5 eCommerce Strategies to Boost ROI

A good eCommerce site can help businesses increase revenue and customer satisfaction while lowering costs. A well laid-out website improves the customer experience and creates additional operational efficiencies. It can add long-term value to your business while providing new marketing opportunities.

Ever since the dot com bubble of the late nineties, it has become increasingly difficult for businesses to operate without the internet. The COVID pandemic only accelerated the eCommerce sector’s rapid growth over the past two decades. Experts expect that some pandemic-related changes to consumer buying behavior will be permanent, particularly those related to online shopping.

At CertiPro, we’re experts in all things related to eCommerce. We’ve implemented eCommerce stores and ERP eCommerce integrations for businesses in many different industries. We’re familiar with the types of challenges companies typically face while implementing new eCommerce sites and ERP integrations. After doing a deep dive into our past projects, we’ve identified the top five strategies deployed by companies who saw the biggest increase in ROI on their websites.

The Top Five Key eCommerce Strategies to Drive Growth

1. Focus on Alignment

When implementing a new eCommerce site, businesses should focus on increasing alignment across their entire organization. A new website can increase sales, but it can also lead to trouble if businesses don’t keep track of their inventory or don’t scale to handle increased sales volumes. It’s important to align operations to include your new website.

Employees should view your website as an asset or an extension of your existing operations. When implementing your website, you should build a team of stakeholders from different departments that will be impacted by your new website. Then, you’ll be able to construct a plan and appropriately scale operations to ensure the success of your new website.

2. Implement Your Website in Phases

Implementing a new website is complicated. Creating a good website involves more than uploading a few product photos, writing descriptions, and adding a shopping cart and a few buttons. A phased approach to your website implementation will allow you to realize short-term ROI while also building toward your long-term goals.

After laying out your vision for the entire project, divide the project into phases and roll them out gradually. This allows you to build a high-quality site without losing momentum. Have employees test and trouble-shoot your site before it goes live. Find early adopters who are eager to use your site and collect their feedback.

3. Integration is Key

Integration is a key component of the most successful website implementations. Integration with what, you ask? Everything you can. Integrate your website with your CRM and business management or ERP software. ERP software often serves as the operational backbone for businesses, storing financial and operational data and making real-time data available to employees.

By integrating your eCommerce site with your ERP, your business will be able to automatically process orders in real time. Real-time inventory numbers will be available on your website so you can avoid over-sells. Updating your product catalogue is super easy, too, with product catalogue updates in your ERP automatically syncing into your eCommerce site, too. Integrating your ERP and eCommerce site streamlines the ordering process and can increase your sales volume.

4. Offer Personalized Experiences

Personalize customers’ experience on your website to drive repeat orders. This includes storing their past order history for easy reordering, storing their account information so they don’t have to re-enter address information when they place a new order, and provide product recommendations based on past orders. An ERP eCommerce integration like E-Link integration makes all that possible, and more.

You’ll even be able to create those personalized experiences for B2B customers. Our E-Link tool extends your business logic in Sage ERP to your eCommerce site. That means B2B customers will have access to their customer-specific pricing and inventory online, replacing the often manual and time-consuming process of placing B2B orders with a simple, automated solution.

5. Focus on the Customer Experience

Everything you do on your website should focus on one person: the customer. Customer expectations are rising rapidly, and B2B customers increasingly expect the same seamless eCommerce experience they enjoy in the B2C realm.

Your website should be easy to navigate, have robust product descriptions and photos, and provide an intuitive shopping experience. Harness the power of data and employ strategies like A/B testing to ensure your website provides the experience your customers expect. Everything else on this list, ranging from internal alignment to integrating your website with your ERP, is in service to providing a customer-centric experience on your website.

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Contact CertiPro today to see what we can do for your business.