What the hell is eCommerce? This was the question I had 8 years ago at the end of my university career. I had just wrapped up my degree and was looking for the next step in my life when I came across an opportunity to be an eCommerce intern at SportsDirect.
Now, considering I was doing a media production degree and specialising in design, looking back I can see that this was an odd choice in direction. The truth is at that point I had no idea what an eCommerce intern was and all the design firms I’d applied for had turned me down.
So, off I went into one of the oddest situations I have ever been in that included competition, house-sharing, and learning. If you think is going to dish the goods on SportsDirect and their inside story I’m afraid you’re out of luck. The times I saw Mike Ashley he was busy walking around the office with staff, wearing his SportsDirect polo, and was all-in-all very normal. If you look past him often arriving in his helicopter.
It was during this internship I was introduced to eCommerce and its many methods and strategies. In honesty, when I was trying to learn and figure out how to do the job in the beginning I wish someone had simply said this – eCommerce is the art of selling online.
In this blog, I will highlight the basics of eCommerce and social media, which go hand in hand, and what you should at least be aware of if you are thinking about entering this world of online madness.
eCommerce stands for electronic commerce. If you buy or sell anything over the internet you are part of this online machine. Depending on the company depends on the depth of the strategy being used to pull in more customers. Mainly what the teams will look at is the conversion funnel, they want to give you the right information and right hook at each stage of your shopping experience. There are numerous variations of the funnel but a standard one would be: Awareness, Interest, Purchase, Repeat.
You need to provide the right information for each stage of a customer’s journey otherwise they might not choose you as a buying option. So, say someone is thinking of buying a new car. First, they might research different types. If your site has lots of useful information, comparison features, and articles on what car is good for who – you increase the chances of your site creating hits in the initial research stage.
Next, interest. Once the users have a rough idea of what they want they’ll be looking at what is on offer. Do you have deals, how easy is it to access you, and how are you better than others to purchase from? Also, hardly anyone makes a purchase anymore without checking out at least a couple reviews.
Next, is a purchase, they’ve found you, found the product, decided on a model – what pushes them over the finish line? Good user experience and ease of use. If it’s tricky or complicated to buy people will bounce off your site so fast you wouldn’t believe it. It also needs to be secure, if your selling site doesn’t look secure then people will find it hard to part with their cash.
Finally – repeat. Once you’ve made a sale it’s important to provide good customer service, provide confirmation of purchase, up-to-date progress if your product is being delivered, and obtain permission to stay in contact with them. At the simplest, you should at least end the buying process on a confirmation landing page so the user knows that their order has been a success.
A big part of eCommerce is the optimisation of your online selling tool. For some this will be their website, allowing users to browse, buy and create an account for easy repeat purchases. It could be a selling platform such as eBay, Amazon, or Etsy. Or, alternatively, a lot of sellers are now selling their products directly on social media.
Each platform has a range of skills and methods you can use to optimise your sales. For websites, online optimisation through SEO, PPC, and ensuring accessibility can help you climb in Google’s rankings, leading to an increased chance of being searched and found online for your keywords.
Keywords are a huge help on selling platforms too if you don’t manage to highlight the right terms then even if a user does need your products/services it’s hard for them to find you. For example, If you’re targeting local customers but you don’t include your location, how will they find you?
Finally, social media has massively taken off in recent years and now everyone who wants to make money, be known, and sell online needs a social media presence. No presence now leaves customers unsure of your reliability and trustworthiness. There are ways to make money with and without spending money using social media as a selling platform, however, they make certain it’s slower to do it for free.
IV Digital 