Tips and Tricks to Stack Up to Amazon

As much as you’d love your ecommerce business to be the next Amazon, even striving to measure up can be quite the undertaking. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t compete with this ecommerce giant, and there are a number of tips and tricks you can employ to help your online business stack up against Amazon. To help get you started, here are four things you can do to incorporate some of Amazon’s most successful tactics into your business, and one thing you should learn from them about how not to operate.

Be Like Amazon: Testimonials and Reviews

About 90 percent of consumers say that the opinions, reviews, and comments of other customers influence their own purchasing decisions, and about 75 percent of customers research reviews and comments before deciding to make a purchase. Amazon is great for having reviews on each page for every product, and you can replicate this successful approach by:

• Having your own review pages
• Conducting surveys
• Collecting testimonials from customers
• Incorporating reviews into your webpages, blogs, marketing materials, and other content

Be Like Amazon: Shipping

One of Amazon’s most successful tactics of all time has been their free shipping and fast delivery. And while you may not be able to offer free shipping and same-day delivery like Amazon does, you can create a solid shipping policy that won’t turn customers away. If you do want to have a free shipping option, you can use purchase thresholds, so that only orders over a certain amount are eligible. Make sure you have affordable shipping rates, reasonable delivery times, and shipping policies that are easy to locate.

Be Like Amazon: Make It Simple

Another vital element of a successful ecommerce store is having a simple checkout process, and this is another area where you can emulate Amazon’s effective strategy. In fact, the shorter and easier your checkout is, the less likely customers are to abandon their carts. How do you make checkout easier? There are a few ways you can approach it:

• Offer multiple payment options
• Don’t force customers to register
• Have a guest checkout option
• Allow payments with PayPal so customers don’t even have to provide their information

Be Like Amazon: Trust and Security

An integral part of any ecommerce endeavor is building trust with customers, because if your customers don’t trust you, then they won’t buy from you. Amazon has had plenty of time to build their reputation, but there are ways you can demonstrate to your customers that their personal information is safe with you, including offering payment methods from trusted brands like PayPal, having trust seals and badges from companies like Norton, and using security certificates.

 

Don’t Be Like Amazon: Customer Service

Amazon has always fallen short in the customer service department, and you can gain an edge by prioritizing a great customer experience. Two of the most important elements of good customer service are human interaction and personalized assistance because this will build relationships between your company and your customers, which will keep customers coming back time and time again. Other things to focus on include:

• Minimizing response times
• Excellent problem-solving capabilities
• Knowledgeable customer support staff
• Proactive customer service

Amazon has cornered the market on being a big box ecommerce retailer, and while it would be hard for any business to compete with them head to head, you can make your own business more successful by incorporating a few of their tried and true techniques into your own strategies.

Learning from Amazon’s successes and failings can help your business to increase conversions, lower your abandoned cart rate, increase your number of repeat customers, and overall help you stand out among the growing sea of ecommerce stores out there.