Get Even More Customers to Your Online Store

The ultimate objective of any online merchant is to meet or exceed customer expectations while selling as much of their product or service as possible. There are countless ways to attract visitors to your online store and convert those visitors into customers. There are also many ways to increase the amount sold to an online shopper. Here are some potential initiatives to help you accomplish more.

Post Product Reviews / Recommendations

A great product review from a loyal customer (or brand advocate) posted on your website can help influence a purchase decision. This is the online equivalent of “word-of-mouth” and is trusted by more than 70% of consumers polled. Word-of-mouth referrals from friends and family are trusted by more than 80% of consumers polled.

Offer a Money Back Guarantee

Customers come in all shapes and sizes and successful online merchants strive to satisfy the needs of all of them. A shopper that is indecisive, cautious or risk averse by nature, may read online referrals but still have worries about making a purchase. One way to help alleviate the worry is to offer a “Money Back Guarantee”. If the product does not live up to expectations, you could offer a refund. If your products are well received in the marketplace this may be a low risk offer with good upside potential.

Abandoned Cart Recovery

A growing problem for all online merchants is the abandoned shopping cart. This is where a consumer has added items to their cart and have abandoned it before completing the purchase. There are many factors that lead to an abandoned cart and it is important for merchants to know what they are and eliminate them as much as possible. One reason for an abandoned cart is where the shopper was interrupted during the checkout process for one reason or another. An automated email can be sent to the shopper within hours to remind them to return and complete the almost finished purchase.

Have a Blog

You want more visitors to your website, but how is it they get there? In short: blogging; social media; and search engines. Every time you write a blog post, it’s one more indexed page on your website. It’s also one more indicator for Google and other search engines that your website is active and they should be checking in frequently to see what content you’ve published that they should index. Every new indexed page is one more opportunity for you to show up in search engines and drive traffic to your website through organic search.

When you write a blog post, make it easy for viewers to share on social networks, which helps expose your business to a larger audience. A blog helps maintain your social media presence by extending your social reach with content and driving new website visitors through your social channels.

Kitpak Fulfillment is a leading Winnipeg fulfillment company offering a broad range of e-commerce fulfillment services to offline and online merchants.

To find out how Kitpak Fulfillment can streamline your fulfillment processes, while saving you money, REQUEST a QUOTE or CONTACT US today!

1615 Inkster Blvd.
Winnipeg, Manitoba R2X 1R2
(204) 471-8251
sales@kitpak.com


Get More Customers to Your Online Store

Creating an online store is quite an undertaking. Getting the right design, writing content, selecting product images, website hosting and more, takes time and effort. Finally, you launch the store and wait for the orders to start rolling in. After a few days, you start to see some orders arrive and you hope that sales will continue to ramp up. You begin to wonder if the hordes of potential customers you expected are ever going to come to your store and purchase your products.

The question you ask yourself is “How can I get more customers to my online store and make a purchase”. Here are a few ideas to help answer that question.

Have a Sale

Everyone likes a sale. Consider offering a popular product for a deeply discounted sale price (Loss Leader) to attract visitors to your online store. Once they are in your store, you have multiple opportunities to increase the sale by offering other related products at higher margins. Other types of sales work well too, such as a BOGO sale (buy one, get one) or a volume discount where the discount increases with the amount purchased. Your sale will run for a limited time to instill a sense of urgency and stimulate action in the minds of your customers (fear of missing out).

Give Free Products or Samples

Giving free products or product samples is another effective method of attracting visitors to your online store. For example, to stimulate sales of a new fishing rod and reel, you could offer a free spool of quality fishing line with every purchase. You could limit the expense by making the offer available to the first 100 purchasers only.

Ask for Referrals

Referrals are another great way to get visitors to your online store. Rewarding your existing customers for making referrals leads to more visitors. Referral visitors from brand advocates are four times more likely to make a purchase and spend more on average. They also remain loyal with a higher lifetime customer value than an unreferred customer. Referrals (word-of-mouth) work well as they are trusted by more than 80% of consumers polled.

Start a Loyalty Program

The success rate of selling to a new customer can range up to 20%, while the success rate for selling to an existing customer often exceeds 50%. It can also cost five times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing customer. A great way to retain existing customers is to offer a loyalty program. You could offer discounts to existing customers only or offer something free based on volume of purchases made. Creating a loyalty program is not complicated or expensive and the rewards can far exceed the program cost.

