content that helps shoppers get to know your brand, because it can be a critical part of their decision to purchase. Tell shoppers about your unique startup story or brand’s mission to help establish trust and put potential customers at ease.
Design for shopper confidence
When shoppers visit an unfamiliar ecommerce site, they often look for signals that indicate a brand or merchant is trustworthy. Establish consumer confidence in your site design and user experience (UX) as a key method to help drive conversions. There are a variety of ways to boost trust with your UX, and giving shoppers assurance that your site and brand is legitimate can help reduce cart abandonment.
Avoid some of the more common trust busters that scare off shoppers by following the fundamental principles of UX design.
- Start with a polished, professional website.
To form a perception of your brand, customers evaluate the overall appearance of your website. Generally, they’re looking for a clean layout that’s easy to navigate. If your site looks messy or disorganized, shoppers might become wary. Common but easily addressable issues include layouts that don’t have enough white space, obvious spelling and grammatical errors, unclear navigation or labels, and misaligned text or images. Pay attention to elements like background color, contrast, font size, and style, and the overall spacing and design balance of graphic brand elements on your site. And always edit your copy for clarity, spelling, typos, and grammar. - Gain shopper confidence with thorough product descriptions and images.
Many consumers zoom in on product images so that they can see the details of the fabric, stitching, finish, and materials. Help shoppers make informed purchasing decisions by showcasing compelling visuals and detailed product explanations. Another way to bolster shopper confidence is including pictures or videos of real people using your products. It’s also important to know the types of shoppers perusing your site so you can cater to their unique needs. - Build with mobile in mind.
Half of all website traffic worldwide now comes from mobile devices, according to research from Statista, and mobile ecommerce sales expected to double to $710 billion in 2025. So at a minimum, make sure your site layout and media assets are mobile friendly. When it comes to designing your site for a mobile audience, it’s important to get familiar with the different options. The creative platform 99designs offers a good breakdown of the differences between mobile-friendly, mobile-optimized, and responsive website design.
Remove friction points in your shoppers’ journey
Give your potential customers the opportunity to have a seamless shopping experience. A couple of basic tips for delivering a smooth experience for site visitors include limiting the number of ads and pop-ups, offering a variety of trusted payment options, and being transparent with order delivery estimates.
Looking at 10-years of checkout testing, Baymard Institute found that brands can reduce cart abandonment and even gain a 35% increase in conversion rate by providing a better checkout design. Baymard also found that nearly half of online shoppers say high additional costs associated with shipping, taxes, or fees are what keep them from placing an order, and 22% said they abandoned checkout because of slow delivery times. Additionally, a study commissioned by Amazon Pay found that 37% of surveyed online shoppers said they abandoned checkout because they were asked to create an account, and 28% said the checkout process was too long or complicated.
Adding Buy with Prime to your site signals to Prime members that you offer an experience that millions of shoppers trust: fast, free delivery and a seamless checkout. Plus the Buy with Prime badge and button to your product pages can help improve customer confidence and remove friction in the shopper journey. The Buy with Prime marketing toolkit highlights effective ways to use Buy with Prime brand assets to help drive interest in your products and, ultimately, drive conversions.
Invest in ongoing testing
Effective optimization is directly linked to experimentation and iteration. Put your data and benchmarks to use with A/B testing so you can tell which changes to your CX design drive the greatest conversion. Testing can give you the information you need to make decisions about what messaging, images, colors, fonts, layouts, feature launches, CTAs, and checkout flows work best to turn those hard-won site visitors into actual customers. You can also use A/B testing to boost conversions with Buy with Prime.
Beyond the optimization benefits that A/B testing can provide, one of the simplest things you can do to make sure you don’t have any CX issues on your site is to ask real people, including family and friends, for feedback. By consistently testing, reviewing, and improving your site, you can make sure that you have all the basics of your CX covered.
