Not every user who visits your marketplace or online shop will become your client. After all, doing business in eCommerce means competing for the attention of customers on an almost daily basis.
There are many methods and tools to do this. But even using the same, some entrepreneurs win while others are left merely participating. Why does this happen? The key answer is having the proper eCommerce strategy. In this article, we will take an in-depth look at different strategies for eCommerce success and help you choose the most suitable one for your needs.
What Is a Growth Strategy in eCommerce?
An eCommerce growth strategy is a set of actions aimed at achieving significant revenue growth and sustainable business development in online commerce. It defines key directions and consecutive steps that help a company achieve business goals, increase competitive advantage, and take a leading position in the market.
eCommerce strategy is the roadmap your business will follow to increase customer acquisition, retention and revenue. It covers everything from platform choice and development methodology to customer engagement methods, conversion optimization, and after-sales service.
Why eCommerce Growth Strategies Matter for Success?
- Increase adaptability. What, if not eCommerce, is most affected by new technologies, trends and ever-shifting consumer habits? All of it requires companies to adapt quickly. An established eCommerce tactic is to ensure that you don’t miss out on new opportunities while sustaining the integrity of your overall strategy.
- Maintain resource efficiency. One of the central elements of growth strategy is improving ROI metrics and optimizing your budget. It is important to stay realistic about where resources should be directed and what investments will not yield the desired return. A growth strategy is an important guide for business decisions in these terms.
- Expand into new markets. The right growth strategy allows a company to expand into new fields: more consistent to develop and introduce a new product range, expand to a worldwide presence or gaining new target audience.
- Better understand your target audience. Who is your core customer? Is your company able to picture your target customer, their habits and expectations? Leading business is impossible without understanding these points. And if you find that your current eCommerce sales strategy doesn’t fully answer these questions, it’s time to rethink it.
- Take the long view. Short-term success may seem like a well-deserved outcome of your efforts. But many companies make the mistake of focusing only on it. True success comes to those who look to the future. A growth strategy gives you a clearer understanding of where your business is headed.
- Attract investment. An effective growth strategy can attract investors and partners. If your market position is close to your expectations, partners will also be interested in business development and will be willing to invest in joint activities.
- Have an additional pillar in a highly competitive field. The eСommerce market is filled with large players as well as much smaller but established companies. To stand out from the crowd and capture the attention of customers, businesses need to develop a unique and effective growth strategy. This will affect how you promote yourself and how you outcompete with more compelling offers.
- Understand your brand vision. An eCommerce strategy plan is not only your path to profit, but also to comprehending your company’s mission. Nowadays, customers are more interested in not simply buying a product, but in the value behind it. Does your company care about the environment or helping small creators find a bigger audience? Great, include that in your growth strategy as an additional focus point.
Read more: Global eCommerce Market Growth Points
Top Strategies for eCommerce Growth
It’s no secret that the popularity of online shopping has skyrocketed in recent years. In 2021 alone, global eCommerce retail sales totaled nearly $5 trillion. By 2025, that number is expected to grow to $7 trillion.
There are plenty of opportunities for growth, and consumer demand is higher than ever. However, to grow eCommerce business you will need not only an effective growth strategy, but also ongoing performance monitoring and willingness to make changes on the fly.
We have compiled the most comprehensive list of existing eCommerce growth strategies that can be your key to success in this rapidly evolving commerce segment.
Utilize Advanced Analytics
As an eCommerce business owner, you work with large amounts of data that can be used as a strategic tool. Transactional data, user data, and information from internal business systems can all contribute to operational efficiency.
While the basic level of analytics involves mostly descriptive statistics, historical data, and simple trend analysis, the advanced level focuses on predictive and prescriptive analytics. It is also capable of using machine learning and complex algorithms to provide you with recommendations in the future.
Predictive capabilities take into account conversion rates, customer lifetime value, and churn predictions. This allows you to optimize your eCommerce growth marketing investments and take your interactions with users to a new, more personalized level.
