How to boost your on-site sales on an ecommerce platform

Fifty-five percent of consumers turn to Amazon first when looking for products online. Now that’s a sizeable number of your potential customers. It also means that on-site search influences offline sales as customers search, compare, gather, and evaluate information before making the final purchase. Ergo, it’s important that your brand is discoverable when customers are searching for your brand on-site. These are some of the things that brands should implement to boost sales on-site:

Have a ‘keyword strategy’ in place

We can do that by ‘keyword harvesting’ for on-site paid campaigns and optimizing on-site product page content. This can be done in two ways:

Discoverability in organic rankings

It’s very crucial to shortlist the right keywords for your brand. It has to be a mix of brand terms and category terms. Be mindful that there is a limit to the number of keywords you can optimize the product page content for. The product ‘title’ is the most critical factor to rank high in the A9 algorithm, followed by bullets and then your product description. Make sure your category keywords are well seeded into your on-site content, for in most cases, category search volumes are high – hence it makes sense to rank them high on those search terms.

On-site paid campaigns visibility

We cannot isolate organic visibility from paid visibility when it comes to driving gross volumes (sales) on marketplaces. While an organic strategy is a time-consuming process, a good paid strategy helps drive instant results as you can target different stages of the consumer journey on-site. You can not only target shoppers on the basis of your brand and category terms but also in terms of competition.

Good in-store customer experience

One in every three consumers has bought from a brand other than they intended because of the information they received while shopping online. That’s the power of great product content. Retailers want content that drives customer engagement – content that shows the product in a positive and inspiring light, tells a cohesive story, explains features and benefits, and closes the sale by giving the shoppers a reason to purchase.

Incomplete information, outdated listings, and poor imagery lead to confusion, returns, and poor customer experience, and hence impact sales.

Activate ‘on-site’ media

This one has been under-played most of the time. I have seen brands focus a lot on marketing channels that focus on ‘the top of the funnel’ i.e. building awareness, but there is a lack of attention to building ‘consideration & trials’ i.e. driving conversions.

As a brand you must own both – this can be achieved through on-site searches and display campaigns to drive category visibility, awareness, and eventually sales.

Drive relevant off-site traffic on-site

Only targeting on-site shoppers narrows your reach and volumes. It’s important to have an equally potent off-site media strategy. Drive relevant traffic off-site by intent based targeting, re-marketing, and using website data and traffic effectively.

Important to listen to the consumers

It’s very important to listen to the consumer responses that appear at the bottom of your product page in the form of ‘Reviews & Ratings’ and ‘Q & As’. There are research and tests that indicate a 15 percent jump in conversion rate if the top verified customer reviews are five stars and the brand is responsive to customer queries. ‘Customer Reviews’ work as assurances to the shopper and hence are influential in driving sales.

On shelf availability

Keep an eye on the stock available in-store. You cannot have your ‘best-sellers’ out of stock for sure. Not only are you losing the sale, you are also losing the customer, which leads to high bounce rates, giving your competition a push and bleeding money on paid campaigns.

These methodologies are extremely impactful and help brands go a long way in succeeding on-site.

Shweta Sharma is the Chief of Business Operations of eBuX at AdGlobal360.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)