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Customer service dictates your customers’ entire experience with your brand. When you pair a memorable experience with a product that resonates with people, you've got the recipe for attracting repeat customers.

I’m Eli Weiss, the Senior Director of Customer Experience & Retention at Jones Road Beauty and a proud Gorgias Ambassador. After working in customer experience roles for almost a decade, I’ve learned the best ways to build strong customer relationships and teach teams to do the same.

This is the first article in Gorgias’s Intro to Ecommerce Customer Service series. We’ll go over the basics of ecommerce customer service, setting up a successful customer service program, the challenges, and the best tools for customer service teams.

What is ecommerce customer service? 

Ecommerce customer service combines the power of support agents with self-service resources to assist online shoppers throughout their experience with a brand. It includes everything from pre-sales and purchase questions to returns and exchanges.

The traditional view

The old-fashioned approach to ecommerce customer service is like a game of whack-a-mole ––– it’s reactive. The goal of customer service representatives under this traditional view is simply to resolve issues.

This may have worked back when call centers were the primary customer service channel, but today, brands and marketing are so entrenched in our lives that customers want authentic experiences with whoever they do business with. 

The cutting-edge view

Today, ecommerce customer service is about giving customers the full VIP treatment. Customers don’t only matter once they send in a complaint. The goal is to provide them everything they need from the get-go so they don’t ever have to complain.

What a successful ecommerce customer service program looks like

Picture a well-oiled assembly line of seamless interactions, happy customers, and glowing reviews. It's like having your own customer service dream team who know the best techniques to keep your customers satisfied. But to get to that point, you'll need some key ingredients. 

Below are the top six elements an ecommerce customer service program should have to succeed.

1. Builds customer loyalty

Customers rave about brands that not only align with their values, but give them zero friction throughout the buying journey. When you create thoughtful customer experiences at every point, it will be a no-brainer for customers to stick with your brand, instead of moving over to a competitor.

Here are the building blocks to gaining customer loyalty:

• Maximize pre-sales moments. What does customer experience look like when customers aren’t contacting you? Take this opportunity to reach out to customers with an email, text, or chat message to grab their interest.
• Elevate the voice of the customer. When you make changes, how will your customers feel? Are you updating your pricing or return policies? Represent your customers in all internal meetings and discussions because the decisions you make will affect them.
• Create honest, customer-centric policies. Update your customer service policies to answer all of a customer’s potential questions. Leaving anything out is likely to decrease brand loyalty and bring you a barrage of complaints.

2. Offers proactive support 

Make the first move and don’t wait for your customers to contact you. Taking a proactive approach involves not only initiative and common sense but research.

Here are a few ways you can deliver proactive customer service:

• Ask for customer feedback at every opportunity. Feedback is the basis of delivering effective support. Ask for feedback at every point of the customer journey, from on-site pop-up surveys to customer reviews.
• Track live statistics. Taking note of metrics like the total number of tickets being opened and resolved within a time period can help you identify trends or issues so that your services can be more efficient.
• Celebrate customer moments. It’s easier to keep customers than find new ones. Make sure to recognize your customers on their birthdays or anniversaries by giving them discounts or gifts.

3. Offers omnichannel support

Online businesses can make the most out of their digital presence by offering omnichannel customer service. This is a multi-channel approach to support and includes assistance given on email, live chat, chatbots, voice, and social media.

When you use a helpdesk that leverages omnichannel communication like Gorgias, you benefit from:

• More customer engagement. Offering multiple support channels allows you to reach customers of all demographics.
• A streamlined workflow for your agents. With all conversations in one place, agents don’t need to split their attention between multiple tabs.
• An easier time scaling. A helpdesk makes it easier for growing ecommerce platforms to take care of their customers in an organized fashion.

📚 Related reading: A guide to all the different types of customer service companies need to know

4. Delivers rapid response times

Customers just want answers. Meet their expectations by providing solutions as quickly as possible. Ultimately, this means getting your internal customer service operations right before the questions even roll in.

Here are some ways to hike up your first response times:

• Train your support team thoroughly. Training your agents on customer service skills, brand voice, and exposing them to potential customer questions will ensure they have the foundation to handle both familiar and new inquiries.
• Auto-assign your tickets with Rules. Automating ticket management makes sure your inbox is organized and easy for your agents to navigate. Rules allows you to sort your tickets when certain conditions are met.
• Use Macros and scripts. Simplify responses by using customer service scripts (called Macros on Gorgias), so your agents can stop doing repetitive, manual work and get straight to delivering good customer service.

5. Includes useful & easily accessible self-service

Customers shouldn’t always need to go to your support team for answers. Empower them to find their own answers with self-service options like a Help Center, knowledge base, or FAQ section. It’s a win-win: your customer support team dodges a pile of tickets and your customers have an answer in seconds.

Don’t forget that self-service options should be easy to access, too. Put them front and center, like on your website’s menu or as a fixed element at the bottom right corner of all webpages. Customers should be able to find what they need with just a few clicks.

6. Always measuring & improving

You'll want to dig into your customer service metrics, like response times, customer effort score, customer satisfaction scores, and feedback from your customers. Measure it, analyze it, and figure out where you can refine customer service even more.

Maybe your response times are extremely slow, and you need to start using automation. Maybe customers are complaining about a confusing checkout process. Whatever it is, your customers are your cheat sheet. Use the feedback to make improvements, and implement those changes. 

💡 Note: Contrary to what online customers think, customer service agents, and even leads, don’t know everything. Their goal is to continuously learn about how to improve the customer service experience with the help of customer feedback.

5 common challenges of ecommerce customer service 

Challenging customers and questions are part of the job. But if you’re struggling to handle what you feel should be an easy fix, you may not have the resources you need.

To mitigate those problems, I’ll show you the solutions to the five most common challenges in ecommerce customer service.

1. Too many customer inquiries

❌ Problem: Your inbox is full of customer questions and you don’t know where to start.

✅ Solution: Prioritize tickets by urgency based on each customer’s message and whether the customer is a new or returning customer.

On Gorgias, you can create a Rule to automatically tag tickets into their appropriate categories. For instance, tickets that contain complaints can be automatically identified and tagged as “high priority,” while “where is my order?” tickets are tagged as “low priority.”

The benefits of automating ticket management leads to better managing customer expectations, response times, and makes it easier for you to keep loyal customers.

2. Not enough agents to handle customers

❌ Problem: You have a small team of agents and too many customer inquiries to resolve in a timely manner.

✅ Solution: Automate your recurring tasks so your agents can handle more important interactions.

With Macros, app integrations, and Automate, routine tasks like organizing your tickets, sending scripted responses, and checking up on customers can take seconds. When agents don’t need to handle repetitive work, they can focus on delivering more thoughtful support.

📚 Related reading: 14 best customer service software for every kind of business

3. Too many support channels

❌ Problem: You have too many tabs open and customer conversations to track.

✅ Solution: Integrate all your communication channels under one platform.

An omnichannel strategy is the easiest fix, which Gorgias specializes in. By combining your email, social media, SMS, and phone support in one platform, your attention won’t be split across multiple tabs, allowing you to provide personalized customer service no matter which channel a customer chooses. 

4. No customer feedback loop

❌ Problem: You routinely send customer surveys but don’t know how to effectively apply the feedback.

✅ Solution: Determine the most important issues to resolve, create an actionable plan, and share your findings with the appropriate teams.

Collecting customer feedback is pointless if you don’t know what to do with it. The main purpose of feedback is to gain insights that can resolve issues or bring forth new questions.

Most CX teams have one of two problems:

1. Not collecting enough data and therefore not having the answers to customer questions
2. Collecting a lot of data but not synthesizing it effectively and sharing it with the right people

Bridge the gap between data collection and insights by sharing your learnings with the appropriate team members to inspire them to take action. In essence, it’s about translating critique into innovative support methods.

5. Tough customers

❌ Problem: A customer is wrong but insists they’re right, and you don’t know how to reply properly. 

✅ Solution: Acknowledge their frustration and provide them with the correct information by using positive language.

Surprise, surprise — customers are not always right but it’s important stay respectful even during tense conversations. You shouldn’t outright tell them they’re wrong, instead do the following:

1. Thank them for writing. Let them know your brand values all customer feedback to ensure your interaction starts off on a positive note.
2. Acknowledge their frustration and issue. Give them the peace of mind that the agent they’re talking to understands them and can lead them to a resolution.
3. Provide multiple solutions. Chances are, your customer has already browsed your website for answers, so be sure to offer alternate solutions and resources in addition to the most obvious ones.
4. Escalate the ticket to a customer service lead. If the customer is still not satisfied, direct them to a specific agent that could provide them with more information.
5. If necessary, make an exception. Some issues simply can’t follow your policy and may be better solved with a refund, discount, or novel solution. Allowing exceptions for returning customers can be the means of retaining them.

📚 Related reading: How to respond to angry customer emails

How to improve ecommerce customer service with a helpdesk

If you could invest in just one tool, make it an ecommerce helpdesk. Having a single hub to manage customer conversations and order management streamlines the customer experience.

I've tried almost every helpdesk out there, and Gorgias is by far the most intuitive helpdesk I've used. Gorgias goes beyond the basics of a customer service tool by giving you the ability to talk to customers across multiple support channels, manage tickets efficiently, and handle customer queries all within Gorgias's easy-to-use interface.

Try it out for yourself with their interactive tour:

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3 ways top-notch customer service can boost your bottom-line

Delivering exceptional customer service isn't just about addressing inquiries. It's a reimagining of your brand’s overall experience that directly impacts your financial success. When customer service is your priority, it leads to repeat purchases, a boost in your repeat customer rate, and the creation of customer ambassadors.

1. Drive repeat purchases

Your CX team has the 411 on what your loyal customers love about your product and what they'd like to change. 

This data is invaluable for your retention team when crafting engaging campaigns and creating educational content post-purchase to ensure they know how to use the products they ordered.

2. Create customer ambassadors

Customers are more likely to remember your brand if you initiate moments that cause happiness after they use your products. 

How exactly do you do it? You introduce a bit of surprise and delight to the online shopping journey instead of sticking to the script. You want to delight customers with memorable moments — without overdoing it to the point of being predictable.

When I worked at OLIPOP, one of my favorite moments was when a customer ordered 20 cases of OLIPOP for her wedding. However, our shipment was cutting it close to their wedding date. To compensate for the panic our newlyweds might’ve been feeling, we asked them for their wedding registry and got them a shiny new waffle iron.

3. Boost onsite conversions

When potential customers are given speedy support, it’s easier to turn window shoppers into brand new customers. A well-integrated customer service strategy can remove obstacles and can push browsing customers into making their purchase.

How Gorgias has helped top ecommerce brands grow revenue

Delivering great customer service might involve some experimenting. With the right tools, you can help your customers feel more connected to your brand overall. 

If you're in search of ecommerce customer service software, give Gorgias a try. Gorgias is designed specifically for ecommerce businesses and their customer support needs.

At OLIPOP, we were able to decrease our first response time by 88% in the first two months of using Gorgias — even when our ticket volume doubled. And our revenue? It grew over 1200%. 

If you want to learn about how we accomplished this, read the OLIPOP case study.

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Most ecommerce businesses understand that offering great products at a reasonable price isn’t enough. We know that customer experience is key to gaining long-term loyal customers, obtaining reviews and referrals, and growing in the long term. But too many brands believe that a great customer experience means surprising and delighting customers. 

Frankly, handwritten notes and freebies don’t make for a great customer experience or a winning strategy. That’s not why customers reach out to your brand, nor is it what drives customer retention. They reach out to support for quick, helpful, effortless experiences; this is what makes top-notch customer service so important. Then (and only then) should you put the cherry on top with surprising, delightful extras.

Why “surprise and delight” is not a viable customer service strategy

Top-notch customer support is like an ice cream sundae, and efforts to thrill customers are the sprinkles and cherries on top. Sprinkles and cherries are great, but they don’t make for a satisfying sundae on their own. 

Customers won’t be that amused if you make them wait on hold for 45 minutes and greet them with lighthearted jokes. Likewise, you’ll make a customer feel frustrated if you spend your budget on freebies but ignore implementing customer feedback about the product.

More than anything, customers who contact a brand's customer service team want their problems solved quickly and well. Fast, helpful, low-effort experiences are the base of your sundae, and any extra efforts to delight the customer are sure to fall flat if you can't do that. 