What can you achieve with advanced analytics?
| User segmentation | AI tools, integrated into the CRM system, can assign your visitors to roles based on their behavior on the resource. The user has made their first purchase? A great target for a newsletter with an offer to return to your store. The user has made several purchases for a large amount? AI bot offers those loyal customers lucrative promotions with discounts on their favorite product segment. |
| Personalized experience | Including onsite advertising and automated product recommendations, based on previous purchases and similar product segments, as well as offers to join a loyalty program. |
| Dynamic pricing policy | Makes management’s job easier by collecting real-time pricing data on specific product segments and helping you track down the most relevant offers that your business may want to match. |
| Warehouse and inventory management | Inventory forecasting has long been a regular business practice of many high-performing companies, ensuring that their customers never have to deal with the sudden disappearance of goods from the storefront. |
| Effective user satisfaction | By identifying at-risk users in a timely manner and applying a targeted re-engagement strategy, you can increase customer lifetime value in your favor. |
| Fraud prevention | Revealing potential fraudulent activity, predictive analytics tools can block suspicious transactions and share payment information with the bank. This directly increases the security of the resource. |
Simtech Development used an advanced solution for a company that provides a wide range of disposable tableware, packaging, and household supplies for restaurants, bakeries, schools, and catering companies.
As part of CS-Cart’s integration with QuickBooks Online, we implemented a low stock notification feature. This allowed the client to be reminded in advance that they needed to replenish their stock, and minimum threshold value for each item could be set individually.
Product management was also reworked. Each item received an ID indicating the exact warehouse, warehouse location (the client worked in several cities), shelf and level. Such automation made the work of the client’s warehouse staff much easier.
Consider the Existing Market Model
One of the key steps to a successful eCommerce growth strategy in recent years has been to enter the online market with a multi-store resource, using the most growth-capable combination of omnichannel retailer and brand stores.
Let’s say your company simultaneously produces clothing, hobby products, and toys. Each of these types of goods is designed for a different audience, so it will be difficult to fit them into one sales channel. In addition, you are unlikely to be able to compete with marketplaces, which are still more convenient because users prefer to buy everything in one place.
In this case, you can acquire the same advantage that, for example, a small brand with niche products has—target access to the right audience in a less competitive field.
Using multi-store eCommerce you can manage different sites and brands from a single administrative area. At the same time, stores can differ in branding, products and overall presentation. With this, the omnichannel nature of your business allows you to promote each of them through different touch points: email marketing, social media, targeted advertising, and so on.
One of our customers, AreaSafe Project, has been successfully using the multi-store model for years, selling equipment to create a safe environment near any urban infrastructure.
This model helps companies combine products in one order and get quick quotes. Simtech Development’s task in this case was to review the code and redesign a new storefront with which the client wanted to expand into a new market.
We completed the site and added many useful features to improve the usability of the storefront and make it more user-friendly.
Leverage Your Store and IT Infrastructure Synergy
A company’s growth is often hampered by the presence of siloed systems. This makes it impossible to implement a unified commercial strategy, which has a negative impact on revenue growth.
In this case, end-to-end integration can help by combining front- and back-office systems to centralize customer and product data.
The most common way to achieve this is to implement a complex system with a set of modules that correspond to your company’s business processes. If this solution is not feasible, you can establish a two-way data exchange via APIs.
This strategic step requires the implementation of three key business systems:
- Warehouse Management System (WMS). Provides visibility of all inventory and order fulfillment activities.
- Customer Relationship Management. Centralizes all customer interactions with your platform.
- Enterprise Resource Planning. A system that helps you manage inventory data, simplify the redistribution of commissions to salespeople, and more.
In our practice we have worked with clients who need integration with inventory management systems. For example, The British Grocery Store that was based on a multi-vendor version of CS-Cart.
We implemented integration with Linnworks inventory management system. Store administrators received synchronization of inventory data between Linnworks and CS-Cart using a cron script.
The script allows the “In Stock” item setting to be updated and matches items using the “Item Code” field on the CS-Cart side and the “Item Number” field on the Linnworks side. When orders are placed, they are automatically sent from CS-Cart to Linnworks.
Our developers have also implemented the immediate display of order status, which has made order administration much easier for business owners.
Optimize Website for Search Engines
You should never neglect the power of search engine optimization (SEO) promotion. Implementing this phase into your growth strategy is almost a major milestone for the future achievements of your business.
According to research, 59% of users are looking for information about the product they want through Google. At the same time, these searches communicate very important things to your business: potential customers are interested in buying specific things, the big question is where.
An effective SEO strategy helps your products and customers find each other, increasing conversion rates and lowering the cost per acquisition. Because users are already engaged, they are the most likely to make a purchase, so SEO promotion is considered the most break-even option for a reason.
Where to start? First and foremost, focus on search engines and keywords. Sometimes even savvy businesses struggle to get to the top of search queries, which means it’s time to rethink your naming and product descriptions.
