Why Technology is Key to The Success of Your Online Store?

Too many retailers who make the jump into the online space tend to operate with the belief that they’ll eventually generate sales simply by being online. However, the ‘build it and they shall come’ ethos has been shown, time and again, to be ineffective in generating views, traffic, conversions, and sales.

If you’re really interested in making a successful online store, the key is in the technology that you engage with.

As this guide will help show, technology underpins the most successful attempts to make a thriving online store in 2022. 

Platform

First up, let’s take a look at the online store you’ve made. You might simply be selling on Amazon, in which case you can skip this tip and move on to the next one.

But if you’ve worked hard to set up your own store on your own website, there are several ways in which technology could help you achieve more views and engage more customers.

Here are some tech products that could serve to help you in the future:

• Plug-ins that help you process payments faster and with the minimum of friction for your customers
• Templates that allow for user-friendly and visually appealing product pages that users can refine their search for based on price
• Back-end features that can help boost your website’s SEO (more on that later) by making your website easier for Google to read and categorize
• Software that increases the overall speed of your website and the loading of your product images

All of these can help your website to encourage higher traffic as well as a higher conversion rate – removing the friction and getting people to that all-important checkout page. 

Also Read: Tech Tips For Small Business Owners

Marketing Analytics

Online marketing has moved on from the days in which retailers simply relied upon an advert to generate more sales.

A static advert is a little like a billboard – it’s unfit for the digital age, and though thousands of people view it, only a handful will act on what they see and read from it. Instead, your marketing efforts must be married with a concerted effort to analyze their performance.

This means using marketing analytics programs or partnering with firms that do so that you can make the most of your marketing spend. You should:

• Use SEO tools to understand where your website ranks on Google’s search results pages and how your efforts to climb that ranking are faring
• Engage with your website’s backend and plug-ins to that backend to understand where the majority of your traffic is coming from
• Engage in UX and user testing to see if there’s anything that you can improve on your website to remove further friction
• Track every dollar you spend on a paid promotion or advert, working out the ROI on that dollar over time

These technological assistants are crucial if you’re to successfully market your store in the modern era. If you’re not tracking how you’re performing with smart technologies, you’ll be left in the dark when it comes to recognizing where you might be going wrong. 

Tech Experts

If you’re a beginner in the world of SEO, marketing, and promotional strategies, it’s fair to say that you’re not going to perform as well as if you simply partnered with a firm that specializes in these kinds of services.

You can use them to set up a marketing campaign that you then operate under your own steam, and the questions that you ask them – and the answers you receive – will be instructive as to how you continue to market your products in the future. 

To find these tech experts, you need only search for relevant companies on Google. Remember that you’re looking for niche experts, such as firms that can recommend and implement a novel Amazon marketing strategy that is sure to generate high sales for your firm. Make use of outsourcing, or bringing in a tech consultant, in order to get up to speed sooner with the rest of your competitors. 

Also Read: 4 Theses on B2B Marketing in 2021

Automation

Successful online stores are selling hundreds of products a day. If you were doing that in a physical store, you’d need several employees to process those sales, take payments, pack bags, and send customers on their way.

Online, you’d expect you’d need even more, given that you also need to package and post each purchased product. Happily, automation technology means that you actually need fewer workers to sell more products online. 

You’ll want to do an online deep-dive into this technology. Suffice it to say that your finances, payments, and accounting should be automated, as should your confirmation emails and delivery service. Even marketing can be automated, as well as customer services, in order to free you up to work on more pressing tasks in your online store. 

Make a note of these tech tips to help your business reach the next level when selling in the online space.