2. Hone your data measurement
For most small and mid-sized businesses, getting a handle on critical data can help pave the most direct path to growth. As the head of tech business development for Buy with Prime, Dan Jeong, puts it, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
The list of ways to measure data will change depending on your needs. In general, many merchants track signals like customer lifetime value, conversion rate, average order value, churn rate, customer acquisition cost, and monthly recurring revenue.
“When you spin up your business, the number-one thing to do is get really sharp on your measurement,” Dan says. “You want to be super dialed into the profitability of each of the items that you’re selling, looking at your website analytics, such as monthly traffic that you’re getting to your site and bounce rate.”
By keeping close track of your cost of goods and profitability, you’ll know exactly how much margin you have to make strategic bets on potential growth drivers, including investments in search ads or marketing to build traffic.
Once you have a baseline for the monthly pool of potential customers landing on your site and the amount of sales that traffic generates, you can focus on one of the most important measurements of them all—your conversion rate—and drive more revenue by optimizing your customer experience.
Read more about data measurement and growth strategies from Dan on our blog.
3. Establish a cohesive marketing strategy
Consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and while there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to developing a cohesive marketing strategy, there are many proven tactics for acquiring and keeping customers. Here are three foundational marketing guidelines to consider when seeking to scale to your full potential.
Understand your customers and their motivations
Before you make any significant investments in a marketing plan, know who your customers are, where they are, and how they behave.
Some questions to think about:
- What types of people are engaging with your website and what do they care about?
- Where do they live, hang out, and work?
- What social networks do they use?
- What brands do they love, and how are they engaging with those brands?
Tap into customer data and analytics to define your audience, looking at metrics like page views, unique visitors, and bounce rates, the primary channels driving your traffic, the devices customers use, and the geographic regions they’re visiting from. Platforms like Google Analytics offer a wealth of insights about how your customers experience your brand online, and these data signals can be used to understand your customers’ behaviors and preferences.
“Collect customer information and use that to reduce your marketing costs as much as humanly possible,” says Buy with Prime senior economist Aaron Bodoh-Creed, who recently outlined some important sales drivers for small businesses to watch for. “Work very hard to optimize the traffic coming to your site and look at the profiles of your return customers to deliver a consistent, personalized message to drive that lifetime value.”
To help boost sales, have a clear sense for what motivates your customers and optimize your CX and marketing materials to appeal to their needs. Accenture’s recent survey of more than 25,000 consumers across 22 countries provides a revealing snapshot of how consumer motivations are evolving beyond price and quality, with factors like ease and convenience, trust and reputation, personal service, and product origin becoming increasingly relevant.
Our Buy with Prime shopper experience team identified three shopper archetypes based on insights gleaned from studying the behaviors of online shoppers. Getting clear on the preferences of different types of shoppers can help drive engagement with your brand.
Using analytics, you can also create customer segments based on demographic and psychographic information to create marketing campaigns that are mapped to your shoppers’ needs and expectations.
The delivery of personalized experiences is one of the key factors in driving customer retention and long-term value. Companies that prioritize personalization also generate 40% more revenue from those activities than companies that don’t. PwC’s 2022 Customer Loyalty Survey found that customers are increasingly less loyal to companies when they don’t get the personalized experiences that they seek.
Optimize for SEO
The higher your site ranks in results for search terms relevant to your business and products, the more traffic and customers you can drive to your website. Search engine optimization (SEO) is foundational to any marketing strategy and one of the biggest opportunities to increase shopper traffic and sales. Most smaller merchants looking to scale can benefit from focusing their marketing efforts on SEO.
Check out some SEO techniques to get the right traffic to your site, starting with creating a narrowly focused keyword strategy. It’s also a good practice to look at your analytics and tap into SEO tools to find insights that can help inform the length of content on your site, experiment with incorporating new keywords, and identify ways to drive more brand awareness in search.
Embrace an omnichannel approach
Today’s consumers expect a unified brand experience, whether they’re shopping online or in person. Omnichannel marketing is the seamless integration of every channel or customer touch point to create a consistent experience that gives consumers as many opportunities as possible to discover and engage with your brand—and as many options as possible to make a purchase.