Customer service interactions tend to drive disloyalty, not loyalty

According to Emplifi, 49% of consumers have left a brand in the past year due to a poor customer experience. Also, according to The Effortless Experience, an influential customer service book by best-selling author Matthew Dixon, customer service interactions are 4x more likely to drive customer disloyalty than they are to drive customer loyalty.

If 20% of support interactions leave customers delighted and 80% leave customers frustrated, your greatest opportunity is to reduce frustration, not chase after hard-to-achieve delight. 

Ecommerce customer delight isn’t linked to loyalty (and it’s expensive)

The Effortless Experience also reveals that going “above and beyond” isn’t even what drives that 20% of loyalty-building interactions. While companies assume exceeding customer expectations generate superfans, customers are generally just as satisfied when companies simply meet their expectations.

And 80% of companies who use customer delight as a strategy say they spend heavily on providing this delight: More overhead from giveaways, VIP kickbacks, refunds, and policy exceptions. Given that these delightful experiences don’t correlate to customer loyalty, this is not money well spent.

Support’s biggest impact is to mitigate disloyalty by reducing customer effort

If we zoom into what drives customers away, the most common issue is a high degree of effort — not a lack of gifts or delightful conversations. Common reasons for high-effort experiences include:

• Multiple contacts to resolve an issue
• Repeating information
• Getting transferred between channels

The negative impact of these high-effort experiences is staggering. According to The Effortless Experience, a whopping 96% of customers who had high-effort experiences feel disloyal to those companies afterward.

To put it simply, most companies are trying to go “above and beyond” before they effectively provide the baseline of customer service, which is a helpful and low-effort experience. 

How to minimize customer effort: The better version of surprise and delight

The key to customer retention is reducing customer effort. 94% of customers intend to purchase after a low-effort experience compared to a slim 4% after high-effort experiences, making it an essential part of a best-in-class customer experience. Lowering customer effort involves designing an intuitive user experience, decreasing the number of steps required to complete tasks, improving reply and response times (along with other key customer support metrics), and using forward resolution in support. 

Here are five more quick wins to reduce customer effort in ecommerce:

1) Offer self-service functionality on your website

88% of customers expect your online store to offer some kind of self-service. Self-service resources could be as simple as a frequently-asked questions (FAQ) page or more interactive functionality to manage orders without having to reach out to customer support. 

For merchants using Gorgias, you can set up a Help Center that does both in just a few clicks. Customers can read articles about your brand and shipping policy, and check their delivery status (which they do an average of 4.6 times for every order) instantaneously.

Here’s a great example of self-service order management on Steve Madden’s Help Center:

Learn more about self-service order management with Gorgias.

2) List answers to pre-sales questions in a help center

Once you have an FAQ page or customer knowledge base, one type of question to proactively answer is pre-sales questions. These are questions potential customers have while mulling over a purchase in their heads before hitting “Place order” at checkout:

• Is it the right size for me?
• Is it compatible with products I already own?
• Can I return it if I’m dissatisfied?
• Will it arrive before the holidays?

If customers have to reach out and wait for an answer, they might just abandon the purchase and look for another online retailer that better addresses their questions. At least, that’s the case for the 63% of customers who attempt to solve issues via self-service support before reaching out.

So, don’t delay in making clear sizing guides, shipping policies, returns policies, and other self-service information that your customers need to confidently make a purchase.

3) Use forward resolution in customer support to avoid unnecessary follow-ups

Forward resolution is the practice of solving anticipated issues for customers before the customer even thinks to ask.

Let’s look at a real-world example: A customer inquires about shipping times to their local region. The support agent can see they have items in their cart that are on pre-order and, while answering the customer’s question about shipping time, also tells them that pre-order items are sent separately and that they can track delivery status through self-service. The agent has answered the initial question and forward-resolved two potential issues — reducing effort for the customer.

If you can, audit multi-touch tickets from the past few months to understand which questions tend to have natural follow-ups you can proactively answer. Then, add that follow-up information to your templates, or Macros if you use Gorgias, to improve your customer experience.

Here’s a Macro that not only answer’s a customer question about the location of an order, but lets them know when that order will be shipped:

Learn more about resolution time from Gorgias’s Director of Customer Support.

4) Know more, ask les‍s

One of the most damaging mistakes is making customers repeat themselves. Agents need that information to do their jobs well, but asking a customer to repeat their story at every juncture is a surefire way to damage a valuable customer relationship.

Instead, give customer service representatives all the customer context they need from the jump. Gorgias’s customer sidebar gives agents valuable context like purchase and communication history (from Shopify or BigCommerce), reviews information, cart data, social media engagement, and much more so customers don’t need to constantly retell their story.

Learn more about Gorgias's customer sidebar (and how it helps you better understand and serve your customers).

5) Make your support more convenient with automation and omnichannel

90% of customers say an “immediate” response is important, and 78% of customers prefer a variety of support channels to get in contact with customer support. 

To answer questions faster, consider using a customer support platform with automation features to help your team move faster and automatically respond to repetitive customer questions. Gorgias’ automated system can help you prioritize customer service requests, tag the appropriate agent, and close no-response tickets so you spend less time on admin work. And, with the help of pre-written Macros, automated Rules, and chatbot-like self-service flows, you can send instant, personalized responses to questions like, “Where is my order?”

Additionally, explore expanding to an omnichannel or multichannel ecommerce customer service strategy, which gives customers more touchpoints for your brand. Customers value the convenience of texting your brand, calling your brand, and hearing from you on social media. If you’re only available via email, you will likely lose customers due to high effort.

Read our guide to omnichannel customer service or check out our unified helpdesk to learn more.

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6 ways to delight ecommerce customers (once they have a low-effort experience)

Don’t get us wrong, customers usually enjoy an extra bit of pizazz or a freebie. And those sprinkles can even boost your brand’s conversion rate in the short term and boost customer loyalty in the long term — as long as they’re not associated with a high-effort experience. 

Take a look at the following customer delight strategies and consider adopting them only once you’ve developed a low-effort customer experience as a foundation.

 1) Offer free shipping (the new normal for customer satisfaction)

According to a 2021 survey, 66% of customers expect free shipping with every online purchase. This means that free shipping is often more of an expectation than a bonus — thanks, Amazon. Nevertheless, offering free shipping to your customers can still be a great way to encourage customer delight in many cases.

Customers love the word "free," even if the money that they are saving is only a few dollars. In fact, many stores can raise their product pricing slightly to make up for shipping costs and still see a boost in conversion rate from offering free shipping. 

If you can’t offer free shipping to every customer, setting qualifying amounts is a good way to delight customers with free shipping while also driving higher average order values.

Woxer is one ecommerce brand that offers free shipping on all domestic orders and some international orders. Plus — another best practice — Woxer makes this information easily accessible as a Quick Response in their live chat widget.

For more help on how to offer free shipping without losing too much money, check out our guide to offering free shipping.

2) Launch a customer referral program

Creating a customer referral portal or program offers dual benefits. For one, it helps your brand attract new customers by encouraging them to refer their friends, family, and colleagues through word-of-mouth advertising. Along with introducing your brand to new potential customers, referral programs can also be a great way to blow away your customers: Everyone loves the opportunity to earn discounts and rewards!

If your ecommerce company has a strong net promoter score (NPS), you’re positioned to launch a referral program, capitalize on that goodwill, and delight your customers. If you want to start a referral marketing program, check out tools like Extole which systematically reward customers who bring you business via word of mouth.

3) Post user-generated content on social media

Recognition is its own reward, and a shout-out on social media is something most customers enjoy. Highlighting customers who use your products, positive customer reviews, and other delightful interactions allow you to celebrate customers and add social proof to your social media profile. It also reduces the number of content marketing materials you need to produce on your own.

Marine Layer's Instagram is full of customer shout-outs and other user-generated content that your brand may be able to pull inspiration from:

4) Use loyalty programs to reward VIP customers

Like a referral program, a loyalty program rewards customers for repeat purchases and continued brand loyalty. If your customer experience is already smooth enough to bring in repeat customers, delighting those superfans with rewards is a strong strategy.

If you already use Gorgias, you can integrate loyalty platforms like LoyaltyLion to make the customer experience even more seamless. For example, esmi Skin Minerals uses Gorgias and its integration with Loyalty Lion to bring loyalty data into Gorgias and provide even more personalized, automated service to shoppers. Thanks to this powerful integration, esmi achieved a 58% boost in brand loyalty program enrollment and a 2X increase in average loyalty program member spend. 

Learn more about how esmi uses Gorgias and Loyalty Lion to improve loyalty program enrollment rates and double the lifetime value of its loyal customers. 

5) Celebrate customer milestones for loyal customers

Even if you don’t have an official loyalty program, you can celebrate your VIP customers at key milestones like birthdays or the anniversary of their first purchase. On top of sharing some warm and fuzzies (and maybe free product), one benefit of this kind of celebration is to potentially get a shoutout from customers on social media for your surprise. 

Check out our CX Growth Playbook to learn how to implement this tip with Zapier, plus read about 18 other tactics to drive growth through customer experience.

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6) Optimize proactive customer service across the customer journey

One way to delight customers is to move beyond purely reactive customer service, which requires customers to reach out to get help. With proactive customer service, a combination of directly reaching out to customers and creating self-service resources, you can help more potential customers, reduce cart abandonment, and improve your brand’s customer experience.

Proactive customer support could include self-service resources, like those described above. It also includes non-intrusive chat campaigns, which let you automatically reach out to customers who display certain behaviors to offer support. For example, you could reach out to customers who linger on a product page to ask if they have questions about the product or need a recommendation on sizing.

Here’s what Ohh Deer, an online retailer that sells delightful stationery, says about chat campaigns:

 “With chat campaigns, the goal is to remove any customer equivocation and get the customer to the product they really want.”
– Alex Turner, Customer Experience Manager at Ohh Deer 

Learn how Ohh Deer drives $12,500 each quarter through Gorgias chat.

Delight and retain your ecommerce customers with low-effort support 

The key to great customer service isn’t some sparkly delight. It’s efficient, convenient, and helpful support that customers can access in a variety of ways. 

With Gorgias, ecommerce brands can access the tools and integrations they need to automate time-consuming tasks, provide instant answers, and reduce the number of times customers have to write in and wait for your customer support team’s answer. Through our platform, your customer support team becomes more than just a team to answer customer questions — it becomes a revenue-generating machine.

Book a demo to see how Gorgias can help your ecommerce brand.

Your eCommerce business has proven to be successful and may have encountered growth limits. The natural next step is to expand, either by gaining more sales in your current market or moving into a new one. This can be done by creating new products, moving to a larger office, buying new technology, hiring additional staff—essentially taking all of the steps needed to set your store up for success.

However expanding an eCommerce business carries with it opportunities for both growth and failure, and it takes a lot of energy and resources to get it right. Passion and confidence are excellent, but they aren’t the only ingredients that go into growing an eCommerce business. 

For this venture to succeed, you need a great business plan. In this article, we go through every step of the process so that by the end you will completely understand how to write a great business plan for expanding your eCommerce store.

What is an eCommerce Business Plan?

Let’s start with the basics: Think of your business plan as fulfilling the role of a road map. Naturally, it can’t predict real-life variables flawlessly but it can establish a contingency plan for a wide range of situations. This will identify problems, how to overcome them and show lenders, potential partners or investors where your business is headed. 

Your business plan will also explain what the market opportunity is, growth projections, and other important milestones. Basically, this is the document where you state what you want to accomplish and how you will accomplish it. 

Why Should Your eCommerce Store Have a Business Plan?

The business world can be harsh and unforgiving. About 45% of businesses fail in the first five years and only 25% of them are still operating after ten years. If you are going to expand your eCommerce business so that it is thriving in new markets and selling out new product lines, you need to utilize every beneficial tool and resource. 

A good business plan sets you up for this type of success right from the beginning. Creating one isn’t the only factor that contributes to success, but data shows startups with a business plan grow 30% faster, are twice as likely to secure funding and succeed 16% more often.

How to Write an eCommerce Business Expansion Plan 

Even though an eCommerce business plan is a complex document, writing one doesn’t have to be an intimidating process. 

Below, we list out every factor that should be taken into account as you work to draft a successful business plan for expanding your business.

