Congratulations! You made it through the holiday season. No rest for the weary, though. It’s time to look ahead to next year. To help you make some New Year’s resolutions for your Shopify Plus site, we pulled together some of our top posts on topics we think will help make a significant difference to your business in the year to come. While some of these to-dos may seem obvious, you’d be surprised how often brands don’t implement or fail to implement them effectively. Bringing some attention to these six areas can really help give your business a competitive edge.
✓ Optimize your on-site cross-selling and upselling
If you’re not cross-selling or upselling, that’s a big, missed opportunity for your business. Cross-selling and upselling should always increase your average order value (AOV) and therefore your total revenue. Cross-sell and upsell recommendations also can enhance your customer experience – who doesn’t love a smart recommendation to make shopping easier or more fun? Before you dive in, though, it’s important to know when, where, and how to do cross-selling and upselling on your site in ways that aren’t annoying.
✓ Clean up and normalize the data in your ERP
You may be thinking about launching a new eCommerce site in the new year or enhancing the functionality of your existing site. However, all those cool bells and whistles of an amazing user experience depend on data (no, not magic). Data like revenue and returns, inventory, shipping information, and product content all will directly or indirectly affect the front-end functionality of your eCommerce site – what the customer sees and experiences. For your site to work the way you want, this data must be cleaned and normalized so it can be understood and used by Shopify. The process can be more time-consuming than you might think. If you don’t plan ahead, you could be setting yourself up for cost and timeline overruns.
✓ Improve your Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals are a set of specific target metrics to measure “common signals” related to page speed, responsiveness and visual stability that Google uses in its SEO ranking algorithm. You need healthy Core Web Vitals to rank well for SEO. Fortunately, there are some straightforward fixes to help improve your Shopify site’s Core Web Vitals metrics. Surprisingly, many brands haven’t bothered, which gives you a golden opportunity to boost your competitive edge.
✓ Optimize eCommerce on-site search
If they can’t find it, they won’t buy it. If you’re using out-of-the-box search on your site, chances are it’s not too smart. You can do a lot to improve it – and you’ll find it’s worth it. Research shows that although on average just 5-15% of site visitors use on-site search, the 15% of traffic can account for 45% of your revenue. That’s because consumers using search are further down the funnel and ready to buy. Help them out! Where should you focus your efforts? There are key areas that will make the most difference. Then, if you’re extra ambitious, you can take search to the next level by integrating merchandising strategies (highlighting certain products and/or displaying certain products together) on the results pages.
✓ Reduce returns with better sizing information
You can’t account for taste, but you can help your customers avoid purchasing the wrong size and/or fit. Wrong size, fit and color are the top reasons why customers make returns. Stop the bleeding! In addition to losing short-term revenue and incurring extra costs, the hassle and frustration of customers when they buy the wrong size can also lead to longer-term losses, such as lower customer lifetime value (CLTV) due to bad customer experience. Providing more comprehensive and intuitive sizing information is another “obvious” best practice that surprisingly only 43% of eCommerce sites actually do.
✓ Bundle products to increase AOV
Product bundles can provide a lot of value for customers if you do it right. And the increased revenue is nice, too. However, it’s not as simple as packaging products together and offering them at a lower price. There’s some strategy – and some psychology – to consider when thinking about how bundling could work to increase eCommerce revenue. To determine the best way to bundle products for your business, consider psychological factors, audience demographics and psychographics, your sales data, inventory data, and what your competitors are doing. There’s no one right answer, so you’ll want to test some options, depending on your customer, market, and business goals.
Check all the boxes
If you’re like most online merchants these days, you’re probably feeling the heat from increased competition and higher ad costs. The eCommerce landscape is changing fast, that’s for sure, with an influx of more brands coming online and shoppers’ behaviors shifting since the pandemic. The good news is that customer experience is still king. And there’s always something you can do a lot to improve the experience on your site. If you need help checking off these boxes on your to-do list, we’re happy to help. Give us a ring.