According to Similarweb, Amazon.com receives over 2.4 billion visits per month, whereas eBay receives roughly 750 million visits per month. In many nations, these two websites predominate the online shopping scene.
PipeCandy estimates that there are currently about 12 million active eCommerce businesses worldwide (excluding China), with about 3.9 million in the US and Canada.
There are a lot of businesses vying for the user’s hard-earned money.
Over the past year, Google’s traffic and keyword counts have progressively increased due to recent algorithmic changes. However, the huge players keep pushing the small players down the search results pages. As it prepares for a world dominated by mobile devices and seeks to increase its ad revenue, Google is constantly changing how its search results appear.
What must you do then if you wish to launch an online store?
What can you do to stand out from the large, established and well financed players while remaining relevant?
The answer is simple: Position yourself in your niche market.
Positioning Entails Identifying A Niche
Positioning your brand in your ideal customer’s mind is the most important component for a long-lasting competitive advantage.
There are two main options to influence your customers and prospects:
a) Taking the lead in a currently active product or service category (This would need huge investments in terms of money, effort & time, and not a practical option for everyone)
OR
b) Entering any new product or service category as the first participant. In other words, you must establish a brand-new category that sets you apart from the competition.
After choosing an option from above, start small. Focus on a specific need, seek to fill it, differentiate your offering, and rule the niche market. The easier it is for the business to concentrate on and fulfill its customers’ needs, wants, and wishes, the smaller the segment. You can expand your reach into wider markets once you establish yourself as a leader in the niche industry.
Get Ready To Offer The Best Customer Service Possible
Amazon cannot provide customer service in the same manner as you. They are oversized. This is a sandbox Amazon is not allowed to enter. You can, though. One of the finest strategies for competing with Amazon is offering something that Amazon cannot. They are unable to treat each customer as an individual the way you can. Viral spreadability for your brand is possible thanks to enthusiastic brand advocates. Amazon lacks this capability. Customer service is the notion that you interact and build relationships with your clients on a personal level.
Avoid Making Client Service Difficult
All you have to do is offer personal care and be courteous.
There is general agreement that client retention through relationships and customer service provides a higher return on investment and is more economical than other forms of marketing.
Improve Local Search Efficacy
Utilize Google Webmaster Tools or Bing Site Explorer to optimize your website.
Google has developed a tool called “Google Search Console” that offers useful details about how users reach your website and what they do once they arrive. You can increase your position on Google and Bing’s search engine results pages by submitting a sitemap to their webmaster tools if you already have a domain with content. By uploading them, you are informing the search engines about all the information on your website so they can better crawl it, index it more quickly, place you higher in regional SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), and lessen cross-domain duplication.
Taking Local Advantages Regionally & Nationally
Companies in regional sectors occasionally have more options than only protecting their current markets. These extenders can employ the correct transferable assets to expand abroad by building on their domestic success. A targeted foreign expansion strategy closely correlated to the business’s core assets can result in increased sales and scale advantages and priceless learning opportunities.
The best way for extenders to use their assets is to look for analogous markets that are similar to their home base in terms of customer preferences, proximity to their home base, distribution channels, or governmental laws. To provide a straightforward example, expatriate groups are probably open to accepting domestically produced goods.
Make It Simpler And More Convenient For Your Customers To Check Out And Make A Purchase:
If you’ve ever tried to buy something from Amazon, you wouldn’t be the only one to find their checkout process frustrating. They employ an account-based checkout mechanism, in case you are unfamiliar. No purchases may be made without first registering. 37 percent of all online cart abandonments are due to customers being asked to register on the website where they were trying to make a purchase:
Why not remove this from the purchasing process for your clients and win the business that Amazon is unquestionably losing?
You might also try to:
- Permit guests to check out instead of paying customers.
- Make sure the checkout page functions properly on mobile devices.
- Ensure that your website is HTTPS.
- Activating social login (one click, instead of filling out forms)
Create, Rank, and Grow
The success of a specialized eCommerce site can be achieved in three steps, as the subtitle suggests. The first step is to build an eCommerce site or at least the foundation for a sufficiently powerful one. The second is to increase your site’s ranking, even if low, to demonstrate that you are not under any penalty and doing as planned. The final step is to develop the website from a startup into a major player that pays you thousands of dollars each month.
About EquipmentFX
Over the years, the services we offer have evolved to meet each client’s unique needs. We like to lead with our proprietary A3 assessment to really understand the gaps and opportunities. From there we can discuss follow-on services that we can customize together.
After each assessment, the two questions clients usually ask us are “Can you just do this stuff for us?” followed by “We have marketing people—how can we make them and our processes more efficient?” And sometimes we simply deliver the road map and provide support as needed.
At the end of any engagement, you will have a formal framework and internal audit process to improve your program or build a program from scratch to create more new customers and sell more to existing ones.
To find out more about the EquipmentFX A3 assessment, digital marketing, or technology consulting services, please contact us.
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