6 TIPS TO IMPROVE YOUR ECOMMERCE STORE FOR BLACK FRIDAY

• Spain’s one of the countries experiencing the most significant growth in ecommerce, with a turnover of 51.6 million euros in 2020.
• And estimates show that the number of Spanish citizens shopping online is expected to reach 36.9 million by 2025.
• With Black Friday just around the corner, Packlink has compiled a few golden rules in order to create and manage a successful ecommerce store

eCommerce 2020 Scenario

Madrid, 28 September 2021 - In Spain last year, the value of online purchases reached the amount of 51.6 million euros, a trend which looks to stabilize more in the next few years, in spite of the acceleration caused by the pandemic. In fact, by 2025 it’s expected that the number of users in the ecommerce sector will reach 36.9 million citizens by 2025 (Source: statista).

The lockdown period has favoured migration from traditional commerce to ecommerce platforms with a growth of 5.8% in total turnover of a sector which has, however, been shrunk in certain areas of activity such as tourism, which experienced a 57% decrease compared to 2019. However, basic consumer goods such as supermarket products or electrical appliances managed to double their results.

This transition to the online market has become a window of opportunity by creating an alternative in complicated times for consumption, at the same time as allowing Spanish companies to diversity their sales and distribution channels, adapting themselves with versatility to changes in the sector and increasingly connected consumers. A business ecosystem in Spain which, according to the latest statistics from the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism, already has 2,911,553 businesses, of which 99.8% are SMEs.

“When we insist on the idea that SMEs are the bulk of Spanish businesses, we’re not exaggerating. The great majority of the active population work in SMEs, in addition to the more than three million freelance workers registered in our country. That’s why Spain is one of the countries where ecommerce has grown the most, an excellent complement to traditional trade, allowing them to accompany their physical business and reach customers in any part of the world with complete ease,” states Noelia Lázaro, director of marketing at Packlink, a logistics solutions platform which supports more than 36,000 SMEs in Europe.

It’s precisely this complementarity which allows small business realities not only not to disappear, but on the contrary, for the online and offline channels to grow together. A “democratisation” of trade, which will therefore be the trend in the years to come.

6 tips to get the most out of your business on Black Friday

There’s less than two months to go until Black Friday, the important North American commercial milestone which has taken root across the globe, including in our country, and which has become the official starting signal of the Christmas campaign. A Christmas campaign which last year broke all the records for the number of shipments with almost 200% compared to the previous year according to Packlink data. For all these reasons, Packlink highlights 6 tips to transform your business into a successful ecommerce store:

1. Study your niche and understand your customers: What are you selling? Who are your most loyal customers? Start with local knowledge and turn it into a wider strategy. Define your “buyer personas”, the archetypes which group multiple clients into a single abstract figure by specific characteristics (demographics, behaviour, interests and similar values) so it will be easier to satisfy the market, even in the absence of a direct relationship. For example, a pharmacy ecommerce store may expand its offer and turnover by including supplements if its buyers are also passionate about sport.
2. Create your online website: You don’t need to be a web developer to create an ecommerce store, there are platforms which allow you to create websites in just a few steps, taking care of both aesthetics and usability. For example, Wix is based on the drag and drop system which means it will allow you to create a page simply by dragging the graphics onto it. Another CMS created specifically for ecommerce is PrestaShop. It features separation between content, graphics and programming, so each professional figure can take care of a different section.
3. Design your online catalogue: Once you’ve created a captivating and easy-to-use site, it’s time to think about the contents. The first step is to organise the products in the catalogue effectively, especially if there are different brands in your e-shop. There are two possibilities: organising by brand or by functionality. But how do I choose? Ask yourself: “Do my buyers know the brands I sell?” If so, choose to organise your products in a way that highlights the brand. For example, in the case of clothes, consumers are usually drivento buy because of brand strength. In contrast, in B2B the practical-functional aspect is of greater interest, which is why it’s better to organise them by function.
4. Optimise your ecommerce store’s SEO Working on the SEO strategy will allow you to optimise the Conversion Rate, even doubling the website traffic and sales, which is why identifying suitable key words is so important. They respond to information requests from our users, which is why it’s important to understand how our customers look for a specific product online. Google comes to our aid with its Keyword Planner, a free tool which was created to select the key words to be included in Google Adwords advertisements, but which is also useful for finding out useful monthly data related with specific keywords. Once the keywords have been identified, they should be inserted in the existing texts on our ecommerce store, writing product sheets favourable to the SEO, that is, which are able to respond to a specific need with the appropriate words. Don’t forget to optimise the URL: this has the function of allowing the search engine to find your page; enter your reference keyword here too!
5. Promote your e-store: according to the Multichannel Observatory, promoted by the School of Management at Milan Polytechnic and Nielson, around 75% of those who bought a product saw it for the first time on social media. That’s why it’s so important to build a social presence. First, it’s necessary to understand which channels are visited most by our audience and how to communicate with them properly. Once the channels and Tone of Voice to be used have been chosen, an editorial plan of consistent and interesting publications should be set up. For this, you can use a mixture of different contents, from informative, which communicate “who we are”, “what we do” and “how we do it”, to posts with the aim of engagement, oriented towards making community and more “educational” contents linked to the goal of conversion. Don’t forget that social networks, as well as being communication channels, are also sales channels: today customers can purchase directly from the publications they see through Facebook and Instagram Shops.
6. Choose an appropriate tool for customer deliveries: you’ll wonder which of the many steps an online retailer has to manage absolutely must be automated and therefore accelerated and simplified. The answer is: all of them. And there’s a way to do this, and it means knowing how to put shipments in the right hands and planning them through a single tool. For example, Packlink PRO integrates with your ecommerce store (created by Wix, PrestaShop or WooCommerce) automatically, so it’s easy to import and monitor received orders, and also ship with national or international services, saving up to 70%, all without contracts or monthly fees.

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