Product and category pages in an online store or marketplace usually have different keywords. If “Playstation 5 DualSense” is appropriate for a product page, then “Playstation 5 Gamepads” is more suitable for a category name. Also, different industries emphasize different keywords.
If B2B can afford to use product SKUs as keywords, B2C is better off using more general phrases: “shirt pull and bear” will give the Pull&Bear site as the first option, “lego star wars” leads in the section with a specific line of toys.
Include thorough keyword research in your strategy, using Google Search Console and Google Analytics, or more professional SEO software.
An outdated version of a website can also negatively impact your SEO metrics. For example, while working with our client Craftland, we made sure that the business was updated to the latest version of their multi-vendor solution almost immediately.
In addition to improving SEO and moving to the latest version of PHP (which is more secure and better received by Google search engine), you get a more responsive and mobile-friendly design, all redirects from old links, and other fixes if the old version had any bugs.
In this case, Simtech Development took care of the security and speed of the update.
Read more: Latest SEO Trends For ECommerce Businesses
Integrate With Social Media Marketing
There are many cases where a strong social media presence has worked to a brand’s advantage. A good example of authenticity is Duolingo, which has long established its green bird as an image directly associated with the company through viral content.
It is a great example of how social media presence has gone beyond the usual consistent publishing schedule. Duolingo’s clever use of trends and their comedic character image spread rapidly through social media. For example, the famous green bird’s TikTok alone has 13.9 million followers.
Understanding that the company provides digital services, it relied on the fact that its audience spends a lot of time online. This means that they are aware of the latest trends, memes, and activities that can be played in promotion successfully.
By incorporating this into their eCommerce growth tactics, the company’s social media networks are performing incredibly well.
You too can strengthen your social media presence. It starts with understanding your brand: what is your target audience, what consumer pain points you solve, are your customers chronically online or more focused on offline activities? Answer these questions while planning an eCommerce strategy and help your business grow.
This approach can be achieved with an omnichannel eCommerce solution. All business processes, marketing campaigns, traffic outflow and inflow, as well as workflows will run through one platform. The platform can be custom developed or you can use a ready-made product. For example CDP (Customer Data Platform) or ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), which already have the basic functions you will need.
Simtech Development can implement either of these approaches, integrating features tailored to your business needs.
Omnichannel eCommerce is currently the most optimal approach in terms of financial costs and time-to-market. But only if you want to use social networks as a way to promote your brand, rather than selling directly from social networks.
Read more: ECommerce Merchandising: A Quick Guide
Provide Highly Personalized User Experience
A high level of personalization doesn’t always have to mean annoying a shopper’s entire customer experience. Business owners know what it’s like to be a customer and get a lot of noisy pop-ups with discounts and promotions on their screen that they often don’t even open.
Overly intrusive personalization can raise privacy concerns and discourage further shopping. Instead, it’s better to focus on a seamless and simple presence alongside the user to make more advanced eCommerce strategies.
A good example is the website of The Ordinary, a cosmetics and skin care brand. On the home page, users will find a “Build My Regimen” section. Inside, there is a small quiz with a few questions. Based on the user’s answers, the site will suggest which of the company’s skincare products best suits their skin type, age, and so on.
Most importantly, during this test, the company collects user information in the form of name and email address, but leaves the option to skip entering this data. In this way, the user gets a convenient feature, gains trust in the brand, and is likely to stick around to read more about offered products.
Of course, implementing such a feature will have a good effect on your brand perception, showing that you care about the customer, understand what products you offer and the purpose of your company. But personalization can go much further, becoming an effective tool for your growth.
If you want to grow your business and add the features listed in this article to your website, contact Simtech Development. We will provide you with a growth strategy based on our experience and CS-Cart technologies.
To increase the level of personalization, one of our clients, Faly Music, wanted to introduce the feature to pre-purchase products that were not yet on sale. This helped the company understand the needs of the audience and work with the booking system.
At the same time, the client’s exclusive private club created an additional level of customer engagement. By working directly with members of the community, the client was able to pre-sell music products that were not available to the general public.
Work on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) refers to the number of your resource visitors who take a desired action. The challenge for your eCommerce growth program is to find the right ways to encourage users to take that action. The outcome depends on your business goals and could look like an additional encouragement to sign up for a newsletter, to register to get more features, and so on.
As we wrote above, it’s not about the number of notifications flooding your site’s overlay, it’s about the ability to show it all at the right time. Recommendation pages can be a great example of this: the user was looking for epoxy for crafts, why not recommend them tools for working with the material or small figurines for creativity. This will have a direct impact on CRO.
