How to be Successful at E-commerce and How can VAs Help?

Whenever we think about a successful e-commerce shop or business, names like Amazon and Walmart come to mind. Small and medium businesses may not be able to replicate to the finest detail what they have done, but they can learn from the tried and tested ways these industry behemoths have arrived at the position of global domination.

For example, both of these industry e-commerce giants use virtual assistants (remote experts) who help them with tasks like managing online stores, tracking shipments, responding to customer reviews, writing product descriptions, product listing, email marketing, run ads, and so on. How it benefits them, we’ll discuss in the blog.

We will also take a look at other valuable strategies they implement. Without further ado, let’s dive straight in to learn the most important strategies for a successful e-commerce shop.

Statistics say that currently there are more than 110,000 e-commerce websites that generate revenue on a significant scale. When the competition is this brutal, how do you plan to tackle all this? You surely have strategies of your own, but enriching them with the following will help you survive and thrive in this fierce market.

The secret of doing any kind of business is developing a deep understanding of your target audience and their needs. Depending on your capital and other external factors you have to decide whether you’d want to try and attract a broad audience online.

For starters, selecting a niche audience specific to your expertise is a smart approach. Conduct market research and get a grip on your target audiences wants and needs to build a solid foundation for your strategy.

One of the keys to e-commerce success is being efficient. But it would be extremely hard to stay efficient if you have to face losses every time there is a change in your business needs.

Therefore, choosing a scalable e-commerce platform is not only a valuable option but a necessity. Choose a platform that will allow you to customize options and scale however you want to meet the expectation and growing demands of your customers.

Amazon and Walmart have teams of remote experts or virtual assistants that take care of tasks like product description writing, inventory management, data analysis, etc. But why did they rely on virtual assistants? They knew that VAs can play a crucial role managing their complex operations while also keeping expenses as low as possible.

By hiring remote experts you can avoid the minimum wage law, employee benefits, and other overhead costs and finally end up saving a ton. Secondly, as you get access to a larger talent pool you get to hire experts habituated with the various challenges you will face from managing inventories to optimizing online sales.

Now e-commerce entrepreneurs know that you have to cut unnecessary checkout steps to deal with cart abandonment. You are aiming to achieve that with a ‘one-click ordering’. But to do that right you have to keep some things in mind.

You should provide your customer all the information they need to have before you prompt them to make the buying decision with one click. Make sure that all the necessary information (product attribute, price, estimated delivery date, shipping fees, return policy, etc.) is easily accessible from the product page.

Bonus tip: You can also include a self-service customer support tool like Amazon does. Offer customers 30 minutes (after buying with one click) to decide whether they want to cancel or modify the orders. This will send a (figurative) message to your audience, that you are thinking on their behalf, and it will build trust.

The importance of product reviews is an obvious one. Amazon’s product reviews archives get so big that buyers who don’t want to buy a specific item from Amazon visit them for reviews.

But how can you build your reviews? For newer brands it is harder to generate product reviews because not everyone is motivated enough to write a product review.

What you can do is add an one-tap rating feature, so that your buyers can simply select their rating for a product and give feedback without uttering a word. You can also start an incentivized review program that clearly benefits the shoppers. It will help you jump start on one of the most effective ways to be a successful e-commerce business.

Immediate access to products is a benefit that only brick-and-mortar retailers offer. Buying something through an e-commerce website involves having to wait for the item to arrive. This is a customer pain point that major e-commerce websites are trying to address with their premium services and quicker deliveries.

If you want to join in and acquire and retain your customers you have to work on the speed of your shipping process. By selecting the right shipping partners, optimizing your warehouse operations, delegating tasks like order processing, inventory management, return, tracking, and so on to expert personnels you can rival the e-commerce giants with new-found speed.

In a competitive marketplace you cannot ignore the importance of a rich product page. You have to give customers everything that they need to know. It should happen that they would not have to go anywhere to find the thing they are looking for.

Although a huge part of the content would come from user’s reviews & FAQs, personalized product recommendations, and delivery & return policy, you can also provide abundant product information and design specific product banners to help customers decide if a product is the one they need.

If you trace back most of the successes these e-commerce giants had you will reach one point: data analysis. Let’s talk about one of the most remarkable ones: predictive analytics.

It is the application of machine learning, data, and algorithms in learning past data to help one forecast future events. You can also build a system to monitor customer behavior and use the data to make your services better.

For example, Amazon allocates products to warehouses that are closest to people who have high probabilities of buying that product in the very recent future.

The importance of superior customer support is always high due to the fact that favourable experiences regarding this part of a buyer’s journey attracts a lot of new customers. Actually, it is one of the leading ways people will remember your brand.

If you have exceptional service associates or staff in place you can answer customer’s questions quickly, effectively, and in a friendly manner. If you practice social listening (you must) you will hear your customers talking about their positive (or negative) experiences about your brand.

Conventional loyalty programs would not do. Customers are tired of the programs that tell them to buy ten items (for instance) only to get one free, or accumulate a high number of points only to get a 10% off, and so on.

If you can engage your customers through a loyalty program that rewards them without any accumulation (meaning instant gratification), it can help greatly with customer retention.

To make a worthy loyalty program, try moving your focus from your sale’s KPI to the customer’s initial needs and look for new ways to reward your audience besides heavy discounts.

• Product Listing Optimization (PLO) 
• Inventory Management 
• Order Processing and Fulfillment 
• Customer Service and Support 
• Social Media Management 
• SEO and Digital Marketing
• Return and Complaint Handling 
• Website Maintenance
• E-commerce Analytics and Reporting 
• Product Image Enhancement 
• Product Classification 
• E-commerce Transaction Management 
• Product Category Management 
• Product Description Writing 
• Competitor Research and Product Research

Depending on the service provider you choose they can provide more or less services shown in this list.

If you own an e-commerce business there are some tasks you have to do by yourself. But there are tasks that are better taken care of by others, especially tasks that require expert handling and the repetitive ones.

From the crucial research work to the load of administrative tasks that bunch up everyday, VAs can be a great asset to your e-commerce business. Therefore, if you want to run a successful e-commerce shop you should carefully consider the strategies mentioned above and implement the ones that seem best for you.