7 Ways to Reduce Risk and Increase ROI with an Integrated eCommerce Website

Operating an eCommerce site offers companies an unprecedented opportunity to expand their reach and grow sales. It also increases risk. A badly run eCommerce website can hurt your reputation and drive customers into the arms of your competitors. When managed correctly, an eCommerce channel can boost revenue and increase customer satisfaction while cutting operational costs. They provide both short- and long-term value for any organization. How can a company avoid the pitfalls of creating a bad or poorly designed website, and make sure they’re providing the best possible experience for their customers? By following the correct strategies from the beginning and always keeping the needs of their customers in mind. This guide outlines 7 key strategies to help you build a maintain a great eCommerce site.

7 Key Strategies to Increase ROI with eCommerce

These strategies can be helpful for companies along any stage of their eCommerce journey, ranging from creating a website to refreshing a long-standing site or putting out new content. Some businesses build their websites and then integrate them with other core systems later, while other companies set out to build an integrated eCommerce site.

1. Learn from the Competition

  First, you should perform competitor research. Most companies have competitors. Even if your company does not have a direct competitor, you likely have indirect competitors. A direct competitor is someone who offers the same products or services as your business. Netflix and Hulu are direct competitors. Indirect competitors are companies that offer different products but are targeting the same market. McDonalds and Dominos are an example of indirect competitors. While one sells hamburgers and salads and the other is known for pizza, they both target people who want fast and cheap food. Learning from your competitors can help you avoid their mistakes and imitate their successes. This includes knowing what products to offer and how to market them. Places where you can perform customer research include:  

• Competitor websites
• Competitor social media accounts
• Keyword tools like Google Keyword Planner, UberSuggest, or SEMRush
• Online blogs
• Industry newspapers or periodicals

You may also wish to hire a consultant to perform additional research like surveys or focus groups, or someone who can do a deep dive into your competitors’ marketing position and brand story.

2. Create Quality Content and Optimize Your Website

  Researching your competitors will also help you create quality content and focus on SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s the process of building websites and creating content that ranks well on search engines such as Google and Bing. In the early days of the internet, SEO work mostly focused on using the right keywords. Since then, search algorithms have evolved to prioritize the user experience. While keywords are still important, search algorithms also prioritize metrics such as the bounce rate, the average amount of time spent on each page, and how many other high-ranking websites link to yours. You should use keyword tools to identify the right terms that will draw traffic to your site. You can also create blogs or product pages following the model provided by high-ranking sites. Optimizing your website involves technical aspects as well, like using appropriate Heading and Paragraph tags and having a well-structured website with a good sitemap and robust navigation features.  Over time, investing in SEO results in more traffic and high conversation rates.

3. Align Operations Across Your Company

  An eCommerce website is not just a website. It can transform your entire company. Building a website may require expanding your supply chain to fill new orders, leasing new warehouse space, or other logistical challenges. Providing insufficient logistical support to a new or revamped eCommerce channel can result in a bad customer experience and lost sales. It’s important to align your eCommerce efforts with operations across your company. A good place to start is by integrating your website with your ERP or business management software. ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning, and it’s a form of software companies use to connect departments, streamline operations, and improve visibility into real-time operational data. As an example of how this would work in practice, a manufacturer might use an ERP to track their supply chain and manage production. A wholesale distributor might use an ERP to manage their warehouses. A sales manager at either of these firms could check their available inventory or schedule an upcoming shipment in their ERP software. Companies often process orders in their ERP software. When phone or email orders come in, employees manually enter data into their ERP for processing. By connecting their website and ERP software, companies reduce or eliminate manual data entry and automate online order processing. ERP eCommerce integrations provide other benefits, too, like preventing over-sells and allowing customers to access their full past order history.

4. Leverage a Phased Implementation

  This strategy is more for creating or relaunching a website, but you can use it for unveiling new pages or new top-nav menu items as well.  A successful eCommerce deployment involves more than clicking a few buttons. It’s a strategic project that involves time, investment, and proper planning. Taking a phased approach also allows you to roll out your project faster since you can unveil new pages or sections in phases. Set project timelines and regularly check your progress and results, including whether people are using your pages or whether your new content is working as intended. This will help you quickly identify and fix any issues you may have missed during the earlier stages of deployment. It will also save your business time and money and achieve short-term wins for your company.

5. Focus on Employee Training and Adoption

  Employee training and adoption is often an underappreciated but crucial step of launching any new business technology or process. No matter how great your system is, it’s useless if none of your employees use it. A CRM can be a valuable tool that improves customer service and drives additional sales and value for your organization, or it can be glorified rolodex your sales reps use to identify potential prospects and little else. Train your employees and make sure they’re comfortable using any new system or following your new procedures. That is the best way to ensure your company gets the full benefit from your investment.

6. Gather Customer Data

  eCommerce websites and the internet provide an unprecedented opportunity for companies to connect with their customers and learn more about them. Marketing has shifted from focusing on demographic information to psychographic information, which includes data like a person’s attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological information. Focusing on psychographics allows companies to better target their customers by interest and provide better service and products to their customers. If companies haven’t, they should add Google Analytics to their website so they can track customer behavior. Understanding how customers actually use your website, including what pages they visit and where they exit your site, is crucial to improving your website and the user experience. It allows you to make sure you’re delivering the content, experience, and value your customers expect. In addition to Google Analytics, you can also use tools like heatmaps or session replays to learn even more about how customers interact with your website.

7. Focus on Improving the Customer Experience

Your entire website should focus on one thing: the customer experience. A good customer experience will drive conversions, improve organic traffic, and help build trust in your brand. Focusing on the customer experience includes having a robust, easily navigable website; good product pages; and an easy checkout process. It also often involves providing value to your customers beyond your products and services. This could include offering educational content like blogs or white papers or offering fast shipping options. Providing a good customer experience includes fulfilling your promises to customers, providing a consistent experience, and being responsive when customers reach out with problems or complaints.

The Bottom Line: The Benefits of eCommerce

For most companies, having an online presence is no longer optional. Even in the B2B space, which has traditionally relied on face-to-face meetings and email, phone, or fax orders, buyers increasingly expect seamless eCommerce experiences that mirror popular B2C websites like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and more. The 2020 COVID pandemic accelerated a digital transformation that had already been occurring for quite some time.

About Us

At CertiPro, we are a team of Sage and eCommerce certified professionals. We offer Sage and eCommerce integrations for Sage 100, Sage 300, Sage 500, Sage Intacct, and Sage X3. We also specialize in Magento Adobe Commerce, WooCommerce, and Shopify. Before working with us, many of our customers struggled with websites that didn’t work the way they needed or were overly reliant on phone and email orders that required time-consuming manual data entry and order processing. We replaced these outdated systems with a simple, automated solution. Contact us to see what our Sage and eCommerce integrations can do for your business.