Amazon is indeed an example of a major eCommerce player that you should not be ashamed to learn from. If you want to build similar functionality into your marketplace, or order development from scratch with even more impressive options, you can do it with Simtech Development.
Our practice counts many implementations of tools to increase CRO. One of them was the development of an application with built-in up-sell and cross-sell blocks with product recommendations: “People buy this together with…”, “You may also like this product”, etc. As a result of the work, the final development has taken the form of several blocks:
- Product recommendations (similar products, most popular, products by tag, featured products, etc.)
- Bar for adding a subscription line for company news and collecting email addresses
- Free shipping with two progressive goals: “Purchase products worth N dollars and get free shipping”, “Purchase merchandise of total amount N dollars and get a bonus”
- Announcement with special offers
- Countdown timer: “The promotion ends in…”
Each component was designed to lead customers to the desired action.
Besides, consumers nowadays won’t stay on a page for more than 10-20 seconds. So let’s say your direct business goal is to increase the number of users who made an order on your resource. What can you do?
Working with CRO can solve this problem along with website optimization. You can implement a guest checkout, “Buy Now Pay Later” or “Buy Right Now” purchase option. This will save you time that a buyer doesn’t want to spend filling out forms with name, email and contact information. 70.19% is the approximate overall rate at which shoppers abandon shopping carts during checkout when the process seems too long.
It’s also important to think about the payment methods presented on your resource.
We took this into account when working with the Faly Music store mentioned above. The store was in demand in Mexico, so it was a logical step to integrate the most popular local payment options: PayPal Plus and Mercado Pago.
With PayPal Plus, customers don’t need to create an account to pay. And Mercado Pago allows them to pay not only by credit card, but also by bank transfer.
In addition, we have added a convenient installment feature where the customer can quickly pay for their order.
By creating a convenient and fast ordering payment environment, our client increased sales by 150% within one month!
Read more:
Accumulate Social Proof
Many companies underestimate how much eCommerce businesses depend on reviews and social proof. However, if your brand is associated with trust and positive customer feedback, this can be used as a point of promotion and your business growth.
User-generated content (UGC) is an effective and proven method to drive high conversion rates. User reviews as social proof are found in lower funnels, but works on a premorbid basis, meaning it is capable of gaining attention if used intelligently.
You can do this by incorporating customer reviews and video content (like TikTok or Youtube Shorts) into your promotional materials. By leveraging live, real user feedback, you can create lifecycle marketing campaigns and get effective conversions without spending a lot of money on advertising.
GoPro is a great example of concurrently using social proof and UGC. The brand invited users to upload clips taken with action cameras to social media using the hashtag #GoPro. The company then selected the best ones and uploaded them to its Instagram.
By doing so, users:
- saw the product in action
- received live feedback from other users
- got acquainted with content relevant to their interests
- were brought closer to the possibility of purchasing the product from the brand
Social proof is one of the most powerful trends in eCommerce. We have experience in implementing it to the fullest extent and with the client’s needs in mind.
For Northskull’s online clothing and accessories store, we implemented a number of features:
- Added a video section where videos from Northskull’s YouTube channel are automatically uploaded
- Created a Wish List, where customers can create a stylish list of products and share it with their friends
- Integrated a system for displaying posts that mention the brand on social media
We used the ready-to-use Social Stream solution. Added this feature into the online store and all the necessary settings so that the administrator could manage all the displayed posts and sources.
Read more: 10 Ways to Build Trust in eCommerce
Provide Referral and Loyalty Programs
Referral marketing is an existing and quite successful eCommerce revenue growth practice for increasing audience reach. Recently, however, its effectiveness as a word-of-mouth marketing tool has diminished, and it has transformed into a way to get additional rewards.
Many customers will only share a referral link with their friends if they see an obvious benefit: a discount, a unique offer, a free service, and so on. So why not give your referrers this opportunity?
A good example of using referral marketing is Dropbox, which offers users free storage in exchange for inviting a friend to become a new user.
Understanding that cloud storage is exactly what users are turning to Dropbox’s services for, the company is successfully utilizing this referral program by making an essential offer to users.
More credible word-of-mouth marketing comes when a referral program is part of a loyalty program. It’s a way to reward customers for their loyalty to your brand and all the purchases they’ve made. And if they bring you a new customer? Even more rewards! As a great incentive for repeat purchases, a loyalty program doesn’t require you to spend a lot of money.
