We are living in extraordinary times, with global online and eCommerce sales surging to an all-time high of $4.2 trillion, mainly triggered by the ongoing impacts of the pandemic.
This trend, however, is not unexpected given the rise of the online marketplace, artificial intelligence, and innovative technology have allowed brands to reach billions of consumers faster than ever before.
The silver lining is that as an eCommerce business owner, you can make your business more sustainable, in every sense of the word.
In business, sustainability can mean two things. It’s either adopting practices that reduce your company’s carbon footprint to achieve carbon neutrality. Or it’s about ensuring that your eCommerce model adapts itself to complex, volatile, and unpredictable economical and financial circumstances to minimize shocks and continues to evolve, grow, and generate revenue and add value.
In this article, we take a look at some of the top ways to achieve both forms of sustainability to make your eCommerce business a success.
Make Use Of The Right Software
Regardless of what eCommerce business you are in, getting the right software and having the technical know-how to run it is key.
For example, if you are in the fashion industry, you will benefit from business process management software, such as apparel ERP software, which will automate your entire process and help you with B2B eCommerce. This will allow your employees to focus on other integral tasks, improve efficiency by reducing errors, save operational costs such as traveling thousands of miles to meet manufacturers, and increase overall productivity.
Other beneficial solutions include inventory and product management software as well as supply management tools.
Optimize Your Website
As someone who is in the eCommerce business, your website is akin to your brick-and-mortar store. Basically, you need to ensure that you maximize your eCommerce conversion rate and keep monitoring it to ascertain where and how you can improve it if there is a decline.
Generally, website optimization is not just about the checkout page, but also about the landing page, category pages, product pages, search options, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, optimizing for add to cart, optimizing for checkout, and overall user-friendliness and appeal.
This also means exploring the reasons for and solving cart abandonment issues, having high-quality product images, optimizing site speed, optimizing for mobile, adding several payment options and allowing payments in multiple currencies, and having international shipping and returns.
Personalize, Enhance, And Improve Customer Experience
How you communicate with your customers through the end-to-end business cycle is key to building and expanding your business and ensuring its long-term growth and sustainability.
As your customers interact and engage with your eCommerce website, you can use artificial intelligence to enhance customer experience through personalized recommendations, real-time interactions, automated chat functionality, chatbots and live chats, and sentiment analysis for customer feedback analysis.
In addition to enhancing the user shopping experience, you also want to ensure post-sale support, customer services support by implementing a CRM system, order shipping support, and regular and consistent communication for repeat sales.
Furthermore, you may also want to enhance customer experience by enabling guest checkouts, sending reminder emails for abandoned carts, personalized marketing emails, loyalty programs, and discount codes, special offers, or even secret sales.
Adopt Sustainability Ethos
Living in a world undergoing rapid climate change, millions of consumers are growing increasingly conscious of their purchasing habits.
As an eCommerce business, it is vital you transition towards a sustainable model that actively works towards mitigating adverse environmental impacts. This is not only great for the planet but can be leveraged by your marketing team to showcase that you are proactive in your mission and vision to support climate neutrality.
Following is a list of some excellent ways to achieve sustainability in your eCommerce business.
- Frame a mission statement and a corporate conscience page for your website.
- Work alongside conservation and environmental organizations to understand the critical issues in your industry to implement the right practices in your procurement and supply chains.
- Implement sustainable shipping by using recyclable and sustainable materials or reducing the amount of packaging and reducing your business’s overall footprint.
- Create recycling and energy-saving policies for your business to reduce waste production and energy.
Last Thoughts
The eCommerce world has become highly competitive, and as a business that intends on surviving and thriving, it is time to make some changes to ensure sustainability in the long run. Having said that, always ensure that you stay true to your brand spirit, keep building valuable and significant customer relationships, and nurture your eCommerce business to set it up for long-term success.