Executive Summary

The executive summary is the last part you will write, but the first section that anyone reading your business plan will see. As the preface, it is basically a one-page synopsis that summarizes almost every important detail. It should grab your reader’s attention and convince them it’s worth their time to read the entire document. 

Below is the basic information that you should include in your executive summary:

What Kind of Products Do You Sell?

Describe all your of your products, new and old, explaining their key benefits and features. They need to address a need that customers have or opportunities in the market. You should also show how they differ from competitor’s products and highlight why potential customers will choose your product over the other options on the market.

Your Monetization Strategy

A monetization strategy is a detailed plan about how to generate revenue for your products. In this section, describe three or four of the main strategies you intend to implement to market your products to your target audience. 

Your Audience and the Market

Define your specific target market by including information like market size data, growth rate, customer segmentation, and market structure. You should also explain the characteristics of the ideal people to whom you intend to sell your eCommerce products.

Company Overview

A company overview will include vital details about your eCommerce business. It will describe the size of your company, how many more staff you plan on hiring, what you want to achieve and where it is located. It is typically the second section and appears after the executive summary. 

You should include the following elements when writing the company overview section of your business plan: 

Your Team 

List out your key players in the team section of your business plan. This might include everyone from the C-level executives to the HR representatives and the new positions you plan to hire for. Make sure you paint a picture of your team that showcases their professionalism and finest skills. 

Company Structure

In the company structure section, you should provide information about how your company is organized. The most common business structures are sole proprietorship, LLC, S Corporation, or partnership. If required, it will also discuss how your business structure will change. 

Mission Statement

The mission statement serves as an existential justification for why your business has been created. In a few sentences, you explain why you exist, and what you strive to accomplish. In addition to serving as a brief explanation of your business to readers, the mission statement can also serve as an internal reminder of your company’s values—one that could potentially shape decisions in the future. 

Market Analysis

This section should demonstrate both your expertise and provide a thorough analysis of your current market. If you plan on tapping into a new market, it should also be analyzed. 

When you craft this part of your business plan, you should have a significant understanding of who operates in the space you have taken an interest or are currently in—both in terms of competition and consumers. This includes potential customer segments, the value and volume of the market, who your competitors are and what their challenges and successes have been.

Let’s look at these in more detail:

Target Market

It’s essential that you understand who your target market is, and never assume that everyone will want to buy your products. In this section, you will provide readers with your current and and new target buyers’ demographic data so that they understand who customers are or will be. You can use this research to create a customer profile, using information such as their education, income level, gender, lifestyle preferences and age. 

Market Size

The market size refers to how many people are shopping and purchasing products from your niche. This will also depend on the scale of your expansion. For instance, if you plan on selling clothing all around the world instead of only national, you should take an international approach to assessing the size of the market. The industry market size is often a huge factor for investors that will read your business plan. You should also note if the market is declining or growing.

Competitive Analysis

You want to know who is thriving in your niche, and why. For this part of your business plan, dissect your competitors, including as much information as you can gather about them. This could be everything from their weaknesses to their web traffic, to their product and pricing strategy. 

The more you know about your competition, the better you will be able to position yourself to stand out. 

Marketing Plan

This segment of your business expansion plan is where you share your comprehensive marketing plan. Identify how you plan to promote your new products, attract leads, and retain customers. Your marketing strategy will determine whether your expansion will have massive amounts of growth or you have none at all. 

Customer Loyalty Program

To retain customers that purchase new products at your eCommerce store, consider rewarding them through a loyalty program. Planning and outlining this from the offset will help increase your chances of accumulating a new and invaluable, solid customer base. There are different loyalty programs for you to choose from, such as point based, tier based, paid based and progress based.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy that requires sustained planning and well-organized content production. Targeting keywords, producing content, building links—all for organic visibility so that your new products on your eCommerce store will appear at the top of search engines to obtain as much traffic as possible.

Print

Print marketing may seem like a thing of the past but it can still be effective, especially when combined with digital. Direct mail marketing can drive traffic online and aid online sales when voucher codes are delivered to potential customer’s homes, for example.

Social Media

Social media is a very important element of any marketing strategy and should be accounted for in your business expansion plan. It may refer to what type of social media platforms you will use, what will you share, and when you will share it. This section should also include what metrics you are going to track, such as engagement, click-through, and conversion rates. 

Email

You should plan on expanding and segmenting your email list right from the moment you list your new products so that you have a cost-effective way to communicate and promote them. This will provide your business with a dependable base of consumers that you can offer compelling deals to time and time again. 

Products

In this part of your business plan, it is time to get much more precise about your current and new products, including what you have, what you expect to have, and how you plan on handling that inventory. 

Description of Products

Product descriptions allow you to explain your inventory to a buyer succinctly so they understand what they are getting - think benefits, not features. Product descriptions also serve as an opportunity for SEO and simply for differentiating your inventory from that of the competition. 

Anticipated Future Products

Write down what you expect to add in the weeks, months and years to come, beyond your current expansion. This will be extremely useful information to investors when evaluating your business plan.

Operations

In this section, you will account for what is involved in your day to day operations of running your eCommerce store. It is important to demonstrate that you understand the process it takes to also buy, manufacture and deliver additional new products. This can cover a lot of ground, depending on your business model.

Production

Is your company building its own products? If so, create a step-by-step outline on how they will be manufactured. If not, state whether you will be using a dropshipping or third party manufacturing company instead. It’s also important to acknowledge any problems that may occur. Production is a very important component of success, so be very detailed. 

Inventory

Here, you include how much inventory you have at any given time. It’s also important to plan for how you will store, handle, and track new product lines. 

Shipping

A lot of considerations factor into this very important element of your eCommerce business. Will you sell your new products to international customers? If so, how long will it take to package your products and ship them? Will a third party shipment company be necessary, or will you be able to handle the entire process from your own physical location? These questions need to be answered.

Equipment

Undoubtedly, equipment will be required for your business to operate. In this part of the business plan, you can list out what you have on hand, what you will need before you launch your new products, and what you might need as your business grows even more. You should also include the costs of your equipment.

In order to be as detailed as possible, list all types of software, hardware and machinery. This can include forklifts, computers, and other types of marketing automation that are critical to the success of certain departments within your company. 

Financial Plan 

The purpose of writing a business expansion plan is to prove that your eCommerce store is and will continue to be successful. You will have the opportunity to demonstrate this by translating all the components of your business into numbers. You will then need to elaborate on these numbers in a way that makes the expansion of your store sound like a profitable venture to investors. This section is often the least favorite part of the business plan to write, but it’s inclusion is essential. 

Income Statement

An income statement refers to your revenue streams, expenses, and profits over a certain period of time. It will show whether or not your business is profitable. If you are still in the planning stages of the expansion for your eCommerce store and the products have not yet been launched, you can model your income statement from the experiences of a similar business that is operating and selling the same products within your industry. 

Determine the Break-Even Point

Here, the term break-even point refers to how much of your products you will need to sell before you can cover the costs of all your expenses. This also helps make your case for a business loan as it shows the sales level your store requires to ensure it won’t incur a financial loss. 

Cash-Flow Statement

Cash-flow statements refer to the cash that comes in and goes out, typically per-month. When your company has more cash coming in then it does going out, this is referred to as “positive cash-flow” or, in other words, profit. On the other hand, if your expenses are higher than your revenue, this is called “negative cash-flow”. 

Forecasting cash-flow is very important, even if it is an imprecise practice. It allows you to prepare for a variety of different circumstances, such as a quiet season, and demonstrate how you will adapt your eCommerce business strategy accordingly. 

Wrapping Up

The business plan you will write exists not just for attracting investors, but for helping you to overcome common obstacles eCommerce businesses often face while expanding. By planning ahead, you increase your chances of success and help to ensure that your business will enjoy a continued fruitful future.

By taking into account everything we have discussed in this post, you have the resources and tools needed to write a comprehensive business expansion plan. 

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With a decade of experience in customer service roles, I’ve recognized that ecommerce customer service goes beyond answering questions. 

The best experience you can give customers is proactively providing them with what they need so they don't have to contact support at all. In instances where customers do need to talk to someone on the team, interactions that surprise and delight help keep them coming back. 

Ecommerce customer service may feel less personal than it would in person, but there are a multitude of ways you can make it special.

Whether you’re building an online store from scratch or need extra hands to handle your growing customer base, I’ve rounded up the top 15 best practices for ecommerce customer service that you can start using to improve your support team.

The top 15 ecommerce customer service best practices to implement

1. Use a customer service helpdesk specifically built for ecommerce stores

‎If I could only recommend one tool, it would be a helpdesk. A helpdesk is a customer service software that allows support agents and teams to manage customer data, inquiries, and orders in one platform.

If you run an online store, Gorgias is the perfect helpdesk specifically designed for ecommerce tasks. It smoothly combines order management, order fulfillment, and customer service in one tool, so that you can speak to customers and resolve their issues while being able to pull up their order data in one window. 

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2. Combine all your support channels on one platform

‎When customers can receive help the way they want — whether that’s a phone call or Facebook messages — they feel more comfortable initiating a relationship with your brand. Establishing a positive first impression can be the fuel you need to turn them into returning customers.

💡 Tip: Phone support can be the key to keeping customers. Throughout the years, I’ve seen first-hand how a simple 10-minute phone call can turn a sour interaction around. Most customers may prefer written communication, but being able to hash out an issue over a voice call can be the difference between losing a customer and keeping them.

The top support channels you should offer: 

• Email: Provides customers a channel to voice in-depth and detailed inquiries.
• Chat: Useful for quick questions that can be answered within one interaction.
• Social media: The best channel for new customers who want quick answers.
• Voice/phone: A valuable channel to explain and resolve complicated issues. 

3. Automate responses with reusable Macros 

‎To cut down first response times, use Macros or customer service scripts. On Gorgias, Macros are pre-written responses that can be applied to the most common customer interactions.

The best way to use Macros is by applying them to what I refer to as empty-calorie tickets. Empty-calorie tickets are repetitive inquiries that people ask over and over again, such as “Where is my order?” Automating the responses to these low-effort tickets is the easiest way to incorporate Macros into your workflow. 

When to use Macros:

• Welcome emails
• Order status emails (transaction completed, order shipped, order delivered)
• Refund processed emails
• Customer loyalty emails

4. Trigger shopping cart abandonment notifications

Customers who abandon their carts are inevitable, but you don’t have to leave it there. Sending an email to a customer who still has items in their shopping cart can be the final push to trigger a purchase. You can even pair the notification with a discount to make the purchase more appealing.

Acquiring new customers is expensive, so it’s extremely important to recapture customer attention when you have the chance. 

5. Respond to social media comments quickly

Pay attention to your social media presence because 26% of people learn about a product through social media, according to a 2023 study by Statista. Public social media comments have the power to either bring in new customers or completely turn them off from your brand. For this reason, it’s important to actively engage with social media users who mention your brand. 

Having an active social media presence is an easy way to show you care about what your customers have to say. When you address comments publicly, prospective customers will trust you more for your ability to be transparent and authentic.

📚 Related reading: 5 tips to leverage social media for your store

6. Send order status and shipment update emails

Customers like to know when an action they’ve taken was successful. When it comes to ecommerce, you can easily check this best practice off your list by making it a routine to send order status emails, like when an order has been shipped.

On Gorgias, we take the manual work out of sending routine emails with Macros. If you’re a Shopify store, Gorgias automatically populates your emails with important customer information pulled from Shopify such as customer name, order number, tracking number, and more.

7. Offer self-service options

88% of customers like to find answers on their own and expect a brand to have a self-service portal, according to Statista. You can help make the search easier by filling your website with self-service options. 

Self-service options are resources for customers to get the answers they need without contacting an agent. These include FAQ pages, help centers, chat widgets, and interactive quizzes.

Here’s how each self-service option can benefit you:

• FAQ page: Centralizes customers’ most commonly asked questions on one page to prevent your inbox from being filled with the same questions.
• Help Center: Larger in scope than an FAQ page, a Help Center is a database of detailed resources like articles and how-to videos to help customers learn more about your brand and product.
• Chat widget: Chat widgets can turn into a self-service option with the implementation of Quick Response Flows, or preset conversations that can answer customers without a live agent.
• Interactive quiz: A fun self-service addition to online stores that carry highly specialized products, like skincare, health supplements, and apparel.