Even separately, referral and loyalty programs are effective components of eCommerce growth strategies. Use them in your business and communicate with your customers in the language of value and mutually beneficial cooperation.
Referral and loyalty programs can even be integrated into an out-of-the-box solution as features responsible for distributing visitor roles.
As a platform administrator, a company can categorize users based on their actions on the platform, amount of purchases, and so on. Then determine the permissions that result from those actions. For example, you can make participation in a loyalty program with a paid monthly subscription a requirement to become a VIP user.
Take Advantage of Email Marketing
Email marketing has been around for a long time, is used by almost every major company, and has become a constant participant in the rise of eCommerce.
A user’s email is a way for companies to achieve automation, personalization and social proof at once. For quality promotion, you, again, need to move beyond the occasional newsletter with new offers or discounts.
Consider creating dynamic content in emails to tailor the message to each customer or customer segment specifically. From addressing the customer by name to personalized recommendations based on their preferences.
Nowadays there is too much digital noise, so users prefer content that is targeted strictly to their interests. A good example is the Curio app for journalists.
Inside the email newsletter, the company makes a personalized recommendation by giving a brief and intriguing introduction to the podcast and inviting users to listen. At the same time, they follow the golden rules of email marketing: a clean CTA, simple design, and an indication of how much time the user will spend listening to the podcast.
Planning an eCommerce strategy? Do not forget to build automation and personalization into your email newsletters: make recommendations based on users’ preferences, their purchase history, monthly or yearly summaries of their purchases on your site. Perhaps your store has just received a new product that matches a recent customer’s preferences; why not let them know about it in your newsletter?
Email marketing tools are an integral part of the out-of-the-box solution, so if you consider this as your main method of promotion, you hardly need custom development.
However, keep in mind that your emails may have low deliverability and often end up in the “spam” folder. This will lead to customer retention and, as a result, low sales.
This is exactly what one of our clients was facing. We helped them integrate CS-Cart with their main email service. We enabled automatic upload of customer data, accredited the sender and worked on filtering for more accurate audience segmentation. This solution ensured the legitimacy of the sender, thus significantly reducing the chances of the company’s mailings getting in the “spam”.
You can also use social proof, customer product reviews, and user-generated content to reinforce your offer and therefore increase eCommerce revenue.
What Metrics Help Track Your Growth Strategy?
You’ve figured out which successful eCommerce strategy fits your business goals. By combining different methods or by improving your current strategic choices. What else should you consider? Analysis and optimization metrics, of course.
These are the ones that really show how well your strategy matches your investments, how users react to changes, and whether the strategy is achieving the desired results. Let’s summarize all the key metrics we mentioned above in one way or another:
- Conversion. Displays the percentage of visitors who made the desired action: purchase, subscribed, participated in a promotion, and so on.
- Average Check. Shows the average cost of an order. It helps you evaluate how effectively you sell products or services, whether you should focus on selling low-value items or high-value ones, which segment of goods is most in demand, and so on.
- Lifetime Value (LTV). An estimate of the total profit from one customer over the entire period of cooperation.
- Purchase Frequency. How often your customers come back for new purchases, what motivates them. The metric depends directly on your products: whether you offer household goods or single, unique items.
- Abandon Rate. The percentage of visitors who left the site after viewing a single page. This metric can indicate problems with design, content, or site loading speed.
- Return Rate. The percentage of returned or canceled orders. A high rate may indicate problems with product quality or delivery service.
Conclusion
While success in eCommerce is linked to innovations, it is not directly dependent on it. More often it is a matter of working with strategic thinking, taking the right steps towards the user, and therefore a deep understanding of your focus audience.
Growth and development strategies, in-depth market analysis, and adapting to changing customer needs are all components of a sustainable and successful eCommerce business. However, the most important business trait is the ability to see behind the numbers and metrics of real people and their needs.
There are many eCommerce tools available to help you achieve this understanding. Only quality software can implement a referral or loyalty program, for example, assigning users to different roles. Email marketing automation also could be implemented on the eCommerce platform, not to mention the ability to track key metrics. SEO optimization and predictive analytics, personalization, and even the monetization model of your business—all of these will only work if your eCommerce resource operates on a modern, scalable platform.
If you are looking to implement advanced tools or need advice on building an eCommerce platform with an existing strategy, contact us. Drawing on the experience of our big clients, we will advise you on the right solution to implement new strategic steps in your business.