An eCommerce store is like a well-oiled machine: a series of moving parts seamlessly functioning together to propel the business forward. Order fulfillment, product management, customer satisfaction, the list of components and processes goes on. And as an eCommerce site owner, you’re the mechanic—it’s your responsibility to keep this machine running. But with so many moving parts, it can be a headache.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a platform that helps you streamline that process? As an eCommerce website design agency, we couldn’t agree more.
Shopify and Shopify Plus offer many applications and plugins that help expand the functionality of your eCommerce business. As a proud partner to Shopify, Codal has compiled some of our favorite Shopify applications that can help you grow your business. But first, let’s look at some key strategies and approaches that can help your eCommerce business drive sales.
How to increase eCommerce sales
Increasing eCommerce sales is not an exact science. Depending on your brand and what you’re selling, different approaches may yield different results. But there are some best practices that tend to deliver across the eCommerce landscape. Let’s take a closer look at a few of them.
Boost conversion rate
Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your eCommerce site that make a purchase. As one of the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) for eCommerce businesses, conversion rate tells you how effective your site is at enticing visitors to buy your products. Optimizing your conversion rate means refining your site so visitors are more likely to convert, or make purchases. This increases revenue per visitor and helps to drive down customer acquisition costs (CACs), setting your business up for revenue growth.
There are numerous factors that affect your site’s conversion rate, including design, layout, site speed, and more. Look for opportunities to enhance the user’s paths-to-purchase. These can include making call to action (CTA) buttons more prominent, incorporating high-quality imagery, refining your checkout process, implementing cart abandonment software, and much more.
Improve site traffic
You’re not going to sell anything if you can’t get users to visit your eCommerce site in the first place. Generating traffic is essential as conversion rate optimization efforts will only pay off if you have a solid base of users visiting your site. Therefore, implementing strategies to drive more visitors to your site is crucial.
Perhaps the most common best practice for driving traffic is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO improves the visibility of your eCommerce website on search engines, so when a user searches for terms related to your brand and its products on Google, they can easily find your site and click through to browse. Done correctly, SEO is a relatively inexpensive but extremely effective method of drawing visitors to your site.
Use email marketing
Running an eCommerce business without leveraging email as a marketing channel is just plain silly. You’ve got a direct line to your customers, why not use it to sell some stuff? Email marketing is a cost-effective way to boost brand awareness, drive traffic, and ultimately, increase revenue. With a return on investment (ROI) of 38-to-1, it’s hard to argue with the benefits of email marketing.
5 Shopify applications that will grow your business
Installing these applications for your Shopify eCommerce store can help to boost its performance and set your business up for long-term success.
Yotpo Reviews
Yotpo is one of the most comprehensive eCommerce marketing platforms available. It offers a full suite of tools to help eCommerce businesses boost conversions, increase customer loyalty, and grow revenue. Perhaps its most popular offering is its Yotpo Reviews app for Shopify merchants.
Yotpo Reviews presents a new way to collect user feedback. A few weeks after a customer purchases an item from your eCommerce site, they are emailed a form to rate their customer experience. Yotpo then uploads that feedback directly to the merchant’s site. Easy, peasy.
The Yotpo Reviews app boasts some pretty cutting-edge brands as users, including Rebecca Minkoff, MVMT, and Steve Madden.
Armed with more feedback, your business can bolster a higher ROI and site traffic from your targeted consumer group. And the price tag on that? Zero. Yotpo is a free application. Too good to be true? Not at all—it’s just another great app from Shopify.
Oberlo
With more than 100 million products sold using its technology, Oberlo is one of the most comprehensive dropshipping apps available on the Shopify App Store.
Retailers can add any number of products into their Shopify store. This dropshipping feature makes delivery to clients seamless: it goes straight from the supplier to the customer. You do not have to manage the inventory and orders can be fulfilled with the click of a button.
Oberlo is built for novice brands and experts alike and can help your business streamline orders being fulfilled, retain up to date prices, and maintain an accurate inventory.
Plug In SEO
Plug In SEO Optimizer has also been well received by the eCommerce-verse. Plug In SEO makes optimizing your website for search engines painless.
The application informs you if your site will have any issues with search engine performance. Upon installation, Plug In SEO does a brief analysis of your homepage and then displays its findings—if page titles, meta descriptions, or content are optimized.
Plug In SEO identifies issues that can save your business time and money and avoids excessive resources being spent on determining whether or not the site is search engine compatible. For anyone in the eCommerce sector, this is an application that is well worth the installation.
Zendesk
Falling under the customer service category on the Shopify App Store, Zendesk develops software for harnessing better customer-to-business relations. Zendesk offers an easier way to answer customer service concerns, get customers in contact with the support team, and customize the data selected for customer support.
Zendesk offers connectivity—an easier way to provide quick and reliable customer support. With this customer service tool, a business has an easier way to engage their users. With quality customer service comes a quality business. Codal has personally recommended Zendesk to nearly all of our eCommerce clientele. For Zenwise, a health company, and Joriki, a yoga apparel company, Zendesk assisted Codal in providing satisfactory results for these growing organizations.
ReConvert
Upselling and cross-selling are tried and true methods of capitalizing on customer loyalty to drive sales. ReConvert helps you quickly and easily create custom thank you pages—think order confirmation pages—for customers that have completed purchases.
The app allows you to add widgets to your thank you page using its drag-and-drop interface. Drop in reorder buttons, discount promos, CTA buttons, imagery, and more custom content to help drive upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Remember, your relationship with a customer doesn’t end when they click “Complete order.” Drive customer loyalty and enhance sales opportunities with ReConvert’s easy-to-use interface and powerful functionality.
Take advantage of Shopify’s extensive App Store
With Shopify’s expansive number of apps, it was challenging to choose just a few. If you would like to find out more about the apps that Shopify offers, Codal—a certified Shopify partner—is here and more than happy to help.
Codal’s eCommerce designers and developers are masters of their craft and can help you select the best Shopify apps to help your business drive sales. Armed with market-tested design principles, we cut cart abandonment, streamline paths-to-purchase, and make your eCommerce store leave your competition in the dust. Interested in learning more about Codal’s Shopify eCommerce solutions? Get in touch today.