📚 Related reading: A guide to building an FAQ page

8. Collect email addresses

Data collection makes up a large chunk of customer service, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. The easiest way to gather customer data is by collecting email addresses via newsletter signups and contact forms on your online store.

Customer service is important and shouldn't stop when your agents are off the clock. On Gorgias, you can add a contact form to your chat widget when your store is offline, so you have the opportunity to turn first-time customers into loyal followers.

‎Benefits of collecting customer emails: 

• Allows you to entice new customers with promotional offers and discount codes
• Boosts customer data with requests for feedback
• Personalizes customer interactions

9. Optimize your website for mobile

Three-quarters of Americans are shopping with their smartphone. It’s time to shift your focus. To take advantage of this customer behavior, match a convenient tool like the smartphone with an equally convenient and optimized website.

A website optimized for mobile includes:

• A responsive layout that adapts to all device sizes
• An easy-to-use menu
• Limited popups and distractions
• Legible fonts and text sizes

10. Create a customer returns and exchanges portal

If your store accepts returns and exchanges, it’s a good idea to automate the process with a portal. Returning an item is essentially just one step: getting an item out of a customer’s hands. It shouldn’t require a live agent. So, when your customers can return an item on their own, it becomes a huge time-saver for both them and your agents.

For example, when I worked at Stitch Fix, every time a customer needed an exchange, they'd have to reach out to support. It was a huge friction point. Eventually, we decided to build an exchange tool that became part of our checkout flow. From then on, our customers didn’t even need to think about contacting support because it was just an automatic part of the process.

💡 Tip: The easiest way to make a returns portal is by connecting Loop Returns with Gorgias. Loop Returns simplifies the return and exchange process by routing customers to a link, not an agent. By automating this part of the customer journey, your support team can deal with more urgent tickets.

11. Feature customer reviews to amplify your brand

Showcasing personal experiences can be the magic ingredient that adds credibility to your product. When potential customers read about real-life encounters with your product, they gain trust in your brand. Customer reviews can even nudge hesitant buyers toward making a purchase.

For example, PuffCuff does an amazing job at making their product shine. Not only do they feature reviews, but they also include a customer review video. Being able to add a visual element that shows how conveniently your product solves a problem can convince customers who are on the fence.

Where to feature customer reviews:

• Homepage
• Product pages
• Social media posts
• Welcome emails

12. Create a loyalty or rewards program

Attracting new customers requires extra marketing that you may not have the budget for. Here’s a different approach: increase the value you get from your current customers with a loyalty program.

With a loyalty program, customers who already love your brand are incentivized to buy more while earning exclusive perks. An easy way to set up a program is by integrating LoyaltyLion with Gorgias. You instantly get customer retention features like shopping cart rewards, in-site notifications, and loyalty emails. 

13. Use high-quality product photos

Without a physical storefront, your product photos will be doing all the talking. Customers want to get as close to the product as they possibly can to make an informed purchase. In short, gaining customer trust depends on the appearance of your products.

Here’s how to build trust through product photos:

• Standardize product photos across your website. Using the same high-quality camera, lighting, and background will show customers your brand pays attention to details, allowing them to trust your products more.
• Display multiple angles of your product. Allow customers to envision how your product will fit into their lives with accurate photos.
• Implement zoomable photos. Letting customers zoom in on your products can show them the exact qualities of your product, such as color, texture, and build quality.

📚 Learn more: Improve your product photography with these 3 tips

14. Improve your checkout experience 

When customers get to checkout, they’re inches away from the finish line. Don't risk hampering their journey by subjecting them to a bad checkout experience. In fact, a staggering 17% of US online shoppers abandoned their orders in 2022 because of a "too long/complicated checkout process," according to Baymard. 

Here's how to improve the checkout experience:

• Offer guest checkout. Customers want fast service and that means letting them skip the tedious account creation process.
• Present all extra fees and costs. Surprise fees can turn customers off from buying a product. Be transparent by including any extra fees at the checkout page to avoid losing their trust.
• Accept a variety of payment options, including Buy Now, Pay Later. A brand that caters to all wallet sizes is likely to bring in more customers.
• Include a checkout progress bar. Visually guiding your customer through the buying journey allows them to feel at ease with manageable steps and provides them with a sense of achievement once they reach the end.

15. Track trends by using customer service metrics

‎You’ve got pages of customer emails, buying behavior data, and feedback — now what? The next step is to use this data to track customer buying trends and your support team’s performance. With Gorgias, you can track how well your customer service operates with Support Performance Statistics. 

Track these support performance metrics to improve your processes:

• First response times: The faster you answer tickets, the more satisfied customers will be.
• Average resolution times: How effectively is your team resolving tickets? You can track this number to pinpoint gaps and inefficient steps in your process.
• Average number of tickets: A high number of tickets may indicate that you need more self-service options.

💡 Tip: Great customer service should have clear KPIs that are aligned with company goals such as customer retention and revenue generation that clearly demonstrate how your customer service creates value for the company and enable you to evaluate the effectiveness of your support program.

The bottom line: Delight your customers at every stage  

Making every customer interaction delightful goes a long way. Customers are more motivated to keep interacting with your brand and can even inspire new customers to join in. When you show customers that you care, you give way to loyalty. 

At Gorgias, we quickly get support teams the customer trust they need with an all-in-one helpdesk. Our helpdesk streamlines the customer experience with omnichannel communication, ecommerce platform integration to Shopify and BigCommerce, Revenue Statistics, and automation in one convenient platform. 

Ready to put these best practices into practice? Book a demo now.

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If you get ample traffic to your online store but don’t convert that traffic into sales, you will never reach your revenue goals. And for many online stores — even stores with a great product and brand — low ecommerce conversion rates eventually lead to store closures.

To optimize your ecommerce conversion rate, you need to know how to guide potential customers through your conversion funnel. Conversion rate isn’t something you “do,” per se. Consistently converting shoppers requires a marathon of research, experiments, and tweaks.  

Fortunately, there are some low-lift tactics that might make a huge impact on your website’s conversion rate. 

What is ecommerce conversion rate? 

Ecommerce conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your online store who make a purchase in a specified time period. 

In the digital world, a conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who perform a particular desired action (such as signing up for a newsletter) on your website or page within a specified time period.

For example, let’s say you wanted to measure your rate for the month of November. If you had 13,021 unique website visitors, 201 of whom made a purchase from your store, you would divide the number of visitors who made a sale (201) by the total number of visitors (13,021). The ecommerce conversion rate for these numbers would be 1.5%. 

Now, let’s learn more about the rates your ecommerce business should aim for. 

How to calculate your conversion rate (CRO)

Your website’s real conversion rate can be calculated as follows:

Take the number of visitors who converted to customers, divide it by the overall number of store visitors you had during a certain period, and finally, multiply that number by 100. This will give you your conversion rate at that particular point in the funnel.

‎No matter what rate you aim for, you’d probably agree that there’s always room for improvement. No website is ever perfect, and what’s more, customer behavior changes over time. CRO is an ongoing process of learning and improving. 

What is the average ecommerce conversion rate? 

Ecommerce conversion rate benchmarks are important to understand how you stack up against other online retailers — and more specifically, your competitors. 

Bottom line: the latest data, which comes from Kibo Commerce in Q1 of 2022, shows that ecommerce conversion rates in the US average out at 2.3%. The report goes into considerable detail about variances in conversion rate: for example, conversion rates vary between mobile (2%), tablet (3%), and desktop (3%). 

Take that number with a grain of salt. A “good” ecommerce conversion rate depends on your business’s maturity, product category, audience, digital marketing maturity, and so much more.

What’s a really good ecommerce conversion rate?

Most ecommerce experts say that a rate of 1-3% is normal, whereas 4% is fantastic. But, we have another take on the matter. At Gorgias, we’ve learned that the best definition of a good conversion rate comes from your internal data and individual business goals. Focus more on increasing the number of conversions in your store month-over-month than how that number compares to anyone else.

As a rule, your conversion rate optimization (CRO) plan should involve ways to continually improve your own rates, rather than just comparing yourself to everyone around you. There will always be a new tool, strategy, or update that your competitors will use to top you. You can’t afford to become complacent. 

So, even if your rate is above the industry average, continually learn about new ways to increase conversions and continue to optimize the user experience and website functionality for your shoppers. And, if it’s on the lower end of the scale, start implementing the following advice right away. 

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How to improve your conversion rates with marketing assets

Here we are. Now we’ll see what you need to do to ensure visitors buy something from you, instead of usual virtual window shopping. You’ll be glad to hear that you don’t need to do a complete rehaul of your website. You just need to make use of the tools and assets available to you.

1. Offer limited coupon codes

Not only do your customers want discounts (who’d object to that, really?) they fully expect them. Just five years ago, more than 560 million people around the globe used discount coupons. Since then, the number has grown to over 1 billion. 

What types of coupons can you offer? There are plenty of coupon types in ecommerce:

• Free shipping coupons, which lessen the overall costs
• Fixed-amount coupons, which only last for a certain amount of time
• Total cart value coupons, which can help you improve the average cart size

For conversions, the best ones are time-limited coupons. Offering time-limited coupons might be the perfect way to engage your customers and improve conversions. By giving them a deadline, you’ll be able to persuade them to finish the purchase process instead of abandoning a full cart. 

2. Use effective pop-ups on your site

Admittedly, pop-up ads sound a bit dated. They’ve been around for more than a quarter of a century at this point. The phrase conjures up images of pop-up-filled screens for more seasoned users. But you’d be wrong thinking like that.

When used right, pop-ups can be effective in 2020. According to Sumo, certain pop-ups can improve your conversions by more than 9%. That’s something worth investing in. 

Here’s how you can use pop-ups:

• Make your customers an offer they can’t refuse
• Create a 30-sec delay timer not to annoy people
• Make the “X” button clearly visible to the user

Also, you should try not to annoy your visitors too much. So make sure that your popups appear once per customer. Also, make the “close” button visible on both desktop and mobile screens. Nothing frustrates a person more than a pop-up that won’t go away. 

Finally, you get one pop up. Maybe it’s a contest, maybe it’s Facebook Messenger, maybe it’s push notifications, either way, you only get one.

3. Create detailed product descriptions

Product images are a big selling point for many consumers. However, product descriptions also play a large role in the purchase process. They give the shopper important information about the product itself and contain keywords that improve your Search Engine Optimization efforts and serve as proactive customer support.

That’s why you can’t afford to have lazily-written product descriptions. Sloppy writing and spelling mistakes will turn a lot of people away. Furthermore, if you’re selling products manufactured by a third party, never use their descriptions. Try to be unique and descriptive as possible at all costs.

Looking for inspiration? Use Gorgias to create a macro asking your customers how they use your products.

4. Add reviews and testimonials  

Nobody wants to be a guinea pig. If there’s a product with 3 reviews or a product with 375 reviews which one are you going to choose? Probably not the one with 3 reviews, and you don’t even know the price. 

That’s where product reviews and testimonials can help you. You simply need to gather feedback from previous customers, compile it, and put it in a prominent spot on the website. 

Product reviews not only create more social proof, but they also help bust specific objections and sell to different ICPs. If you’re buying a BBQ are you looking for hamburgers and hot dogs, or competition brisket? The same product will be reviewed differently.

Tactically placed testimonials and reviews on product pages can improve your sales immensely. Just ask Angie Schottmuller of Conversion XL. According to her, testimonials can make conversions go up by 400% in some cases. 

With purchases going up, so are the review requests. When better to ask a customer for a review than after a great interaction with your support team?

5. Remove unnecessary form fields 

Let’s talk about cart abandonment. You may know that 9 out of 10 people abandoned their shopping carts before completing their purchase. You have to do everything in your power to prevent this from happening.

One thing that drives many shoppers away is the number of fields in delivery forms. 

Your sales team doesn’t need to know every single detail about your customer’s life before processing purchases and sending products out. Keep the form fields to a minimum and ask the customer only for essential information that concerns payment and shipment.

Don’t sell to businesses? Remove the business name. Don’t need a phone number for delivery? Remove it. You get the idea.

6. Consider offering free shipping

No one likes to be attracted by a seemingly low-priced item, only to discover that the shipping costs are astronomical. Consumers hate hidden costs. They make them feel bamboozled and as an online merchant, that’s the last thing you want. 

