Scalability and accessibility had impeded widespread ecommerce in the past. The development of ecommerce and supply chain models like dropshipping have opened new avenues of revenue for anyone with an online presence, generating a multibillion dollar industry. Learning what features will help you maximize the ecommerce potential of your website allows you to open doors for the capital that your website can collect and broaden its exposure to online audiences.
Product Diversity
A key part of running a successful and well-known website lies in the extent of your connections with other businesses and retailers. The essence of dropshipping depends on skipping intermediaries along the supply chain. The website acts primarily as a platform to expose different products to customers and allow these products access to a greater market audience online through the nature of their aggregate marketing strategy.
Shopify, one of the biggest dropshipping and ecommerce enterprises, defines dropshipping as distinct from the traditional supply models in the following way: “The biggest difference between dropshipping and the standard retail model is that the selling merchant doesn’t stock or own inventory.” There is a big implication here about the transactional nature of dropshipping for suppliers and ecommerce websites. Suppliers are looking for opportunities to sell to more customers and are willing to take costs and shipping on a rolling basis and absorb a majority of the stocking costs for exposure to a market.
Therefore, the feasibility and competitiveness of your dropshipping business directly corresponds to the diversity of products that can be reasonably hosted in online catalogues on your website. Product diversity has a number of different levels. You have platforms like Amazon that express this diversity through the sheer size of its inventory and then other companies which deal with a more exclusive set or niche, such as fitness or businesses that sell things like used hockey skates.
Thinking of product diversity should start with imagining your intended customer and categorizing their preferences. For example, if you wanted to market to a group of people aimed at startup efforts, you might do some market research on which products are seen as essential to fueling the development of new business ideas. Identifying clusters of preferences within a group of people with similar interests characterizes this method.
Capture Audiences With Attractive, Theme Based Visuals
Ever see a movie or play a game that just feels unified in how it looks? In some cases, visual appeal has a greater impact than even usability for the user’s impressions of the website. That feeling is what we’re trying to replicate here as part of a method to enhance how attractive your website appears to prospective customers.
To max out your site’s ecommerce potential, you’ll want to make sure that the site actually sticks and markets itself to a coherent theme. In other words, you can’t have an ecommerce market that just consists of a jumble of products that are shown to users because they were the easiest retailers to secure a deal with. You need to streamline and curate the types of products that your business uses to shape its profile and image online.
Your website should have a stable and intuitive theme and offer products under the umbrella of that theme. For instance, you may want to cater to travelers in an effort to capitalize on that particular niche. To find the products that are relevant and related to such a theme, you’ll want to be looking into what people usually prefer to do when they travel and scrutinize the products that they tend to use.
Utilize Big Data and Quantitative Methods to Improve Ecommerce Efforts
“The numbers don’t lie” is an expression that holds even more true today in a world where businesses as well as their marketing and advertising strategies revolve around the prospect of big data analytics. According to SAS, a front-runner in big data technology, “Big data can be analyzed for insights that lead to better decisions and strategic business moves.” Technology and automation are rapidly expanding their reach into every conceivable market, even transforming industries like life insurance.
83% of businesses in a research report by Forbes believe that data makes existing services and products more profitable. Things like product diversity are qualitative aspects of your business that can be improved with discretion and the judgment of people on your product team. However, analytics and quantitative methods of analysis will afford your website and any ecommerce venture that you are thinking about with a greater ability to analyze and adapt to emerging market conditions.
You will want to start out with qualitative assumptions, and then change your website based on the feedback that you receive from clients and feedback from internal statistics. For instance, if you may be thinking of introducing a new set of products from a retailer onto your site. However, before introducing those products, holding a survey with your site’s existing customers about what products they want to see offered should structure the initial decision to reach out to a specific retailer.