Use Multiple Sales Channels

Having an online store on your own website is a great way to start selling your products. However, to scale up and meet higher sales expectations, consider utilizing multiple sales channels for your products. There are numerous, well established online marketplaces you can utilize to achieve greater market penetration. Not all customers shop in one place so being in multiple places increases the chance of your product being found. Consider selling through Amazon, eBay, Shopify or Walmart for almost any product. Specialty marketplaces such as Wayfair and Etsy may also be great for your products.

Build an Email List

Staying in touch with your customers is a key component of sales success. Build your list and use it to remind existing customers how much you value them. Email is the standard for communicating sales or promotions to your customer base and can provide a great deal of valuable data, on which to base future promo emails. Your email database is likely the most important tool in your marketing toolbox.

Kitpak Fulfillment is a leading Winnipeg fulfillment company offering a broad range of e-commerce fulfillment services to offline and online merchants.

To find out how Kitpak Fulfillment can streamline your order fulfillment process and save you money, REQUEST a QUOTE or CONTACT US today.

1615 Inkster Blvd.
Winnipeg, Manitoba R2X 1R2
(204) 471-8251
sales@kitpak.com


Are You Planning a FREE SHIPPING Promotion?

Many online businesses contemplate offering FREE shipping to their online customers either as a special time-limited promotion or even permanently. Here are some of the Pros and Cons to be aware of.

Pros

• Easy for online shoppers
• Final cost is known in advance
• Reduced shopping cart abandonment
• Potential for increased sales
• Happier customers

Cons

• Free shipping may reduce margins
• Shipping to remote locations can be expensive
• Seller must closely monitor freight costs

Offering free shipping for online orders is an extremely popular strategy that is gaining greater momentum in the world of e-commerce. Free shipping does not mean an online store loses revenue; it simply means that the online shopper is not presented with a separate shipping charge for their purchase. When providing free shipping, average shipping costs are typically built into the price of the product so that the customer does not have to contend with unexpected shipping costs and therefore does not have the opportunity to re-evaluate and possibly cancel the purchase prior to completion.

When shipping parcels in Canada, there are some destinations that cost much more to ship to than other destinations. These areas typically require some form of extended and expensive service such as air freight in order to effect delivery.

To help you better plan for a FREE SHIPPING promotion, Kitpak Fulfillment has identified some of the Canada Post destinations or Forward Sortation Areas (FSA’s) that can be significantly more expensive to reach when shipping by Canada Post.

When shipping to the FSA’s in the list below, you may want to consider adding a surcharge to cover the extra shipping costs or you may simply choose to exclude these FSA’s from the FREE SHIPPING promotion.

FSA’s are identified by the first 3 digits in the Postal Code.

R0B     R0C     A0K     A0P     G0G     J0M     P0L     P0T     P0V     S0J     T0H     T0P     V0J     V0N     V0P     V0R     V0T     V0V     X0A     X0B     X0C     X0E     Y0B

Contact Kitpak Fulfillment today to learn more about how we can help you improve your order fulfillment process and save you money.

1615 Inkster Blvd.
Winnipeg, Manitoba R2X 1R2
(204) 471-8251
sales@kitpak.com


Do you ship posters, banners, artwork or large drawings?

 

Which do you think is better, the Round or Triangle Mailing Tube?

Kitpak prefers triangle mailing tubes for a few important reasons.

• Triangle tubes are stored flat, requiring less storage space in the warehouse
• They are easily assembled when required.
• Triangle tubes are easier to orient for automatic label scanning as they lay flat and do not roll around
• The flat sides offer the best branding opportunity
• The triangle tube is typically stronger in the mid-section
• Many carriers apply a surcharge for tubes vs triangles that can increase the shipping charge significantly

The Kitpak Fulfillment distribution center in Winnipeg, Manitoba is ideally located for reaching all points in North America quickly and inexpensively. To learn more about how Kitpak Fulfillment can help improve your e-fulfillment processes while saving you money, please contact us today.

REQUEST PRICING

 

1615 Inkster Blvd.
Winnipeg, Manitoba R2X 1R2
(204) 471-8251
sales@kitpak.com
 


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