More often than not, people abandon their shopping carts due to hidden costs. According to research, 28% of consumers do so because of hidden shipping costs specifically. 

For all of the reasons mentioned above, you should consider having free shipping. It could potentially double your revenue in a short amount of time. Just look at the NuFace case study. By introducing free shipping, the organization managed to increase orders by 90%. 

Between Amazon, Wayfair, and all the other big players, customers expect free shipping. It can also be a great upsell mechanism if you have a low average order value.

7. Add a live chat option to your pages

Live chat is great for customer support, but it doesn't end there. Most online store visitors want to buy something but many of them are on the fence. Since there’s nothing on a web page to persuade them to finalize the purchase, they often leave the store without buying anything. 

That’s where your sales agents can help. By placing a live chat option on every single page, you can encourage the shoppers to finish what they started. Research shows that people who use live chat are 3X more likely to complete their purchase before leaving a website. 

Learn more about how Gorgias' live chat can improve support and boost sales.

8. Increase urgency with a countdown timer

When time’s running out, most people become anxious. They start making decisions without overthinking them. Overthinking is your enemy. One of the most dangerous ones you have. If you limit the thinking time for your visitors, you might remove overthinking. 

How can you do this? By adding a countdown timer to your pages. 

This simple addition to your site will give the visitors a sense of urgency and motivate them to purchase before it’s too late. One brand even managed to increase sales by more than 330% with a limited-offer timer.

This doesn’t mean lying to your customers. Here are some easy ways to naturally create urgency:

• Countdown to a holiday, e.g. only 4 days left to order to guarantee your order arrives before Festivus
• Order by 3 PM to get same-day shipping
• This item will be held in your cart for 5:00
• Remaining inventory counts

You can also create social proof using count ups.

• Backed by 383 investors on Kickstarter
• Shipped to 83 countries
• Over 10,000 shipped and 983 positive reviews

Learn more about ecommerce growth and conversion optimization

At this point, we hope you understand the importance of conversion rate optimization and a few strategies to improve it. However, it’s always helpful to learn directly from ecommerce leaders about their individual experiences with CRO.

Want to learn more about how real stores improved their conversion rates by focusing on their customer experience? Check out our customer story on Lillie’s Q. They increased their conversion rate by 75% by working with Gorgias to implement real-time customer support and reduce cart abandonment. 

Alternatively, watch the replay of our ecommerce expert talk. They discuss their tips to drive growth and boost conversion rates through great customer experience.

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According to Constant Contact, email marketing offers an average ROI of $36 for every $1 spent, making it by far the most cost-effective digital marketing strategy that businesses have at their disposal. If you’re running an ecommerce store, email marketing can be an incredibly effective way to excite potential customers and re-engage current customers.

That said, sending out individual emails to everyone on your subscriber list is simply too time-consuming to be feasible. Instead, you can leverage automated email campaigns to deliver the right messages at the right time without the manual work. 

We’ll help you get started creating an effective email marketing strategy driven by the power of marketing automation. We'll take a look at everything you need to know about email automation for ecommerce stores, including eight examples of email automation series built to attract and retain more new customers. 

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What is email automation and how does it work?

Email automation is the process of building emails and setting them to automatically send to your email list based on the criteria you choose. It’s used for both transactional and promotional emails, as part of a broader email marketing strategy.

Automated emails can be sent at specific times and triggered by specific criteria. Triggers might include a recipient’s newsletter subscription, purchase history, clicks on links, time since their last purchase, and more. For transactional emails, a typical automation example is sending a user a shipping update or password reset email. 

While email automation is relatively straightforward to set up for businesses of all sizes — which is a big part of why email marketing can offer such a high ROI — there are a couple of things you’ll need to put in place before you can begin sending automated messages. 

First, you’ll need to use an email automation tool that will allow you to deliver one-off messages and multi-message campaigns to your subscribers. We’ll cover some of these below. Second, you’ll need to create email templates for your automated campaigns targeted to specific audience segments. 

With the right automation platform and high-quality message content, email automation is something that any ecommerce business can leverage for outstanding results. It can help boost your store's conversion rate, reduce cart abandonment rate, improve your customer experience, and beyond.

8 Email automation flows to get you started

To help you get up and running, we’ll walk through eight of the most important email automation series for reaching your revenue, customer satisfaction, and retention goals. As you build emails for each of these flows, make sure to read up on email marketing best practices for tips and inspiration.

1) Nudge shoppers with automated abandoned cart emails

Given that nearly 7 out of every 10 ecommerce carts are abandoned, salvaging even a small percentage of your store's abandoned carts can yield substantial returns. Turning those exits into sales could be as easy as setting up automated cart abandonment emails. According to Mailchimp, cart abandonment emails yield 34 times more orders per recipient than through standard marketing emails alone. 

Many times, simply reminding customers that they still have products in their shopping cart is all that it takes to convince them to complete their purchase. Many ecommerce stores also choose to offer discounts to encourage conversions.

Goals for abandoned cart emails

The main goal of abandoned cart emails is to reduce your cart abandonment rate, a metric that should be easy to track via the analytics features of the ecommerce platform you use. Conversion rate and click-through rate can also be used to gauge whether your abandoned cart emails are as compelling as they should be. 

Tips for setting up your abandoned cart emails

• Send an initial abandoned cart email 24 hours after a customer has abandoned their cart, reminding them that their item is still available and ready to buy.
• Send a second abandoned cart email 48 hours after a customer has abandoned their cart, addressing common objections that might be keeping them from checking out.
• Send a third abandoned cart email 72 hours after a customer has abandoned their cart offering a discount code or other perk. 

2) Send customers personalized product recommendations

Automated email marketing is a great way to present would-be and current customers with personalized recommendations that pique their interest. It pays off: According to Barilliance, average order value (AOV) increases by 369% when prospects engage with a single product recommendation. 

In addition to helping you form more robust customer relationships, product recommendation emails can help you upsell or cross-sell a new product to the customers most likely to buy them. 

Goals for product recommendation emails

The goal of product recommendation emails is twofold. One, product recommendation emails encourage repeat purchases from customers who have already given your online store the stamp of approval. Tracking clicks and conversions on each recommendation is an excellent way to evaluate these emails. 

Two, product recommendation emails let customers know that you’re paying attention to their interests and value their business. No one likes seeing suggestions for products they’d never consider buying. A customer survey could help you measure whether your customers feel your tips are on target. 

Tips for setting up your product recommendation emails

• Constantly tailor your product recommendation emails to the customer’s specific purchase data. You could suggest products that complement their purchase, products similar to their purchase, products other people purchased after viewing the original product, and so on.
• Experiment with when you send personalized product recommendation emails. You could start with a couple of days after a customer makes a purchase or even include recommendations in the order confirmation email. 

3) Automate discount emails based on customer behavior

Strategically sending discounts is one of the most popular ways to utilize automated email marketing. According to Adoric, 44% of consumers check branded emails for discounts and other valuable offers.

To really capitalize on the benefits of discount emails, though, your offers should be triggered based on customer behavior. If a customer has been browsing a specific product, for example, you could send them a discount code as a welcome. 

As we touched on above, you can also send discount codes to customers who have abandoned their cart or on their previous purchases. It’s also common to automate discount emails to send if a certain amount of time has elapsed since a customer’s last purchases, whether it’s two weeks or two months. There are endless possibilities when it comes to tailoring discounts. 

Goals for discount emails

The goal of a discount email is simple: to encourage conversions by offering customers savings on the products they’re most interested in. This makes tracking the success of your discount emails as simple as monitoring the conversion rate and click-through rate of the discount emails you send out. You can also look at average order value (AOV) and customer lifetime value (CLV) to see how discounts impact overall spending. 

Tips for setting up discount emails

• Discount emails that are triggered based on specific customer behaviors are much more effective than generic discount emails that are sent en masse to your entire email list.
• Sending discount emails to customers who have already purchased a product from your store is a great way to reward your loyal customers and encourage their repeat business.

4) Greet and excite new customers with an automated welcome series

Welcome emails that greet your new subscribers have an average open rate of 50%, making their open rate 86% higher than standard newsletters. Wordstream reports that are 320% more revenue is attributed to welcome emails compared to other promotional emails. 

Simply saying hello to new subscribers and providing product highlights is an excellent way to get them excited about what your store has to offer and let them know that you’re happy to have them in the fold. It’s also a prime opportunity to offer welcome discounts, planting the seeds for their first or next purchase.  

Goals for automated welcome emails

The ultimate goal of a welcome email series is to convert subscribers into loyal, paying customers. This makes conversion rate an important factor to consider when sending out these emails. 

Beyond this, welcome emails are also a great way to let your audience know the benefit of engaging with your messages (discounts, exclusive sales, first looks at products, etc.) and make them more likely to open subsequent emails. So, the open rate is an important metric to watch.

Tips for setting up automated welcome emails

• Welcome emails should be sent automatically and immediately anytime a new subscriber subscribes to your email list.
• Thanks to their high open rate, welcome emails also present a prime opportunity to promote high-value products. Depending on your email automation tool, you can tailor your featured products based on the customer’s web activity. 

5) Keep customers updated with confirmations, receipts, and shipping emails

One of the most significant benefits of email automation is streamlining and speeding up transactional email sending. Unlike marketing emails, your customers expect to receive lightning-fast order confirmations, receipts, status updates, and more. 

For example, email receipts that are sent out when a customer makes a purchase have an average open rate of 70.9%, making these emails more likely to be read than any other type of message. Even small delays may decrease confidence or lead to customer service tickets filling up your queue. Email automation lets you proactively inform customers of changes and get ahead of questions. 

Goals for update and confirmation emails

The most important objective of update and order confirmation emails is to provide detailed information and answer customers’ questions. You can track email metrics like open rate as well as customer service metrics like the number of tickets related to receipts, shipping status, and so on.

Tips for setting up update and confirmation emails

• An order confirmation email should be sent immediately after a customer makes a purchase and should include a detailed receipt.
• A shipping confirmation email should be sent whenever the customer's order has shipped and will ideally include a tracking number that customers can use to follow their package.
• While not the primary purpose of update and confirmation emails, these emails offer the chance to market additional products to customers who have already purchased from your store.

6) Engage your repeat customers with a targeted email series

According to data from a Stitch Labs report on customer loyalty, repeat customers make up almost 25% of a store's revenue despite only making up 11% of a store's customer base on average. 

This makes it especially important to engage your repeat customers and ensure that they continue coming back to your store. For this purpose, automated email campaigns that are targeted based on the behaviors and interests of your repeat customers can be highly beneficial. Your email series could include interesting blog reads, product ideas or inspiration videos, promo codes, featured customers, and more. 

Goals for repeat customer emails

The goal of repeat customer emails is to encourage repeat business from your store's most valuable segment of customers. Open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate are the most important metrics to track when sending out these emails.

Tips for setting up repeat customer emails

• Send a check-in email two days after a customer's order has arrived to make sure that they are satisfied with their purchase.
• Send a personalized product recommendation email four days after a customer's order has arrived to encourage a repeat purchase. Personalized product recommendation emails can also be sent out periodically to your entire segment of repeat customers.
• Include discount codes or special offers that are tailored to your repeat customers as a reward for their continued business.

7) Send customer feedback emails to gain valuable insights

Few things are more valuable or actionable for an online retailer than in-depth customer feedback. With automation, you can schedule email surveys that collect this all-important data on a regular basis, whether monthly, quarterly, or yearly. You can also schedule them to send after key interactions like purchases, returns, or customer service conversations. 

Customer feedback emails are also a good opportunity to request that customers leave a review on the products that they've purchased. Small discounts, gift cards, or prize drawings can be valuable incentives for customers to share their thoughts. 

Goals for customer feedback emails

While the goal of most ecommerce email marketing campaigns is to encourage conversions, this isn't the goal of customer feedback emails. Instead, the goal of these emails is to gather feedback from your customers in the form of either survey responses or online reviews. This makes open rate and click-through rate the most important metrics to track for these email campaigns.

Tips for setting up customer feedback emails

• The first email in a customer feedback email campaign should be sent out one week after a customer's order has arrived.
• Customer feedback emails can link to a survey form to collect feedback for your business. Consider linking to review sites to make it easy to leave feedback and steadily build social proof for your products.

