Shopping has started to take place mostly online and thus many marketers have shifted their attention to e-commerce. There are many sites which are known for their efficiency and the companies have a good reputation in this industry, and there are sites which appear overnight and their interface or other features don’t actually boost their sales.
And then we wonder what makes an e-commerce site efficient, what are the online tactics that trigger people to buy those products and what can the team behind that site do better to optimize it. To ask our questions, which we believed they were on the mind of many marketers, we went Beyond Marketing at our TOMM #4.
DigiTales & BanatIT joined forces with CoWork Timisoara to organize a panel with a marketer, a designer, and a growth hacker, in order to have a 360° overview on how to optimize e-commerce sites. Our guests were Alex Arghirescu- Full-Stack Marketer, Dalibor Vasiljevic- Founder & Business Manager Rainfall, and Sergiu Maris- Business Manager Soșetăria, moderated by Anna Maria Radu- Founder & PR Manager DigiTales. All of them have an extensive overview of this industry due to the fact that they have ongoing projects in this area or have e-commerce sites themselves.
Sergiu Maris has witnessed many steps and issues in the process of optimizing his site, as he managed to take the business from no relevant sales to doubling them two years in a row. From his point of view, there are many logistic problems that you have to manage professionally from the start because otherwise, they can end up giving you & your customers a hard time. These are the important factors he pointed out:
- Optimizing and automating the sales-flow to process orders in a timely manner. The process of order taking, invoicing, AWB generation, picking list preparation, AWB tracking and return (if applicable) should not consist of more than 2 clicks/process.
- Optimizing the desktop & mobile content where the images need to load fast and the products need individual description and title. Title, description, meta title, meta description are mandatory elements.
Also, Sergiu reminded us to think of our customers as people and get in their shoes without thinking so much of how to provide the best design/ content or website development. At the end of the day, everybody wants just an easy and intuitive process, without useless actions. The difference stands in the little details.
“In 2019, e-commerce doesn’t depend on you, you depend on it.” states our growth-hacker guest—Alex Arghirescu. One thing that Alex and our two other guests agreed with 100% was the fact that optimizing an e-commerce site is an ongoing process of improving the business’ and the user’s needs. On the same page, there are 3 ideas that stayed on our mind from what Alex said at the meetup. All of them are pieces of advice which he would give to his clients at their first meeting:
- Get involved in your business and get to know as much as you can all the variables and the mechanisms.
- Seek to provide real value through the services and products you offer and do it in a unique way.
- Develop a close relationship with the dev/marketing team if you want real success (or inhouse) and always keep an eye on market trends and “the big players”.
Dalibor, on the other hand, believes in an extensive audit to find out the needs, issues, and potential of an e-commerce site and sustains that most of the time the needs are different than those proposed by the client. Also, for him the term “optimize” isn’t actually accurate in this premise, because the process is ongoing.
We hope you found out some answers to your questions and that the last meetup’s format could put things in a 360° perspective as we intended. TOMM goes on, we’re still after the latest in online marketing and we hope our community will keep growing.
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I felt really well, the organization was great, the communication was just as good … I really liked that you chose to communicate in English and it came out so well. The topic approached really cool. The audience was a little shy, maybe many are still not so familiar with the meetup and the local people.
Alex Arghirescu