7 e-Commerce Best Practice During COVID-19

The e-Commerce sector is going through a fantastic shift due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The e-Commerce industry is a field that relies on purchasing and selling transactions between individuals. Today, businesses give preference to digital engagement.

Undoubtedly, this fast transition to digital involves additional strategic steps. The question is what are the e-commerce sites going to do in this risky situation? The arrangement, indeed, is to do what is within your power. Look in this misfortune for opportunities.

According to Instacart and Walmart Grocery, their application downloads have increased, relative to the previous year by 218 percent and 160 percent respectively. This means people want to make transactions online, but they want to make it worth their money.

Below are a few best practises that you can implement during these problematic times at your e-Commerce business and put things running.

1.  Fuel Up Social Commerce

Social commerce has tremendous loads of advantages. Because of the COVID-19 outbreak, without leaving their preferred online media sites, people spend a significant portion of their energy at home and browse through products. Through friends and family members, they can offer suggestions without any stretch. 

Social commerce will also provide a boost to your business side. When the social storefront picks up ubiquity, your social media audience evolves consistently. It also promotes active engagement on the site, prompting better search rankings.

The majority of the members of your social media audience are very keen on your business and products. This means the interaction with social media and traffic is more authentic. In comparison to anonymous businesses, customers will usually be more loyal to certain businesses that they follow via social media.  

Another extraordinary advantage to your business’s social commerce is that you can collect social media analytics and track your campaigns’ success.

2. Invest Your Energy On Your Holiday Season Sales And Campaign

Thanksgiving and Christmas are the most critical holiday seasons for e-commerce businesses. Gifts, cards, gifts, food and other products are bought by individuals via various websites. Consumers say that they will invest an average of $1,047.83 this holiday season, according to the annual report by the National Retail Federation and Proper Insights and Analytics.

The above observations should be a reminder for e-Commerce businesses. It’s a perfect time to start now if you’re not even planning holiday campaign strategies to take benefit of the biggest gift-giving times of the year. 

But how do customers find you?

In your holiday marketing strategies, below are the four steps you can introduce to boost traffic to your website:

• Organic Reach: To find out which sites have the most traffic, page loads, time on pages, and conversions, utilize Google Analytics’ benefits. Cross-check this data with your top keywords at that point. Instead of the best or most obviously bad pages, concentrate on tweaking pages that behave in the pack.
  
• Referrals: Promote your website, products, and resources for e-commerce on various sites. If you have relationships with those companies as of today, or whether you run campaigns to promote their products, this is easy. During the holiday seasons, reference traffic can be a substantial stream of revenue, as well as the ideal opportunity to expand quality backlinks and enhance your SEO.
• Social Media: Individuals are now looking out before the lead-up to the holiday season for early-bird offers and discounts, much as one-day deals in December for consumers a minute earlier, so give them what they need. Post discounts, coupons, and flash sales. Your followers will impart to their companions the amazing deals, share the word about your products and promote your business and brand all the time.
• Email Marketing: It is an unquestionable necessity to use email for holiday promotions and newsletters. It’s the fastest way to teach your customers the finest products, promotions, and events. E-mail is also an amazing method to promote exclusive deals to your customers.

Experiment with headlines and visuals, but keep it consistently simple, and send substantial newsletters out progressively at the beginning of the day as people browse their email.

3. Ensure Your e-Commerce platform Meets The Needs Of Customers

You have to make sure that the concerns of your customers are answered by your e-Commerce site. This means a web store that is advantageous, secure, and complete and one that convinces customers to buy with you instead of going to competitors.  

The four categories you can incorporate that your customer expects from your web store are below:

• Display Relevant Information:

Your e-commerce website should have reliable, comprehensive and continuous information, from products and materials to stock levels and delivery tracking.

• Offers Optimized Functionalities:

Ensure that the customers can pay and look at their orders easily and securely, but still track their orders, negotiate with their profits and pay invoices online.

• Handles The Complexities Of Orders:

To handle complicated transactions, including those focused on complex pricing and discount structures, with the right method, the web store should be established.

• Prevents Order Errors:

Your inventory statistics, pricing, and stock levels should be listed in the web store periodically. Customers can also approach the web store’s order history and account data to help them preserve a strategic gap from entry and selection errors.

4. Streamline Your Returns Process

As of today, you are likely to see shifts and spikes in demand for some products due to the COVID-19 outbreak. You may have already learned that financially suffering consumers are searching for opportunities to reclaim a portion of their spending. This is uncertainty probable to bring about an increase in returns.

In this way, make sure that the customers are stress-free in the return process. Enable them to allow returns via the online store in the event it is conceivable and to track the progress themselves. It will not only be more beneficial for your customers, but it will also avoid any spike in your service teams’ calls and emails.

5. Introduce Web Stores To New Regions And Markets

It is also an amazing opportunity to introduce the existing web store to new regions and markets to ensure revenue and support existing or cut-off customers. 

Setting up your web stores in locations where you already have a physical presence, but no online presence is important. This would encourage your loyal customers to continue shopping with you if physical shops are to be closed in any situation.

However, that also means finding a new audience if you introduce your web store to regions where you have no presence. Accordingly, ensure that your web store is indeed optimized for SEO.

You will be able to bypass any supply chain interruptions by setting up a D2C or B2C e-Commerce platform, or even uncover new revenue wellsprings if, after the CoOVID-19 lockdowns, interest in your products in the B2B sector declines.

6. Deal With Demand And Supply Chain Disruptions

A study by the Supply Chain Management Institute showed that about 75 percent of companies had just reported disruptions in the supply chain. Here are a few things, both in the short and long term, that you can set up to handle such disruptions.

Streamline the efficiency and reliability of your e-commerce site to manage peak traffic levels:

• Large & Stable Infrastructure: To help your website, ensure you have the right web store host.
• Load Balancing: Spread it over a group of machines to ease the pressure off.
• Lazy Loading: Delaying the loading of some elements of the site. 

In order to cope with supply chain instability and ensure a negligible effect on your customers and service teams, you have to ensure that your web store enables you to do the following:

• Displaying stock levels and pricing in real-time
• Let customers track their deliveries
• Try to make sure that the out-of-stock products are mentioned and let customers realize when to expect them available to order.

7. Bring In Protective Measures To Protect The Employees And Customers

Although e-commerce will enable you to guarantee that your customers and employees reduce face-to-face interactions, this is clearly in line with a particular degree. You often do need to operate a physical logistics centre at the end of the day and to actually distribute the products.

However, despite having new measures in place, you can also console your customers by informing them what you are doing and how their products will be delivered.

Conclusion

Certainly, Coronavirus has developed a wide range of challenges for retailers, but there is still a bright side to this. Individuals who have been ignorant about e-commerce stores are forced to learn about internet shopping and switch their shopping strategy. In any case, people will see e-commerce differently post-pandemic regardless of what the future has to come for us.

E-commerce has long been renowned for its ease, and more people now appreciate the integrity of online shopping.