8) Retain customers with a re-engagement email series

Eventually, some subscribers may start to ignore the emails you send if they don’t find them valuable. Often, segments of subscribers aren’t even receiving your emails because their contact information is outdated.

If you notice that your open rate is starting to suffer, re-engagement or "win back" email series can help. These emails are all about understanding what drives customers to engage with your emails, confirming contact details, and reigniting the interest of your subscribers. There are many different approaches. You can offer product recommendations and discounts, ask readers to verify their email addresses if they like your content, and more. 

Goals for re-engagement emails

The goal of re-engagement emails is to motivate inactive subscribers to take action, whether buying, browsing, or unsubscribing. Monitoring the open rate, click rate, and the number of unsubscribes for these series is crucial. You can also gauge the success of these campaigns by tracking conversions.

Tips for setting up re-engagement emails

• The first email in a re-engagement series that is sent out to subscribers who are no longer opening your messages should serve the purpose of reminding them what they’re missing out on.
• The second email in a re-engagement series should present subscribers with a fantastic offer that will encourage them to check subsequent emails for similar offers.
• The final email in a re-engagement email series should politely inform customers that you’re going to unsubscribe them if they aren’t interested in your emails.

Email automation tools worth integrating with your online store

Automation begins with great software. You’ll want to look for options that integrate seamlessly with your other ecommerce automation tools, such as your customer service or inventory management platforms. Today, the top email automation tools include the following:

• Klaviyo: Klaviyo is an email marketing platform that allows you to collect and analyze data from your customers then use that data to create highly-targeted email marketing and SMS campaigns. If you’re looking for an email marketing solution that will enable you to utilize your data to its full potential, then Klaviyo is an excellent option to consider.
• Omnisend: Omnisend is a marketing automation platform that empowers automated email marketing in addition to SMS messaging, WhatsApp messaging, social media messaging, and beyond. If you would like to use an all-in-one platform that will allow you to send automated messages across a wide variety of channels, then Omnisend could work well.
• Autopilot: Autopilot is a cloud-based email marketing automation platform that allows you to create automated emails series using simple drag-and-drop commands. Autopilot is easy to use considering its impressive range of features, making it a good option for those new to email marketing.
• Mailchimp: Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing solutions available today, in part because of its low cost and user-friendliness. The base version of Mailchimp is free to use, making it a great way to test the waters of ecommerce email marketing automation without investing any money. 
• Drip: Drip is an email automation platform that includes a visual email builder for creating attractive automated email templates. Drip allows you to automatically send emails based on detailed customer actions, making it one of the more capable email automation tools available today.
• Convertkit: Convertkit is a marketing platform aimed at content creators and artists that includes email marketing automation features. It allows you to easily migrate your existing list of subscribers to the Convertkit platform so you can start launching automated email series. 

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Benefits of email automation

Automation lets your business enjoy all the unique, worthwhile benefits of email marketing without demanding more human power or a more significant time investment. Here are the specific advantages of automating your email campaigns. 

1) Offers a high ROI

We mentioned earlier that email marketing is unrivaled when it comes to ROI, yielding an average of $36 for every $1 spent. This statistic alone is more than enough to convince most ecommerce businesses to invest their efforts in this channel.  

One reason why email marketing offers such a high ROI is that email marketing is an incredibly low-cost marketing avenue. Once you have a list of subscribers, the only real expense associated with email marketing is the cost of paying for a subscription to an email marketing automation platform. 

These platforms are available at a variety of price points, including free options with robust feature sets, and let you send to hundreds or thousands of customers every month. When the "I" in "ROI" is this low, there’s potential to achieve a substantial return on your investment.

2) Keeps customers satisfied and engaged 

Automated emails, transactional and promotional, are vital for creating a customer-centric brand. 

Fast transactional emails, such as responses to customer service requests, make your subscribers feel heard and valued. They're a great form of customer self-service. Nearly 50% of customers say they expect an email response from businesses in less than four hours. Automated messages speed up your customer service response times. 

Email automation is also effective at keeping customers interacting with your brand. For example, 45% of subscribers who receive “win back” (re-engagement emails) will go on to open subsequent emails, according to data from Return Path. By scheduling regular messages, you can retain customers who might have otherwise been lost.

3) Built for upselling and cross-selling customers

Automated email marketing also allows you to segment your list of subscribers based on factors like web activity, purchase history, and interests in order to create targeted cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Ecommerce platforms and CRMs offer plenty of data to inform triggered campaigns. 

Say you have a segment of customers who purchased a winter coat from your store. You can set up an automated, personalized campaign that recommends scarves and mittens to pair with their purchase. This is a great way to raise average order values among your existing customer base. 

4) Saves time for your sales and marketing teams

With the right tools, all of the above benefits of email marketing can be accomplished with minimal manual input from your company's sales, marketing, or customer service staff. 

Once you’ve created the necessary email templates and set up criteria to trigger email sends, automated email campaigns practically run themselves. This frees up your teams to focus on tasks that truly need a human touch (and larger projects like SEO for your store) while making them faster and more efficient at repetitive but essential tasks.

Offer top-notch customer support from a single platform with Gorgias

At Gorgias, we’re committed to helping businesses make the most of ecommerce automation and hands-free email marketing through our convenient central hub. Our helpdesk platform integrates with popular marketing automation platforms. It makes it easy to manage email communication, SMS communication, and social media messaging, allowing you to provide the kind of customer service that turns visitors and newcomers into loyal shoppers. 

Want to learn more about how Gorgias empowers your online store? Book a demo. 

In the past, the best way for online stores to grow was to spend heavily on paid advertising. The thinking: get your brand in front of an audience, and sales will just… happen.

But this ecommerce growth tactic is outdated because paid advertising has become outrageously expensive, and many shoppers make purchasing decisions based on customer experience and trust, not ad spend.

Before you dedicate an enormous growth budget to paid customer acquisition, read our guide for more sustainable, customer-centric tips to grow your online store.

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12 sustainable ecommerce growth strategies for brands

1. Determine KPIs, and reverse engineer your strategy from those metrics 
2. Create a long-term SEO plan to rule Google search results
3. Establish a social media presence to generate more website traffic, social proof, and sales
4. Invest in customer service as your top customer loyalty program
5. Implement live chat to boost customer satisfaction and sales
6. Automate time-consuming tasks
7. Find profitable niches to expand your business
8. Form relationships with influencers in your industry
9. Pick the right digital payments platform for your store
10. Use ecommerce advertising to expand your reach (but carefully)
11. Realize the power of email marketing
12. Create a conversion rate optimization (CRO) plan

1. Determine KPIs, and reverse engineer your strategy from those metrics 

You can’t really develop an ecommerce growth strategy without knowing how to know what needs improvement. Without solid key performance indications (KPIs) as a benchmark (and a signal on where to improve), your growth strategy will be little more than guesswork. Pause on the “growth hacking” until you have solid data.

Measuring your KPIs can help you answer questions like: 

• What made your store successful in the first place? 
• What efforts haven’t been paying off?
• What revenue-boosting strategies work best? 

KPIs every ecommerce business should track fall into four distinctive categories: 

1. Monetary indicators: Tracking profit and revenue and increasing return on investment 
2. Customer indicators: Regulating the number of former, current, and future customers
3. Purchase indicators: Analyzing people that have attempted or made a purchase 
4. Conversion indicators: Assessing the number of people that have converted

Any customer service platform worth the price will help you track key KPIs. Gorgias, for example, provides revenue statistics, real-time support performance data, and up-to-date customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. 

Benefits of tracking ecommerce KPIs

Tracking KPIs requires you to acquire new tools, learn how to use them, and train your employees. Is tracking KPIs really worth your investment? Here are a few reasons why tracking KPIs is worth the effort:

• Provides you with a complete, objective overview of your goals and progress
• Gives you a benchmark for your current ecommerce sales, conversion rate, and more 
• Gives you the ability to make more informed decisions based on data
• Allows for a evidence-based employee management and evaluation
• Guides you to new ways to optimize brand exposure, lower bounce rates, improve click-through rate (CTR), and more

Want to know more about tracking ecommerce KPIs?

Keeping track of performance can help you bring your business to new heights. If you’re interested in knowing more about KPIs, how they can help you, and which ones to track, read our guide to ecommerce KPIs. 

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2. Create a long-term SEO plan to rule Google search results

Organic search (when people use a search engine like Google) is the #1 source of traffic for ecommerce. One of the reasons for this is the fact that people, especially young people, actively ignore paid Instagram and Facebook ads. (Plus, those tactics are wildly expensive.)

That’s why your store needs search engine optimization (SEO). Specifically, you at least need to optimize your homepage and product pages to ensure your store is a top Google results when people are online shopping for the kinds of products and services you sell. 

And, if you have the bandwidth, consider launching a full-fledged content marketing program (with blog posts and other educational content) to get even more eyes on your ecommerce site.

While most SEO refers to Google searches, online stores also have to think about marketplace SEO. If you sell on Amazon, for example, you’ll want to optimize your product descriptions to show up at the top of relevant search results. 

Check out Amazon’s SEO guide for more information.

Benefits of ecommerce SEO 

Is SEO really that great of a marketing campaign? Do its benefits apply to small businesses? Let’s take a look at some of SEO’s biggest benefits:

• Allows you to stay competitive despite the increasing number of new ecommerce brands
• Lets you compete with large corporations despite a modest marketing budget
• Helps you bring a steady stream of shoppers to fill your marketing funnel (in other words, attract potential customers)
• Significantly lowers your pay per click (PPC) costs while allowing you to continue attracting customers
• Creates lasting (and compounding) value, whereas paid ads quickly become irrelevant and ineffective

Want to know more about ecommerce SEO?

You can optimize your ecommerce website for search with a few quick wins, but the best SEO strategies are long-term marketing investments that compound over time. Check out our posts on ecommerce SEO:

• 10 Step Guide to Ecommerce SEO
• Shopify SEO Guide: How To Optimize Your Shopify Store for Organic Traffic
• How to Boost Sales with Blog Content for Ecommerce Brands

3. Establish a social media presence to generate more website traffic, social proof, and sales

A 2021 Forbes survey of 6,000 shoppers found that about two thirds of shoppers use social media as part of their online shopping routine. They either discover a brand through its social posting, check out the Instagram for product photos, or look through customer conversations in the comments.

Check out how CROSSNET uses social media cross-marketing to grow their audience:

Not only can social media persuade your target demo that you’re the right store for them but it can also expose your business to customers you didn’t even plan on targeting. In addition to retail sales growth, it will help you expand to markets you haven’t even thought about.

Benefits of social media marketing

Of course, having a page/profile on all of the more popular social media platforms is a must nowadays. But should you continuously invest in social media marketing? Consider this:

• Brings in more traffic to your website and increases online sales in the process
• Increases conversion rates by helping you create relationships with followers
• Builds trust with your target demographic and boosts brand loyalty
• Leads to better customer satisfaction rates through direct dialogue (when you perform social media customer service)

Want to know more about social media marketing for ecommerce?

If you want to read further about how your store could benefit from social media marketing or know more about the best strategies, we recommend you read our article on the topic. There, you’ll find out everything you need for a winning social media strategy. 

4. Invest in customer service as your top customer loyalty program

Without your customers and their loyalty, your business wouldn’t exist. Simple as that. Focus on providing incredible customer service, and you’ll see increased customer satisfaction, more testimonials and customer referrals, and higher retention and repeat purchases from cusotmers. 

32% of shoppers say they would no longer shop with a brand they loved after one bad experience, according to PwC’s Future of CX report. You don’t have to worry about “delighting” every customer. But you do have to provide quick, effective service (and a great customer experience) to build trust and keep customers from shopping with your competitor. 

Want to learn more about growing through customer experience? Check out our CX-Driven Growth Playbook, a compilation of 18 tactics from top ecommerce brands to raise your revenue by up to 44%.

Benefits of ecommerce customer support 

Without a question, investing in customer support is a must. Here are some of the benefits you can expect when you start investing in providing a great customer experience through service:

• Gives you a direct communication channel with shoppers (to receive feedback and product reviews) 
• Establishes a reputation as a caring brand that takes good care of shoppers
• Provides a chance to upsell customers (when the time is right)
• Gives you a chance to answer questions, handle objections, and remove any other barriers to a sale
• Integrates easily with other channels, especially intimate and high-touch channels like text marketing
• Lowers shopping cart abandonment rates significantly and helps with cross-selling efforts  

Want to know more about ecommerce customer service?

