Top 7 Ways to Increase Ecommerce Sales There are many ways to begin increasing your sales without resorting to discounting. Start with these seven tactics.
Ask any group of marketers how to increase ecommerce sales fast, and the first suggestion you’ll hear is “hold a sale.” Shoppers love sales. Any reason you can come up with to hold one – be it Black Friday, Memorial Day, or your ecommerce birthday – is sure to boost revenue. There’s just one problem with the idea. “On Sale” means a discounted price, and a discounted price means less profit. Yes, a properly orchestrated sales strategy can make up for the slimmer margin by pumping up the
volume … but what if you could increase ecommerce sales without discounting prices? Would that be something of interest to you? In this article, we’re going to share seven of the most effective methods we’ve found to get more conversions without having to lower your prices. Let’s go. How to Grow Ecommerce Sales (The Preferred Method)
It’s simple math: you’re twice better off selling 10,000 widgets at a profit of one dollar per widget ($10K net profit) than you are if you sell 1,000 widgets at a profit of five dollars per item ($5K net profit). That’s the dilemma every marketer runs up against when pricing goods. “Shall I go with the higher price, but fewer sales? Or am I better off lowering the price to get more buyers?” (Of course, the starting place for pricing is always to survey the current market and competition.) The danger is in getting fixated on the prices your competitors are selling those widgets at, then basing your sales strategy on undercutting the price. In common terms, that’s called “getting in a race to the bottom of the barrel.” It’s not the recommended practice. At The Good, we invest much of our time educating smart digital marketing managers in the principles of conversion
rate optimization. And a good conversion rate optimization strategy does not include discounting. Let’s go back to the widget sale and consider a new set of numbers:
Scenario #1: Your rock-bottom pricing draws 100K visitors to your ecommerce website. The deep discount pulls a hefty five percent conversion rate on an average order value of $50. That means you made 5,000 sales and generated $250K. Scenario #2: You keep your prices up and refuse to discount. Even if you manage to get the same amount of traffic (100K) and the AOV jumps from $50 to $75, if your conversion rate falls to 1%, your revenue will drop to $75K. Scenario #3: You read this article and decide to put some of the tips below into action. By applying the principles of
conversion rate optimization, you’re able to keep the conversion rate at five percent and drive the AOV up to $95 per order. Your revenue moves to $475K – almost double that of your steep discount strategy – but without discounting prices.Ecommerce sales are to boost your business and make it large. “Impossible,” you say? We see numbers like that – and even better – on a regular basis. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the missing link between your website traffic and your sales volume. We’ve elsewhere covered CRO in detail (see the resources listed below). We’ve even developed an online tool (free) you can use to draw up your own scenarios and see how changes in your conversion rate and AOV can bring about startling changes in sales revenue. Here’s that link: CRO Calculator.
For now, we’ll keep moving and get to the seven top tactics you can employ to get started. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s chock-full of ideas to help you sell more goods or services and earn more revenue in the process … without dropping your prices.