Omnichannel marketing means putting the customer first and leveraging the power of data and personalization to create better user experiences at every brand touchpoint. McKinsey research shows that omnichannel customers shop 1.7 times more than single-channel shoppers.
In addition to using data to get to know your customers and telling a cohesive, a consistent brand story across all of your channels, a successful omnichannel strategy hinges on finding the right media mix. Prioritize the channels with the highest volume, sales, and growth opportunities first by engaging high-intent customers. Ultimately, you’ll want to expand your reach as your business scales. A couple of tactics to consider:
- Cover the entire funnel.
Find the right balance between upper (brand awareness) and lower (repeat customers) funnel marketing to cover all of your bases. Once you know what success looks like, complement your ongoing marketing efforts—paid search, organic social, and email marketing— and begin layering in paid media, PR, influencers, and paid social media advertising at the top of the funnel. As you go further up the funnel to build awareness, you can then convert those customers deeper in the funnel. - Go big on social media.
Social commerce sales are expected to reach $1.2 trillion by 2025, growing at three times the rate of traditional sales channels, according to a 2022 report from Accenture. Gen Z and Millennials are expected to account for 62% of the spending, and you can reach many of them on TikTok and Instagram. - According to recent research, reallocating just 1% of your marketing spend on an influencer strategy can result in a 0.5% increase in engagement. And, when you scale that increased engagement over time as your social following grows it can add up. Content is the centerpiece of any social strategy, so you need to consider the formats and imagery, as well as the cadence and timing to ensure your audience is engaged.
- Follow these social media best practices, and remember that a social media strategy can only be effective if you’re constantly tracking, evaluating, and analyzing performance metrics. And that goes for both organic and paid social media. You’ll want to spread that dedicated marketing spend across both. For paid social, Social Ads for Buy with Prime is an app that helps you reach engaged shoppers with dynamic ads on Instagram and Facebook that feature the trust of Prime. It syncs your Buy with Prime catalog with your Meta catalog to automatically generate social ads featuring the Buy with Prime badge and the products shoppers are interested in.
To find the omnichannel approach that works best for your business, experiment with your content and messaging to figure out what drives the most engagement, but keep your brand marketing consistent across channels. As you embrace omnichannel marketing strategies, it’s important to track conversions through each touch point to the final sale. This approach can give you valuable insight into what works and what doesn’t.
Read about other ways to elevate your marketing across channels using Buy with Prime, and discover some key tactics for developing an omnichannel marketing strategy and marketing strategies for driving engagement.
4. Tap into the power of reviews
In the era of social proof, featuring positive, authentic reviews from real customers on your ecommerce site can have a significant impact on sales. According to one global study, sites that display ratings and reviews increased conversion rates by as much as 38%. Shoppers look for social proof of quality, and they generally consider customer-generated product reviews to be far more trustworthy than content provided by brands themselves.
You can offer your site visitors the social proof that they seek by displaying the reviews from your products on Amazon.com directly on your Buy with Prime product pages. In addition to amplifying your site’s existing reviews solution, Reviews from Amazon can help boost shopper confidence and drive brand credibility.
“Buy with Prime can be a big needle mover on this,” says Buy with Prime senior economist Aaron Bodoh-Creed. “People trust Amazon reviews, so when they see that the reviews from Amazon.com are positive, they’ll be more likely to see it as a quality product and feel more comfortable making a purchase.’”
5. Offer excellent customer service
One of the most important elements to consider as you scale your ecommerce business to ensure that your customer support is top notch. In fact, 76% of shoppers surveyed by Invoca said they would stop doing business with a company after just one bad customer service experience. The good news, according to a 2022 survey commissioned by Salesforce, is that 94% of customers also say that a positive customer service experience makes them more likely to purchase again. Those loyal, repeat customers are the bread and butter of any long-term ecommerce growth strategy.
High-quality brand interactions are integral to building customer trust and loyalty, and customer service represents one of the greatest opportunities for a brand to deliver on experience. Communicate clearly and transparently about the customer service options that you offer, including telephone contact information and ways to access chat.