Your business heavily depends on a great customer experience (and customer satisfaction rates staying high). While chasing after new customers may seem like the fastest way to grow, investing in customer service is your best bet for sustainable growth.

Check out our guide on customer service best practices for more strategies. 

5. Implement live chat to boost customer satisfaction and sales

Live chat is one of the best ways to provide in-context, efficient customer service. We also find that Gorgias customers who use live chat can increase conversion rate through the channel by proactively offering discount codes

Live chat also allows your customer service agent to serve multiple customers simultaneously. And, when you use self-service portal and chat contact form, you can offer live chat support even when you don’t have a human agent to staff the channel. 

Here’s how shoppers can use the self-service portal to answer their questions — in this case, track and update their order — without interacting with an agent:

Benefits of live chat for ecommerce 

Unlike physical stores, most online stores provide limited communication options to their visitors. A customer can’t just walk up to you and ask you a question. Live chat offer that. And live chat can facilitate sales, just like a physical attendant who can answer questions and give product recommendations in the moment. Here’s what can live chat do for you:

• Saves your customer service agents and buyers precious time
• Enables customer service agents to serve several people at the same time
• Gives shoppers relevant recommendations and solutions to their problems (unblocking sales)
• Proactively reaches out to customers during the checkout process to reduce cart abandonment
• Provides additional options for customer self-service

Want to know more about live chat for ecommerce?

Live chat bridges the gap between real-world and online retail by enabling you to help your customers in real-time. 

Read our piece on how live chat can increase sales on your online store.

6. Automate time-consuming tasks

As your business grows, you’ll only take on more time-demanding tasks. On their own, these tasks are harmless. However, they can quickly swell and distract you from higher-impact projects in your growth strategy.

Thankfully, tasks like customer segmentation, order tracking, and many parts of your digital marketing (like creating social media posts) can all be automated. With the right tools by your side, you’ll ensure that your business stays profitable. 

That’s why 89% of businesses already automation some parts of their growth tactics, according to a 2019 survey from Automizy.

Benefits of ecommerce automation

Small tasks can consume a lot of your time. What can you do with all of that free time? Here’s what ecommerce automation does for you:

• Helps you manage your inventory much easier and ship products faster
• Offers better customer experience with better response time, shipping, and returns
• Allows you to focus on more complicated aspects of your operation and improve ROI
• Improvers customer service with automated letters and email responses to inquiries
• Makes social media marketing a lot easier by scheduling posts on multiple platforms

Want to know more about ecommerce automation?

Ecommerce automation is a broad topic. You can automate elements of your digital marketing, your customer service, your administrative tasks the build up here and there. 

Take a look at out our guide on ecommerce automation for further reading.

7. Find profitable niches to expand your business

In ecommerce, a niche is a specific segment of the retail market’s target audience interested in a particular product type. Niches can be narrow and wide. A wide niche would be beauty products and a narrow niche would be male, eco-friendly care products.  

Some of the top ecommerce niches in 2022 include:

• Next-generation beauty products
• Next-generation phone accessories
• Vape products
• Lighting decor
• Tools and hardware supplies

If you want to expand your business, it would be smart to find a particular niche to target. These are trending niches, but you should expand wherever is most relevant to your existing brand and customer base. By targeting a specific group of customers over the long haul, you can more easily establish yourself as the go-to brand. 

Benefits of finding a profitable ecommerce niche

Trying to please everyone is a recipe for disaster. Finding a niche and sticking to it will help your business with: 

• Attracts a group of people that is willing to pay more and stay loyal to a brand
• Helps you stand out among your competitors by having a more unique (and desirable) offering
• Lets you stay on top of current trends and staying in touch with young consumers
• Lowers your costs of advertising and helping attract new people more easily

Want to know more about profitable ecommerce niches?

Expanding into a new niche is no small decision. You have to ensure the expansion makes sense for your existing customers and brand, as well as your future growth goals.

Check out our guide on choosing a niche for more information.

8. Form relationships with influencers in your industry

According to 2021 Statista data, nearly 35% of social media users were either likely or extremely likely to purchase a brand’s product or service because an influencer promoted it. Ecommerce influencers are one of the best ways to increase exposure for new products (or to new audiences).

Below, you can see how Princess Polly partnered with an Instagram influencer with over 11,000 followers to increase brand awareness and bolster social proof:

These people are the ones you need to partner up with. Regardless of your ecommerce industry or the niche you’re targeting, certain influencers can help you improve sales. 

Not even your geographical location makes a difference. There are influencers in North America, Latin America, and even in the Asia-Pacific region — there are plenty of high-impact influencers in China. There are also influencers on every social media platform, from TikTok to LinkedIn.

Working with an influencer can expose your brand to the global ecommerce market and boost your marketing efforts beyond your wildest dreams. If done correctly, partnering with an influencer can expand your social reach, ensure growth, and improve your bottom line. 

Benefits of teaming up with influencers

Although “influencer marketing” is a recent phenomenon, people have been using the influence of others to sell products for decades. Another way marketers describe this is “social proof.” Here’s what you can expect from it:

• Builds trust between you and your customers in a short period of time
• Gets more people to know about your store, offering, and brand message
• Helps your content strategy reach new levels and attract more people than ever
• Provides content and value to your target demographic on a regular basis
• Reaches audiences you haven’t even thought about and sending them your way 

Want to know more about influencer marketing for ecommerce?

Influencer marketing is one of the best growth hacks for ecommerce stores, thanks to the wide reach of influencers and the impact they can have on brand exposure and product awareness. 

Check out our guide on ecommerce influencers for more information.

9. Pick the right digital payments platform for your store

Consumer behavior has changed drastically over the past decade. Just 10 years ago, a vast majority of consumers couldn’t imagine going shopping without any cash on them. Today, most people are more than glad to go cashless. 

According to 2021 data from Statista, digital wallets and credit cards are by far the most common ways to make purchases . Online payment apps like Venmo and Paypal aren’t far behind.

Merchants that want to expand their businesses need to offer seamless payment options to their customers. Having the right platform will speed up the entire purchase process for both local and international customers alike, all while making them feel 100% safe. Fortunately, Shopify, BigCommerce, and other major ecommerce platforms offer multiple payment options.

Benefits of having the right payment platform

What’s the preferred platform for your audience? That’s the question you need to answer. Here’s how using the right payment gateway helps your business:

• Allow customers to open accounts on your website without entering too much data
• Accept multiple payment methods through a simple, single integration
• Enable cross-border payments, helping you reach a worldwide consumer base
• Speed up transactions and increasing customer satisfaction rates in the process
• Increase security levels and helping you gain the trust of first-time customers 

Want to know more ecommerce payment platforms?

Offering the right payment methods could make or break user experience and customer trust. 

Check out our guide on ecommerce payments to learn more.

10. Use ecommerce advertising to expand your reach (but carefully)

Pay per click (PPC) advertising is a form of online advertising in which the business owner pays a certain amount of money every time a consumer clicks on their advertisement. 

There are plenty of platforms you can use to host your ads. This includes search engines like Google and Bing, social networks like Facebook and Instagram, as well as popular websites like TechCrunch and Search Engine Journal.  

Benefits of ecommerce advertising

SEO might be a more cost-effective way to market your business, but paid advertising is a great way for quick bursts of growth. Here are the benefits of paid ads: 

• Target highly specific groups of consumers
• Give you an additional source of website visitors besides SEO
• Help you track your ad spending exhaustively, to the last penny
• Save your money until you start seeing new visitors and real results
• Allow users to adjust their ad strategy and spending on the fly

Want to know more about pay per click?

For most players in ecommerce, paid advertising is a strong strategy. (Of course, it can never replace customer experience.) If you choose to invest heavily in pay per click advertising, you must make sure you understand your customers to advertise on the right platforms to the right targeted segments. 

Read our guide on ecommerce marketing for more information on the best ways to increase exposure and drive more sales.

11. Realize the power of email marketing

Even though some people think that email marketing is on a decline, that’s not even close to the truth. Failing to invest in email marketing would be a huge mistake. The fact of the matter is, without email, your sales, user engagement, and returning customer base would drop. 

In a 2020 survey from Litmus, four out five growth marketers said they’d rather give up social media than email. Email may be old-fashioned, but it’s not out-dated. You check your email most days, don’t you? 

With email, you’ll be able to directly reach your customers and serve them weekly content, without relying on social media algorithms. Not only that but with retargeting, you’ll be able to lower your cart abandonment rates significantly and increase conversions in no time.  

Benefits of email marketing for ecommerce 

Paying more attention to your email campaigns comes with a lot of pros and a very few cons. Here some of the benefits you can expect to experience:

• Gather actionable feedback from large groups of customers
• Send your subscribers fresh content weekly through newsletters
• Mail discount coupons and other rewards to loyal customers
• Retarget customers that have left your site without making a purchase
• Lower cart abandonment rates and reactivating inactive customers

Want to know more about ecommerce email marketing?

Is email marketing something you want to get into? Do you know how to start building a list of leads? What do you want to accomplish with your strategy? 

Take a look at our ecommerce email marketing best practices to learn the basics. 

12. Create a conversion rate optimization (CRO) plan

Ecommerce conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors that make a purchase. Have a low conversion rate? In the world of ecommerce, that’s nothing out of the ordinary. Most US ecommerce websites have a conversion rate between 1% and 2%. 

Of course, the rate varies greatly between different sectors. Some ecommerce niches have rates as high as 4.9% while others have as low as 1.4%. 

All of this doesn’t mean that you should be satisfied with your rate. Your website can always use some conversion rate optimization. How can you boost your conversion rate? In many ways actually, some of which include:

• Avoiding lengthy sign-up forms
• Allowing shoppers to buy without registering
• Placing CTA buttons in all of the right places
• Sending cart abandonment emails 

Don’t underestimate the power of CRO. By improving your conversion rate by a percent, you can double your revenue. 

Benefits of boosting conversion rates

Dedicating a certain amount of time each week to conversion rate optimization can make your business strategy more effective. But there are lots of other CRO benefits:

• Learn more about your regular customers and their shopping habits
• Boost store revenue by running ads based on your customer insights
• Lower customer acquisition costs and improving the average order value
• Improve SERP rankings and exposing your store to a brand-new audience
• Make more informed business decisions and taking only calculated risks  

Want to know more about ecommerce conversion rates?

Conversion rate optimization is a full-time job at some companies. But even if you can’t hire a CRO specialist, you can (and probably should) make a plan to ensure as many visitors as possible end up making a purchase.

Read our guide on ecommerce conversion rate to learn more about how to maximizes sales on your site.

13. Invest in product photography to improve sales

As an ecommerce store owner, your job is to sell products. And when customers can’t pick up and hold your products, your product images become paramount. 

Nowadays, consumers are being bombarded with visual content.  Social networks, streaming platforms, and forums, all thrive from visual content. With so much visual content on the Internet, consumers now ignore most things that don’t tickle their imagination right away.

The Social Ms reports that 67% of potential shoppers say image quality is an important. Think about it: would you trust a brand with low-quality product photos?

That’s why you need to take steps to ensure that your products are looking crisp. Whether this means hiring a professional to handle the work or taking things into your own hands is all up to you. Just make sure that your visuals are on high quality and show the product in its best light. 

Benefits of investing in product photography

Organizing a professional photoshoot is not a small task to tackle. A lot of time and money goes into photo sessions. Here are a few reasons why you need to focus on product pics:

• Allows consumers to have a better perception of your products
• Helps mobile shoppers have a better view of your product offering  
• Improves the speed of trust, making the shoppers trust you right away
• Increases the conversion rates by helping customers make quicker decisions
• Strengthens your business’ brand identity and separating you from competitors

Want to know more about product photography?

Product photography can be a significant investment, so it’s important to hire a great product photographer at the right time. 

Read our guide on ecommerce product photography to learn the smart approach to great product photos.

Provide the best customer experience possible to maximize ecommerce growth

Ecommerce growth is a complex beast. Whether you decide to invest in PPC, hire a product photographer, or start working on an email marketing strategy, one thing is certain: your customers always come first. 

You need to keep your customer service at a high level, in order for your business to continue growing. And you can’t possibly do that without the right tools.

