How to Optimize Your Digital Storefront

As a small or medium-sized business (SMB), it’s time. For what? Optimizing your digital storefront so that your endless efforts to grow your business will bear even more fruit.

You read that correctly. 

You’re already  doing lots of things right (e.g., improving the customer experience, implementing best practices for managing sales channels, and other growth minded endeavors), but nothing can convert a sale like a perfectly optimized storefront. What does a digital storefront look like that hasn’t been fine tuned yet? Poor performance might include slow site speeds, confusing navigation, unclear product pages, and a complicated check-out process. 

These and other issues could keep you from enjoying a piece of the $4.3 trillion e-commerce pie (that’s $4.3 trillion worldwide, in case you were wondering!). 

But all is not lost. There are practical ways you can polish up your storefront to improve performance, increase customer conversions, and feed your hungry bottom line.

Ready to get started? Let’s go!

Making Your Digital Storefront Shine Bright

Selling products online is fast becoming a consumer expectation, especially for the Millennials, Gen-Zers, and Gen Alphas who don’t know life without technology at their fingertips. Here are a few strategies for grabbing their fleeting attention—and keeping it.

Prioritize Speed and Mobile Friendliness

Have you ever clicked on a website, and it didn’t load right away? Or it loaded, but because you were on your phone, it didn’t fit the screen correctly? Did you continue to try and find a product or did you close the page and look elsewhere? 

That’s exactly what your customers will do if your digital storefront isn’t performing at top speed nor mobile optimized. When you create a website with responsive design and fast load times, your customers are more likely to stay and look around.

Make Navigation and Search Intuitive

No one wants to work hard when making a purchase, so if a website doesn’t flow well or requires too many clicks, the customer quickly becomes exasperated and might not make a purchase. Streamline your user experience with clear categories, accurate filters, and a visible search bar. 

Improve Product Pages

Product pages on your online storefront serve an important purpose. They list the attributes of specific products, including their primary features, amazing benefits, and  price tag (clearly noted). 

For each product page, you should:

• Write accurate descriptions, including dimensions, materials, care, etc.
• Use high quality images with multiple angles and offer a zoom feature (everyone wants to see products inside and out, front and back, and top to bottom before hitting the buy button, right?)
• Update stock levels automatically. Remember: if something is out of stock, then having a “back-in-stock” alert may save a sale!

Integrate Reviews

Forbes tells us that up to 98% of consumers like their reviews. And by like, we mean they rely heavily on reviews to decide if they do or do not want to purchase a product. People’s opinions sway other people’s buying decisions, so including customer reviews on your product pages is a big benefit. 

By integrating reviews into your website, you’ll increase consumer trust (your product can’t be all bad if you let people freely share what they think!), and it allows real users to add their own pictures of your product so that customers can see it in real life settings.

Keep Your Storefront Fresh

A clean, professional website with clear messaging, uncluttered site lines, and updated content is a draw for consumers looking to make a purchase. How you present your business says a lot about how you run it. If you regularly update featured products and banners, offer seasonal promotions, and archive discontinued items, customers will continue to be engaged and keep coming back for more.

Use Analytics to Improve 

Another way to deliver the best customer service? Analyze what’s going on by tracking specific data points, including conversion rates, bounce rates, and most-viewed products. When you do, you’ll know:

• How many website visitors choose to buy a product after visiting your site
• How many leave after seeing only one page without hitting the buy button
• How many of your products are viewed (and how often)

Such information helps you make strategic decisions about website design, functionality, and content. In addition, you can run A/B tests on product page layouts or promotional banners, which is simply putting two different versions out there and seeing which one gets more clicks or conversions.

Instead of blindly altering your digital storefront based on feelings (hoping whatever you do sticks), you’ll make tactical changes based on data.

Optimizing Your Digital Storefront with Help from Cin7 

An optimized digital storefront isn’t just about how your website looks or even how it operates. It’s also about making sure you have products on hand so that you can consistently fulfill orders and quickly ship them to your customers. If your inventory isn’t stocked and updated in real time, it’s a sales killer. Having accurate inventory levels produces more sales and satisfied customers.

With an intelligent inventory management solution (IMS), like Cin7, you can sync your inventory across all sales channels. All those times you’ve wondered what’s going on with your inventory? They’re long gone. 

You can also automate your stock updates to prevent overselling (or disappointing your customers). And you can prioritize high-performing products in promotions using Cin7’s sales data and ratings as well as streamline replenishment to restock bestsellers before they sell out. 

Even better, you can use Cin7 ForesightAI to forecast demand using past sales and seasonal trends, guaranteeing that your popular products are well stocked. If that sounds too good to be true, it’s not.

For Cin7 customer Brian Higgins, Managing Director for ABC School Supplies, ForesightAI is the tool that’s helped them find shortages before they happen as well as spot their winners, losers, and chasers (products, that is).

“Now, if we have losers, we can act by removing them. When we find winners, we’re targeting them through things like our Google ad campaigns,” he says. “With chasers, we’re giving products a chance. To be honest, for 20 years, we probably cut products that would probably be selling well today.”

By making your online store a sophisticated, user-friendly place to shop and supporting it with a strong IMS, you’ll be well on your way to growing from success to success. To learn more about how Cin7 can optimize your business, request a free demo today!