Ecommerce strategy – 3 tips to help you win the online race

Building a strong eCommerce strategy has never been as important.

2020 will remain a pivot year for retailers. Ecommerce sales have soared during the lockdown, mostly driven by customers who were shopping online for the first time. Retailers are now expecting the eCommerce penetration to remain quite high, even as stores start to re-open.

Companies who used to only sell in-store sales are now exclusively focusing on their eCommerce strategy. Look at Pepsico for instance: the food & beverage giant just launched its first two DTC eCommerce websites, Snack.com and PantryShop.com. Awesome news for all the quarantined workers craving snacks. But what does it mean for brands who were already eCommerce first?

As a DTC brand or an experienced omnichannel retailer, the good news is: you’re already in eCommerce. The bad news? Now, so is everyone else. So how do you regain your eCom advantage? By knowing and leveraging your best assets: experience, agility, and technology.

1. Leverage your team experience

For companies who are hiring right now, the temptation to prioritize low-salary, fresh out of school candidates is high. But in this new world, seasoned teams are the best positioned to win the eCommerce race. They already know how to drive traffic in a cost-effective way. They’ve already adopted UX best practices and they know how to manage a website https://edaslav.com/.

There is enough uncertainty out there. Relying on an experienced team allows you to focus on figuring out the post-COVID world and build your eCommerce strategy. It also makes your company much more resilient to all the challenges that come with a global pandemic. Logistics issues anyone?

2. Value agility

Building an eCommerce strategy requires a lot of time and energy. You have to stay focused, and sometimes that means ignoring the rest of the world. As an experienced eCommerce team, you can be way more agile, and that’s the key success when the entire world is changing. Having the fundamentals in place gives you space to pivot and refocus quickly when needed.

Even if your company has never relied on brick-and-mortar, the way your customers are shopping and the things they expect from you have changed. They were used to the brick & mortar experience for instance: how do you make sure that your website is enough in a world where nobody wants to set foot in a store? It’s time to experiment, talk with your customers and try new tools.

If you want an example of an agile team who’s had great success lately, watch amika’s eCommerce Director presentation during our retail rebound webinar. She explains how her brand adopted a new approach to flash sales during the quarantine and improved their conversion rate by no less than 50%.

3. Embrace retail technology

Retail technology was already a major topic before the COVID-19 crisis. But now that all retailers are trying to bring the in-store experience online, being tech-savvy is simply the only way to succeed.

Companies who’ve run an eCommerce website for some time are generally more tech-savvy than their brick & mortar counterparts, and that’s probably the main competitive advantage they should exploit. Technologies like curbside pick up and contactless payment have already been rolled out across verticals. They’re necessary but not sufficient. The way to stand out from the crowd is by offering customers perfectly personalized customer journeys. You need to convince them that you have the best product for them, period. This is where the conversion goldmine is.

The pool just shrunk, and there are a lot more fish in it. Your job now is to leverage your advantages and implement the right tools to help you stand out. To help you in your mission, we’ve talked to eCommerce teams who are killing it right now and created an eCommerce strategy guide to help you navigate this new abnormal. Enjoy and feel free to share!