Top 15 Ideas to Reinvent Your Ecommerce Business
5 minutes | Word Count: 994Ecommerce businesses can be huge money-makers when you get your approach right. But it can also take a surprising amount of time and effort to get them off the ground. Even when you’re successful, it can be difficult to maintain your position at the forefront of the market without constantly reinventing and reimagining yourself.
The good news is that if you’re looking for some new and exciting ways to reinvent your ecommerce business, you’ve come to the right place.
Here are just 15 top tips to Reinvent Your Ecommerce Business
1. Add new product categories
Adding new product categories can help to open up your ecommerce store to new types of customers or to upsell new products to existing shoppers. At the same time, be careful not to add so many new product categories that people find it difficult to navigate your shop or to buy from you.
2. Experiment with pricing
The beautiful thing about pricing experiments is that they don’t have to be permanent. In other words, you can tweak your prices, track the results, and then decide what move to make from there. Sometimes you can make more money selling more products at a lower margin than you can by selling fewer products at higher profits.
3. Add a new payment method
Adding a new payment method can open up your e-commerce store to more customers who are perhaps unwilling or unable to use the primary payment method that you offer. In some cases, this can open you up to entirely new markets or help you to establish your dominance in regions that used to be poor performers.
4. Offer customized products
Another way to break through the noise is to offer customized products that aren’t available anywhere else. Oftentimes, selling customized products is as easy as allowing people to print their names on products. At other times, customized products require you to restructure your entire company. If the latter is the case, be sure to dip your toe into the water before committing yourself.
5. Implement guided selling
Guided selling is essentially what sales, in general, should be like. Loosely speaking, it revolves around the idea of getting to know customers and their wants and needs and then helping them to find the best solution for their unique set of circumstances.
6. Improve site search
If people can’t find the products that they’re looking for, they also can’t buy them. That’s why it’s a good idea to spend time and money optimizing your website’s search feature and even to keep an eye on what people are looking for. If they’re searching for something you don’t have in stock, maybe you should stock it.
7. Upgrade merchandising
This one’s fairly explanatory. The term “merchandising” refers to the stock that you have available and the different products that you sell. For e-commerce providers, upgrading merchandising usually means adding new products within existing categories. More products mean more sales!
8. Simplify
The easier you make it for people to buy from you, the more likely they’ll be to do it. You might have heard of the phrase, “Keep it simple, stupid.” Easily remembered with the acronym KISS, it should be the default sanity check that you go through with any change to the website. If it doesn’t make things simpler, it needs to go.
9. Build a community
Building a community around your e-commerce store is a long-term investment rather than a short-term fix, but it’s definitely a good use of your time if you plan to stick around for a long time. Communities can provide important feedback on your products and can even inspire ideas for new products to stock.
10. Post-purchase services
Post-purchase services include everything from warranties and ongoing repairs to maintenance and cross-selling. What these post-purchase services look like will depend upon the products you sell. If you sell printers, for example, then you could launch an ink subscription service.
11. Product visualization
Product visualization software allows you to develop and share 2D and 3D visualizations of your products to give people a clearer idea of what they look like. Many clothing retailers use product visualization to bring their clothes to life so that shoppers are more likely to buy them.
12. Improve the customer experience
Customer experience is quite literally everything when it comes to running an ecommerce store. Put simply, if customers have a poor experience as they navigate and use your site, they’re not going to come back again – and they might not even finish their purchase. That’s why it can be a good idea to invest money in a user experience specialist.
13. Implement mobile-first design
Getting a mobile-first design right isn’t easy, and so you’ll want to work with a professional Magento development company (or equivalent if you’re using a different e-commerce platform). Make sure that your developer is familiar with the latest trends on mobile design and optimization to make the experience as seamless as possible.
14. Launch a native app
Launching a native app is a step up from implementing a mobile-first design because it will allow your loyal customers to download your official app and to shop from their mobile devices on the go. Just bear in mind that developing an app can be an expensive endeavor and so it’s only worth doing if it’ll eventually pay for itself.
15. Offer subscriptions
We touched briefly on the idea of subscriptions a little earlier. The idea is that instead of selling a one-off, you can sell the same product over and over again. Businesses like Dollar Shave Club have been able to build entire companies around the subscription-based model.
Conclusion
Now that you know our top tips for reinventing your e-commerce business, we want to hear from you. What’s worked for you and your e-commerce company? And perhaps more importantly, what hasn’t worked? Be sure to share your experiences in a comment.