Even an e-commerce, like any other business activity, must be managed in the right way in order to have constant success over time. It is not enough to have an excellent product at reasonable prices: you also need to learn to manage some apparently complicated technical aspects. Calculating the budget to allocate to advertising, forecasting how many customers you will get next month, using SEO, concrete strategies to attract more buyers... 

These are not immediate concepts: this is why only a few e-commerces manage to really shine! In this short guide we try to explain these “difficult” strategies in a simple way, explaining the technical jargon behind them and giving practical advice on how to manage a successful e-commerce.

5 Technical Tips That Make E-Commerce Easy to Manage

1) Calculate ROI and ROAS on advertising spend

The reason why you make an investment is to have a return on investment (return of investment = ROI). For this reason you do not start an advertising campaign for your e-commerce without estimating a concrete return on investment, otherwise you risk starting to invest without ever understanding when you have achieved the result, or if it is instead time to change strategy.

Without an accurate ROI estimate, there is no point in starting to spend on marketing!

However, it is not easy for everyone to evaluate the return on investment. 

Let's take for example a newly opened e-commerce, which sells a regular consumer product such as fruit (for example). This online store starts an advertising campaign. It is clear that the first customers acquired following this campaign constitute the return on investment.

Usually, however, the situation is more complex. In some cases, there is already a pool of regular customers, and the advertising campaign aims to expand this pool. But then, even if we calculate only new customers as the return on investment, a very important piece of data is missing: how many of these new customers have been loyal? How many will buy only once? How many will move on to a larger order of products?

This is why when talking about an online advertising campaign it is more precise to talk about ROAS.

What is ROAS?

It is the acronym for Return On Advertising Spend and refers to the return on investment on advertising expenditure. A figure that is difficult to calculate by hand, but which can be set in advance for each advertising campaign: simply communicate it to Facebook Ads and Google Ads at the beginning of the campaign. After that, Google and Facebook will suggest the best strategies to obtain the ROAS you have estimated: they will automatically optimize promotions, alternating the most discounted products and making e-commerce management automated.

The ROAS metric thus becomes easier to interpret and allows for the correction of some errors.

The benefits of an automatically calculated ROAS

• On the one hand, it will be easier for e-commerce to invest in advertising without fear of wasting money.
• You can gain visibility into the exact ROI of your marketing activities, and adjust where necessary.
• There is no need to do complicated do-it-yourself calculations anymore, because the advertising platforms themselves help you
• The only thing that remains for the entrepreneur to do is to verify that the equation profit > advertising expenditure is true.

We all know that Today, advertising investment is a necessary and very important condition for the success of an e-commerce. By understanding how ROI and ROAS work and learning how to use them in practice, everything becomes easier.

2) Activate a remarketing function

Simply put, remarketing is the function whereby your customer's browser "memorizes" which pages the user visited on your site during his first access. In the future, while the user navigates to other sites, he will see advertising for your products in other advertising spaces.

You may have seen this feature in action on Google or Facebook: perhaps you inexplicably saw an ad for a product you had searched for a few days earlier.

This is remarketing: you simply paste a specific string of Javascript code into your site pages, which is usually activated when you start a marketing campaign. This is a piece of text that is invisible to the human eye, but which gives precise instructions to your user's browser.

What to Expect

Basically, every time a customer connects to your online store, they receive an anonymous cookie. This cookie will accompany your customer as they navigate online, such as when they go to Facebook and Google. There the cookie will “train” the advertising space, inserting ads that interest your customer, calculated based on his search history.

In this way the customer will see a product that has already interested him in the past, and therefore will potentially be pushed to purchase, much more than a new user.

A great way to convince the undecided and maximize your return on investment.

Attention: the cookie policy is changing, we invite you to keep up to date!

3) Read Analytics metrics

Before web marketing it was much more difficult to know exactly what your customers thought about a product. Today, constant monitoring of our customers' behavior on our site allows us to have a clear idea of ​​what works and what should be improved instead. However, it is essential to know the metrics to analyze the data and know how to interpret them.

The Importance of Analytics

In analytics software we have a mine of information: by learning to read the metrics you can discover a lot about your users and your site and consequently improve performance.

For example, it can be useful to evaluate the bounce rate of a page, that is, how easily users leave a page without finishing reading the content.  

Another very important piece of information to understand: where customers stop their purchasing journey. 

