5 Strategies for Ecommerce Companies

Ecommerce sales are estimated to increase at a rapid rate in upcoming years. According to Forrester, it is estimated that online retail sales in the U.S. will reach 370 billion by 2017,
up from 231 billion in 2013.

Forester's report also notes:

"Consumers are more likely to use their phones not only to research purchases — both to learn about products and store options — but also to find the best price for a given item. But it’s not just phones that drive retail web traffic; virtually all retailers report that traffic to their sites from tablets spikes during evening prime-time hours, when consumers are in a leisure state of mind. This also suggests incremental web sessions and conversions, because web retail traditionally spikes not in the evening, but during business hours."

So how can an ecommerce companies optimize their opportunity to increase revenues? Here a five things to do to increase sales:

1. Site Performance: Fast websites convert better than slow ones. Use WebPageTest.org to analyze your websites performance (aim for a 2 second load time on average).

2. Schema.org: Schema.org is a tool that gives marketers a powerful tool to improve their click-through rate and capture more traffic. For ecommerce websites, this is a must for all product pages because it helps customers see what is in stock via search (example below).

3. Google Authorship: Google's authorship enhances the appearance of blog posts within search results and can dramatically improve click-through results. Simple additions like this can help capture traffic and outrank your competitors.

4. Responsive Design: Having a mobile website is imperative for the future of sales. The best way to make sure your website is mobile friendly is by utilizing responsive design. Responsive design makes sure that your website will adapt to various screen sizes.

5. Content Marketing: The rule to follow for creating content is if isn't worth sharing it's not worth publishing. It's much better to have one awesome post every week than one per day.