5 Ways Ecommerce Vendors Can Save Money

Like any other business, ecommerce vendors want to save money and boost sales. One of the best ways to do this is to cut nonessential costs for essential services. If done correctly, your business could see more money, just by changing a few daily operations.

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Not to mention that your store may actually see more shoppers as you reevaluate your outreach and offerings. Why stall on something so conducive to your business’ success?

Below are a handful of helpful tips to get your started.

Use a Free Platform Provider

If you want to keep cutter, try ridding yourself of pricey web hosting services in favor of an ecommerce platform provider. Shopify, for example, is one of the best free ecommerce website builders because it allows users to set up shop, manage inventory, accept credit card orders, organize products, analyze incoming web traffic and more, right from the get-go.

Employ an Email Marketing Campaign

Believe it or not, email marketing campaigns are still one of the most effective ways to reach online shoppers. In fact, for every $1 you invest in email marketing, you earn $45.25. Now that’s a robust return on investment you can count on!

Research shows that over 90 percent of consumers check their email account at least once a day; and since shoppers voluntarily join mailing lists, they will actually be interested in what your business has to offer (including upcoming sales, clearance items, product releases, news updates, blog posts and more).

Additionally, email marketing is useful in decreasing cart abandonment, which annually cost ecommerce sites thousands of dollars in sales.

Embrace Social Media

Despite what you may have heard, paid advertisements are extremely ineffective at pulling shoppers to your e-store. Not only do many people ignore online advertisements, many web users even employ ad-blockers, so they never even see your paid commercial.

Thankfully, there’s a better way. Social media marketing is a wonderfully cheap method of reaching new followers and transforming them into loyal shoppers. Creating a brand page on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat or YouTube is totally free and makes use the large populations of people already on these sites.

You can even take things to the next level with proactive video marketing. Have a common complaint about one of your products? Perhaps you can address it with a YouTube video troubleshooting the issue. This will result in greater customer satisfaction and curb the resources you put towards processing returns or customer service requests.

Make Use of Drop Shippers

Drop shipping is an interesting proposal for some ecommerce vendors because it moves goods from the manufacturer directly to the purchaser. In other words, when a shopper places an order on your website, it is sent to the manufacturer who then ships it out. No need for the site owner to do anything.

Of course, this has its downsides. The vendor has little to no contact with the product, making it harder to assess the efficacy of such a program. Addressing customer complaints can also be difficult since the product and shipping process will be completely out of your hands.

Another thing to keep in mind is that drop shipping won’t work for DIY ecommerce vendors since they create their own products. The takeaway here is to realize that drop shipping only works in certain cases.

Heed This Warning

While cutting operating costs is great, you should really avoid using cheaper materials for your products. Sure, it may help you save money in the short term but it could distance your loyal shoppers and frustrate new shoppers looking for quality merchandise.

In the end, it’s all about seeing your own business differently. What is serving and what isn’t? Can you make the change?