8 Key Factors Affecting the Success of Your Online Business

  • October 24, 2021
  • 7 minutes read

Index

As one of the fastest-growing eCommerce markets, the UAE’s eCommerce market is expected to grow to $9.2 billion by 2026. In this highly competitive market, online businesses must find ways to stand strong and make sustainable growth.

While gearing up for an eCommerce venture, many people focus on one far-fetched goal: profit. It’s definitely exciting to plan your store around the concept of building yourself an empire, but that’s not something you can immediately achieve.

Many other factors, ideally of primary importance, affect the success of your online store/business.

Ready to find out what they are?

Let’s go!

Factors to Consider for the Success of Your Online Business

It is crucial to engage your website visitors to stay on the page for more than half a minute, and it is even more difficult to convert the visitor into a regular customer.

Let’s see which factors affect the success of your online business significantly.

 Website Navigation

A unique characteristic of successful online stores is that they have an easily navigable store with on-the-spot virtual assistance.

You may add a detailed sidebar for menus and separate sections for different user concerns, such as menus, blogs, queries, careers, contact, downloadable, and so on. Chatbots and dashboards add further value to the interactivity of your store as well!

However, for better website navigation, let’s consider these factors:

1.    Layout: Your website layout is your first impression of your customer, and it has to be highly interactive, engaging, and user-friendly. Many successful websites have two different versions for desktops and mobile devices.

As an eCommerce owner, the main difference you’ll experience in contrast to a physical store is the absence of an actual building, rooms, in-person staff, and other tangibles your website design single-handedly substitutes. Needless to say, you have to make it as top-notch as you possibly can.

Your color theme, font, written content, menu organization, images, headers, and audiovisuals add to this design. Therefore, you have to orient these to represent your brand’s mood and messages.

2.    Accessibility: As an online store owner, it’s essential for you to make sure your store is accessible to people who are visiting your website for the first time. The more self-explanatory your website is, the more people are likely to use it.

     An online store’s success largely relies on how many languages it is viewable in and the kind of vocabulary it uses. You may also need to integrate accessibility options such as magnification, touch stabilizer, air gesture, and so on to make it a convenient experience for as many visitors as possible.

3.    User Experience: The customers and visitors of your website must feel comfortable scrolling through your portal. A successful website keeps engaging its customers by adding more value to each page and in each section of the page.

A powerful user experience for your website will help you increase your website’s reach and, in turn, generate more leads for you.

Payout Simplification

When it comes to online stores, online payments are easy go-to options for most customers. Especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, cashless deliveries are deemed a much safer alternative.

Therefore, you need to integrate more methods to allow your customers to pay in their preferred payment methods, be it online banking, digital wallets, or buy now pay later (BNPL). The safer and stronger payment options you provide, the more readily your customers will want to pay.

Payit solutions for businesses allow you to integrate wallet payments for your customers and initiate refunds in real-time.

Displayed Product Quality

Your product is your direct and ultimate connection with your customer. You may advertise as much as you want and claim as high a quality standard as possible. Still, eventually, your customer’s impression of the product’s quality determines whether your store is a hit or a flop.

Thus, your customers owe you the same quality if you display an exceptionally high-quality product. It is better to show the same product you have instead of showing something else and delivering a different product.

No matter how hard you try to display your product in the best possible way, your customer reviews reflect the actual quality of your product. Hence, customers will always look for product reviews.

Customer Testimonials

In an online store, it’s essential to keep track of what feedback your customers have for you. This also impacts your partnership with standard payment software programs like payIt and others.

You can record customer feedback by sending out something as detailed as email surveys or by something as simple as asking for a star-based rating with a review column. This will not only help you add valuable testimonials to your webpage but will also help you improve your brand image.

Pricing Policies

One major factor in how well your brand fares is the price you set on your products. In an in-store setup, customers usually show up at the store, purchase something, then take it with them. But with an online setting, the customer also has to pay for delivery charges, cross-boundary shipments, customs duty (for imports), and protective packaging.

This heavily adds to the overall pricing of a single product. Although services like PayIt may help with some compensation through vouchers and discounts, you may also take steps to regulate the product’s price so that it doesn’t become absurdly expensive!

Rewards

Want your customer to keep returning to buy your brand? You have to give them something worth coming back to! Besides the product quality, rewards of different sorts also help online stores retain customers. This includes discounts on future purchases, vouchers, coupons, souvenirs with a certain purchase value, gift cards, and so on.

These little perks can actually do a lot to build a positive image of a brand. So if you’re wondering how to arrange a system of such rewards, the answer is simple: through e-wallets! payIt is one of those digital wallets that partner up with stores to provide customer rewards and keep track of all relevant purchases.

Return Procedures

Stores with complex and time-consuming return policies and order cancellations hardly earn a good reputation in their respective industry. Purchasing from them is risky if you get a defective product but cannot return it later. This is also why such stores lose many potential customers!

Suppose you ensure that your return policies are easily understandable and considerate. In that case, you’ll be able to keep your customers reasonably satisfied, even if they’re occasionally disappointed with how the product turned out!

Robust Cybersecurity

When you’re in a virtual setup, it can be easy for data thieves to hack your portals and steal your customer database and even your own bank information. Other times, any advertisements you may allow on your site may also lead to suspicious addresses.

While setting up your store, you must incorporate the best possible security protocols you can find according to your site. In case your customer’s website server tells them that providing you with their sensitive information might not be safe, you can also try to get your security system upgraded!

Efficient Shipping Procedures

As an online business owner, safety and timeliness are two crucial elements regarding deliveries and shipments. You may ship on different scales to different places, meaning the shipment quality for each place can differ.

Spilled products, broken parts, or incomplete contents are common with shipments and deliveries, so you must be careful about delivering the product. What courier or cargo service you use, how you provide order tracking information, and the average time it may take to deliver the product safely are a few influential considerations.

Product Marketing

Social media and digital marketing are a boon for online stores. If you adopt a viable marketing strategy, you’ll see a significant difference between your sales and those of thousands of online stores with zero focus on marketing techniques.

There’s a wide variety of digital marketing ideas that you can combine to form your strategies. Pop-up ads, sellable links, social media advertisements, and video referrals are a few marketing techniques that contribute to a successful online store.

Conclusion

As effortless as it can be to set up an online store, it takes all your sweat, tears, and blood to turn it into something magnificent. These are some critical factors that you need to adjust if you want your online store to make it big, especially when the markets are steadily becoming more and more concentrated!

Start growing your business by integrating a digital wallet payment method on your website or a mobile app by visiting Payit for business.

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