So here’s a fun fact: it’s estimated that there are well over 90,500 ecommerce stores in the United States alone making only around $12,000 a year in sales (there are an estimated 200,788 ecommerce stores in total, if you add up all the estimated numbers here).
However, a recent article reported that the top 500 ecommerce sites in the United States control roughly 77% of the total $198 billion U.S. e-retailing market.
Surprising? Hardly, considering that the big players usually continue to stay big and dominate the arenas they enter. The question you should be asking yourself after reading this, though, is: if you’re in that 23%, what can you be doing to close that gap as best you can? After all, the big guys weren’t always enormous – they had smart people who recognized how to make the new digital world work for them. Here are some ideas, actually thoughts that my own clients have shared with me, to help you swim with the big fish.
To begin with, you should always try to check to see if your marketing strategies – whether or not they’re created by yourself or by a team – are fresh, innovative, and rich in content. You should also check to see if you’re taking advantage of every channel that’s available. Ask yourself things like “Are there online communities I can reach out to that I haven’t yet tried?” or “am I producing marketing content that people will engage my target market?”
Put yourself in the mind of the online consumer, and apply those ideas to your own online store. Do you, for instance, respond well to pop-up windows asking for emails with the promise of a promotion on your first order? What about abandoned cart emails? Do you like getting Facebook posts in your newsfeed from the companies you follow, or do you not appreciate the stalking nature of PPC? Chances are, if you’re a smaller ecommerce store, you know the online shopping habits of your customers pretty well without even realizing it.
Perhaps most importantly, make sure that you pay attention not just to the people you haven’t reached yet, because you’ve most likely got potential sales right under your nose. Interestingly enough, my clients have shared with me that they’ve found cart abandonment solutions to be up on their list of priorities, despite the fact that only about 14% of ecommerce sites have been reported to actually have a cart abandonment solution that works in place.
Makes sense when you take this fact from a study released by the Baymard Institute: the average cart abandonment rate across ecommerce sites is 67.35%. That means, on average, a small ecommerce will have already gotten the traffic from successful marketing efforts – they just didn’t follow through to secure the customer until the final “Submit Order” button! Combatting that cart abandonment rate is an easy and cost-effective way to recover potentially lost sales while maintaining a great ROI.
There are plenty of cart abandonment solutions out there, so it’s important to vet your options carefully and see what will work best for you and your online business. What my clients look for is ease of use, campaign effectiveness, and ROI. Once you’ve got an abandoned cart solution in place, you’ll be better armed to boost your ecommerce site’s revenue and be well on your way to swimming with the big fish of online retail.
Author Bio: Dena Goldberg, also knowns as the eCommerce Diva, is the Community Manager at Aidalicious, an eCommerce blog powered by AbandonAid.com. AbandonAid is an industry leader in cart abandonment solutions, email marketing, CRO and analytics tools for online retailers, big and small.
Website: https://abandonaid.com/blog
Twitter: @AbandonAid
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