The New Year is only three weeks from now, to the surprise of many 2016 is at our doors, waiting to welcome in another 12 months of Earth’s rotation. With less than a month to go, it’s important to start thinking about what you want to accomplish in the future through some reflection on the past. We’ve created a few guides to help with this goal setting, including a post on eCommerce Trends to Watch in 2016 as well as a holiday sales guide to help you prepare for the influx of customers over these next few weeks.
But to take it one step further, the OCDesignsonline team has picked three resolutions we think that all eBay store owners and other eCommerce sellers should consider taking up for the new year.
1. Do better on mobile – get a responsive design!
With so many consumers shopping on mobile, spending even 66% more than those that don’t shop from their phones, it’s a no-brainer that all stores need to be prepared for this increasingly common method of shopping.
Smashing Magazine even lists that mobile shoppers abandon their shopping carts often because a store isn’t optimized for the small screen, meaning their design is too clunky and difficult to navigate at that screen resolution.
You can fix this problem by commissioning a responsive design, which is a type of design that is coded to change layouts depending on the pixels visible on the screen. If you don’t know how to optimize your store for mobile, request a free quote from our team and we can help you get started with this resolution.
2. Create a better relationship with customers – utilize a mailing list!
Communicating more often with new, old, and prospective customers is a great way to build a more trusting relationship and to incur more sales. eBay has a mailing list option available through the My eBay section so that you can more easily design a newsletter and get it out to customers with store sales information and other promotional materials. And if you aren’t on eBay, Mailchimp is an easy to use and popular mailing list tool utilized by many local and national brands.
And if you are feeling adventurous and want to try a new social network this year, check out our guide on why your store should use Pinterest.
3. Look more professional – get a custom URL!
While a URL is provided from many marketplace platforms, like stores.ebay.com/USERNAME, we’d like to recommend you get a unique URL in 2016 that will redirect to your marketplace destination, assuming you don’t have a custom store created outside of eBay, Etsy, and other similar scenarios.
This not only will help create a more professional look for your brand, it will also be a lot easier for customers to remember – helping them become more loyal to your store. Nothing is worse than someone trying to remember a username you may have created years ago, especially when you may have changed store categories since then and no longer have a username that suits the products sold.
Creating a URL is almost effortless, with sites like GoDaddy and others being so easy to use. You could be set up within minutes!
What plans do you have for your store in 2016? Do you have any particular managerial or customer service oriented goals? We’d love to know in the comments.