If you find that for example 80% of your customers stop at the payment screen and do not proceed with the purchase, this means that there is a problem that needs to be solved right there. Maybe the price was not clear before, or the payment method is not very popular, or there is some important button to pay, but it is not visible on the page.

The source of your traffic

Another interesting information can be to understand from which sources the traffic to your e-commerce comes.

Are your users coming from social media? Another partner site? Your blog posts?

This data allows you to set up a strategy in the most correct way, investing where it is most needed. Connect your online store to Google Analytics as soon as possible: just insert a small tracking code into each page of your site (don't worry, there's no need to copy and paste manually, there are several plugins and simplified tools to do this automatically). 

Only by doing this will you have a clear and detailed vision of how your customers behave on your website.

4) Managing SEO and SERP in an e-commerce

To be successful with any e-commerce it is essential to master the complex discipline of SEO. SEO means Search Engine Optimization, or all those strategies that make your e-commerce pages and products more readable for search engines. 

When we talk about SEO we also talk about site speed and responsiveness towards the different devices of the user. SEO also concerns the structure of the titles of your e-commerce and the way in which the pages are linked to each other.

It is essential to respect a hierarchy of titles and arrange the content sensibly, otherwise the search engines will surely penalize you.

Finally, SEO is also about how your text and images are organized. Every search engine can understand if your text on the page is interesting for users who do a search, and if it is, it will be rewarded with greater visibility. 

Once you understand these basic concepts, it is easier to apply an SEO strategy to your e-commerce, whether it is guided by software, studied personally from manuals, or recommended by an SEO consultant.

What is SERP?

 To understand if your SEO strategy is working, you need to consult the SERP. 

Open your browser and type a word in the search engine. A page with several search results will appear. This list of search results is the SERP (Search Engine Research Page) and is very important because, as is known, those who are in the top positions are more visible.

How to get a good position in SERP?

1. Optimizing your e-commerce pages and products with SEO strategies
2. Creating quality content to post regularly on blogs and social media to attract new potential customers

Why is it important to publish content on your site regularly?

As far as content publishing goes, it is one of the most effective ways to position your site, for two reasons. 

First of all, because search engines love those who publish content that is useful to users, according to their yardstick. If they see that in addition to selling in e-commerce, you also offer informative content in the blog, your online store will gain in authority.

But there is a second strictly commercial reason: let's say that on your e-commerce you are selling kombucha tea. Maybe the Italian market is not yet familiar with this type of tea, and therefore publishing a guide article that explains what kombucha tea is arouses the curiosity of an audience of people who could become future buyers.

Blog articles therefore also have the function of creating your brand communication by orienting it towards your products. SEO articles are your space, your time to build a reputation and to show yourself as truly attentive to the needs and curiosities of the customer. 

For this reason they must be exploited in every possible way!

5) Adopt an effective pricing policy and after-sales service 

On the Internet it is extremely easy to compare the price of multiple items, and given equal reliability, users will always choose the cheapest online store. It is not easy for an entrepreneur to decide what the right price is for their products, but fortunately there are some tips to adopt to increase purchases and make a higher profit on some products.

Our advice is to keep track of your competitors' prices: it will give you a clear idea of ​​the average market value. You will not be forced to adapt, but if for example you offer a high-end product, it will be a good idea to invest in communication to explain to your customers why they should pay more to choose you. 

Using Google Merchant

Google Merchant is a platform where you can manage your products sold via e-commerce and edit your ads.

On Google Merchant, you can upload and edit product information, such as prices and product photos, and this information is included in searches that users perform in Google Shopping. 

The ideal is to integrate Google Merchant with other Google services, such as your Google My Business page. For a similar service outside of Google, you can register as a seller on one of the many price comparison platforms, such as Find prices.

After sales service

It is essential to take care of an effective after-sales service, which includes first and foremost:

• Fast shipping
• Excellent communication and possibly in real time

You can no longer ignore these two elements to have a successful e-commerce, because customers are used to having excellent customer service, even for niche products. Fortunately, there are many software solutions that can help, for example you can partner with an online shipping management service, or enhance your customer service by integrating it with a chatbot for ecommerce.

6) Have your e-commerce managed by a specialized agency

Having a reference agency, which is reliable and takes care of all the aspects described in this article, makes life easier.

An agency assists the entrepreneur, supporting him day after day in the growth of his e-commerce, realizing together all the fundamental points described above without wasting time and money in unsuccessful attempts. 

Why didn’t we write “6 complicated things” in the title? 

Because this one is really simple to do: just use the button above and make a phone appointment with us!