When you offer Buy with Prime on your channels, you have customer and order data at the ready in the merchant console so you can easily manage Buy with Prime orders and returns and provide best-in-class customer service. You also have access to Buy with Prime analytics, which helps you leverage valuable customer insights. Use the findings for catalog management, promotions, and personalized outreach. When your customers have a positive customer service experience and you’re able to nurture relationships after an order, it can mean the difference between a one-time purchase and building a lasting relationship.
6. Invest in ecommerce automation
Charting a path for growth can be a laborious endeavor. The faster you scale, the more complexity you have to manage. Use automation tools that can help you streamline workflows and increase productivity for you and your team. The move can save you valuable time and resources.
According to the 2022 McKinsey Global Survey, 70% of organizations around the world are adopting automation solutions, up from 57% five years ago—and they’re doing it while improving both customer and employee satisfaction.
For online stores, automation software can perform some of the manual, repetitive tasks that eat up your valuable resources, such as customer experience tasks, inventory management, fraud prevention, price setting, and sales and order tracking. The more you can automate with third-party integrations, the more time you and your employees have to focus on the bigger picture.
At least 65% of marketers now employ automated solutions for their emails, and 50% use automation for social media management. From order status updates and discounts to personalized content and promotions, email marketing automation is one of the most effective and low-cost ways to stay connected with your customers, drive sales, and strengthen loyalty.
Automated product recommendation engines, based on purchase history and customer behavior, as well as data-driven automated pricing tools, are another powerful set of levers. And automated customer service and loyalty technologies are experiencing rapid adoption.
Three-fourths of Amazon.com sellers now use Amazon’s powerful automation tools, including brand dashboard, brand analytics, and the Amazon Seller app, to run their businesses. More than half of all Buy with Prime merchants use apps from Alloy to automate key business functions, including syncing and managing orders and customer data and syncing product catalogs across channels. Actually, Buy with Prime can act as a one-stop-shop for automating your business.
7. Streamline fulfillment and inventory management
When ecommerce businesses scale rapidly, logistical issues with fulfillment and inventory management are common pain points that can affect your operations, sales, and customer experience.
Whether you scale across new sales channels or add more products to your line up, one of the most important elements to consider is ensuring that you have enough inventory in stock so you can meet increased demand. To do so, you’ll need to create an historical baseline, and build a forecast for how you expect sales to grow as you scale.
Buy with Prime can help take the headache out of fulfillment by tapping into Amazon’s Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) network. When shoppers use Buy with Prime to make purchases from your site, orders are fulfilled using MCF. That means Amazon handles the storage, packing, shipping, delivery and returns, which both gives you the freedom to focus on growing your business, and delighting your customers by offering fast, free shipping and transparent delivery estimates.
If you’re already using Fulfillment by Amazon, you can use one pool of inventory to fulfill orders from multiple sales channels, including Amazon.com, Buy with Prime, social channels, and orders using the native checkout option on your site (which also uses MCF).
Summary
According to the 2022 Future Shopper Report from Wunderman Thompson, 70% of surveyed global consumers say they want a shopping experience with the same kinds of benefits and services as Prime. Whether your online store runs on Shopify, BigCommerce or another platform, adding Buy with Prime to your growth strategy can help you scale your ecommerce business.
“Buy with Prime isn’t just a button you install on your site; it’s an entire ecosystem designed to help drive your growth,” emphasizes Aaron Bodoh-Creed.
Buy with Prime has been shown to reduce checkout abandonment and increase conversions by an average of 25%*(Or in the case of Epic Water Filters, by more than 40%.). Buy with Prime empowers you to convert Amazon shoppers on your site with the trust of Prime, and give Prime members the shopping experience the know and love.
For more expert insights on supercharging your ecommerce business, check out the Springboard blog.
Learn more about Buy with Prime. If you’re ready to get started, you can sign up now.
*This data point measures the average increase in shoppers who placed an order when Buy with Prime was an available purchase option versus when it was not, during the same time period.