Gorgias is a customer service platform built specifically for ecommerce. Gorgias users provide more efficient (and satisfying) customer service, generate more revenue, and get up-to-date support and revenue data from the tool. 

If you want to see how Gorgias can help your ecommerce business grow, check out our customer story on Ohh Deer, a small business that used Gorgias to generate $12,500 per quarter through customer experience. 

As many of you already know, Gorgias has spilled their blood, sweat, and tears into creating the best customer support platform on the market. 

BUT...

We want to provide our customers with more.

More value. More possibilities. And, most importantly, more opportunities to grow and scale your online business. 

...Enter our new show Vested Interest. 

Like Shark Tank and Dragons Den, Gorgias is partnering with venture capital companies, including Greycroft, Swiftarc, and Rosecliff. You guessed it...successful applicants have the chance to pitch investors and receive valued feedback and advice. Pitching helps brands boost their profile, and may even lead to a second conversation with an investor.

So, in honor of our exciting new initiative, in this blog post, we're delving into ecommerce fundraising in more detail. More specifically, what it is, why you should consider it, and how to raise those all-important funds to transform your business dream into reality.

Does that sound good to you? Fab! Continue reading to find out more...

What's Business Fundraising?

First things first, we want to clarify what ecommerce fundraising actually is. In short, it's the process online merchants take to secure the funds they need to launch and/or grow their ecommerce businesses.

Traditionally, business fundraising was associated with start-ups, brick and mortar stores, and scaling companies to reach new heights.

But, fast forward to today, more and more DTC brand owners and online merchants are also leveraging capital to launch and/or expand their business. 

And there's no reason you can't do the same. 

Of course, there are several ways to raise business capital, but some of the more popular routes include:

• Venture capital
• Crowdfunding
• Angel investors
• Taking out a bank loan
• Equity investors
• Revenue-based financing

As we've just said, there are plenty of other fundraising avenues, but for the purposes of this article, we're focusing on these. 

What are the Different Business Fundraising Options?

Let's explore the options above in a little more detail...

Angel Investors 

Seeking funds from an angel investor(s) might be the ideal option if you're running a small ecommerce brand that's generating steady profits. I.e., without external funding, you're doing okay. Still, to take your business to the next level, you need a cash injection. 

This is where an “angel” investor might come in handy.  

Typically speaking, angel investors are wealthy people, or groups, who pool their know-how, research, and resources to provide promising start-ups capital. 

Generally, angel investors give companies some sort of financial assistance in exchange for either convertible debt (i.e., the promise of converting part (or all) of the loan into common shares, at some point in the future) or ownership equity.

Usually, you'll approach an angel investor with a pitch outlining who your business is, how much money you want to secure, and what you hope to achieve with their finances. 

As the size of angel investments substantially varies (usually anywhere under $50,000 to over $500,000), you'll have to prove how you'll provide reliable results. You need to show investors why your business is worth their time, and more importantly, money. After all, it stands to reason, if you can prove your brand will go the distance, the safer bet you are for them to invest in. 

Then, after your initial meeting(s) with the angel investor(s), they'll typically go away and conduct their own research, ask you questions, etc. to help determine whether your proposition is a good fit with their investment portfolio. 

Crowdfunding 

In short, crowdfunding is where a wider pool of small-time investors assist a company during its earlier stages. As crowdfunding is typically used to accumulate funds to launch, these businesses often have a minimal (if any) track record of their profits. As such, this fundraising method is ideal for those with a killer business idea, without the financial forecasts to wow angel investors, banks, or venture capital firms.   

There are tons of crowdfunding sites online. For instance:

• AngelList
• Fundable
• CircleUp
• CrowdFunder
  

These are just a few of the many online crowdfunding platforms on the web. But, the ones above are a great starting point - here, you can get your brand and business plan in front of loads of people actively looking to invest in fledgling businesses. 

How to Run a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign

Crowdfunding relies on your ability to inspire trust and enthusiasm in your audience. Show them you've done your research and are prepared to put their money to good use. This means breaking up your estimated costs and demonstrating where the money will go. For instance, how much is allocated to production, how much on design? Showing you understand your costs improves your credibility. 

Whatever crowdfunding platform you choose to use, post regular updates, and answer questions. Show the community that's building around your idea that you care for their involvement. Investing in a crowdfunding project can be daunting, some investors might fear that you won’t come through. So, demonstrate from the start that you're reliable and fully invested in putting their worries at bay. 

Last but not least, make sure your crowdfunding campaign is well presented. Where possible, use high-quality graphics and video content. Proofread your proposal, ensuring all the info is shown in a way that's logical and easy-to-read. Get friends and family to check over your campaign description for you. Professionalism goes a long way in inspiring the confidence of potential investors!

Venture Capital Investors

Securing investment from venture capital firms like Greycroft, Swiftarc, and Rosecliff, is (usually) better suited to larger online enterprises. For the uninitiated, 'venture capital' is a form of private equity and financing that investors provide businesses with long-term growth potential. 

Entrepreneurs typically secure this kind of financing from affluent investors or investment banks. But, it's worth noting that venture capital doesn't always take a monetary form. Venture capital can also be provided as technical or managerial expertise. 

As investments go, plowing money into an ecommerce business is one of the riskier options. But, the potential for above-average returns is enticing, so we're seeing more and more investors adding online brands to their investment portfolio. 

However, the main drawback for brand owners is that investors usually get equity in the company. As such, you'll give up the luxury of having full control over your business's operation. You don't need us to tell you that this a big deal. So, take your time weighing up the pros and cons of any investment agreement before signing the dotted line!

Equity Investors

Equity investors do precisely what they say on the tin. They're people who provide companies with financial investment in exchange for a share of the business's ownership.

Generally, equity investors don't get a guaranteed return on their investment. But, should the company be liquidated, the equity investor will get a share of the assets (as stipulated in your contract). 

Unsurprisingly, as equity investment is a riskier option for investors, they often expect to receive certain benefits to offset these risks. For instance, your investment agreement might stipulate that their initial investment is paid back within a specific time frame. Then, afterward, it's common for investors to be paid a pre-agreed share of the profits once you've paid back their initial investment.

Alternatively, (or as well as) equity investors can receive stock shares. Of course, stocks rise and fall depending on the market. So, again their return on investment isn't set in stone. But, the investor has the luxury of selling their stocks on the stock market or via other trading platforms, whenever they feel like it. So, be sure to bear that in mind while you're drafting up your agreement. 

Securing a Business Loan From a Bank

Of course, the more traditional route for securing funding is to apply for a small business loan with a bank or other reputable lending institution. 

If this is an avenue you're considering, you'll want to know why business loans get rejected to increase the likelihood of securing your requested funds. 

Interestingly, the most common reason cited for why business loans are rejected is 'risk.' This is why thoroughly preparing before meeting to discuss (or applying) for a potential loan is imperative. You want to do your utmost to show you’re ‘low risk.’

Part of this planning phase will be gathering the below details and documents:

• Your personal credit history
• Your business plan
• The workability of the business you're launching/expanding
• Your experience
• Your education
  

As you go about creating your business plan, focus on explaining why the small business loan you're asking for is a low-risk proposition. Be sure to carefully assess how much money you need and why. Outline how you'll spend these funds, and how the loan will specifically help you launch and/or grow your business.

Be prepared to explain how you'll designate every dollar you've asked for, with specific reference to your business's following aspects:

• Business operations (employees, software, marketing, utilities, etc.)
• Physical assets (equipment, office space, warehousing, etc.)
• Consolidating loans to pay off business debts.
  

You'll also need to explain how you'll repay the loan through your financial statements and cash flow projections. This should highlight to the potential lender that you're able to repay them over a set amount of time.

Revenue-Based Financing

Revenue-based financing is sometimes referred to as royalty-based financing, so don't let the interchangeable terminology confuse you. Both terms mean exactly the same thing!

In short, revenue-based financing is a method businesses use to raise capital from investors. In turn, the investors receive a percentage of the company's regular gross revenue until a pre-set amount is paid (in exchange for their original investment). Typically, this sum is three to five times the initial investment. Companies like Clearbanc charge a flat fee for their capital. Uncapped is also another fantastic example of a revenue-based financing company. 

Essentially, organizations offering revenue-based financing use data-driven methods to provide ecommerce companies with funding. Capital is typically spent on online marketing and inventory.  The best thing about this kind of arrangement for the entrepreneur is that there aren’t any credit checks, personal guarantees, warrants, or covenants involved.

Why Should You Leverage Investors to Build my Ecommerce Business?

Whether you're leveraging angel investors, an equity investor, or the help of a venture capital firm, there's one significant advantage. 

These kinds of investments are (usually) nowhere near as risky as taking out a bank loan. Unlike a loan, (depending on the contract you have with your investor(s)), invested capital doesn't typically have to be paid back if your business flops. 

Plus, most experienced investors understand that they're playing the long game. So, there isn't quite as much pressure to make quick decisions and turn high profits immediately. 

Why Shouldn't You Leverage Investors to Build an Ecommerce Business?

If you don't like the idea of losing some (or even complete) control of your business, then seeking the support of investors might not be the best option for you. Often investors become part-owners of your company, so depending on their share, there's a good chance they'll have a say about how you run your business. On top of that, should you ever sell your business, they'll also receive a portion of the profits.

How to Best Raise Capital to Fund an Ecommerce Brand 

For this section of the blog post, we're mainly focusing on angel, venture capital, and equity investors. 

When it comes to raising capital to fund an ecommerce brand, there are specific times in the business cycle when you're more likely to secure funding. 

Yes, your best bet is to seek investment when you're actually ready to grow your business. But, securing financing, especially from an angel investor, can take roughly six months to a year. 

So, it's advisable to start contacting and pitching investors roughly 12 months before you actually need the funds to boost your business to its next phase. 

Not only will this increase the likelihood of securing funding for when you actually need it, but for every failed pitch (yes, sadly, there will be failures), you'll benefit from those all-important pointers. 

The more investors you talk with, the more apparent it becomes what investors want to see from your company and your business plan before they're happy to invest. 

With this info to hand, you're then in a better position to adapt your business (and your pitch), to meet the needs of investors, when you actually need the funding. 

How do you strike up a Relationship with a Potential Investor?

Typically, you'll kickstart your relationship with an investor by presenting a business plan. Do your utmost to wow them from the get-go, so they'll only be telephone a call away when you need capital. 

As we've just said, if you're preemptively pitching investors before your business is fully investor-ready, the investor will probably point you in the right direction. 

You can then go away and mull over this information and make the necessary changes to increase the chance of them investing in your business in the future. 

What Can You do to Prepare your Business for Investment?

The best thing to do is to write a full business plan. The most important thing for lenders is what they'll get from the arrangement. As we've already hinted at, you'll want to highlight your expected financial projections. This serves as much-needed bait for enticing investors into funding your business.  

We talked about business plans a bit earlier. However, they're essential to securing funding, so we're delving a bit deeper into creating a killer business plan (of course, this advice also applies if you're considering a bank loan)...

Here are a few tips:

• Keep your business plan as concise and to the point as possible. Just focus on what the reader needs to know. 
• Thoroughly proofread your business plan - you can use Grammarly to help you weed out and fix any typos. 
• Use charts to help illustrate your points, visuals are often helpful aids. 
• Include any extra info in an appendix, for instance:
• Financial forecasts 
• Market research and data to back up your proposal
• The resumes and credentials for all your key team members.
• Any product/service literature that explains what you're bringing to the market. 
  

Don't be tempted to be overly optimistic about where your profit forecasts are concerned. Yes, this might up your chances of securing the desired finances. Still, in the long run, you're more likely to suffer from a cash flow crisis and damage your management credibility. Put simply, it's not worth it - stick to the truth. 

Also, ensure your business plan looks as professional as possible. Show the lenders you're taking their investment seriously! So, put a cover on it, include a contents page complete with page numbering, and kickstart your proposal with an executive summary. 

For those unsure what an executive summary is, it's just a condensed synopsis of the key points covered in your business. The reader's digest version if you will. 

On top of that, you'll also want to highlight the following details:

• How your business runs, including a breakdown of your organizational structure and all the stakeholders' roles and responsibilities.
• Your brand identity - who you are, your brand story, your goals, mission, aims, etc. 
• A detailed report of your target market (this should include any weaknesses in your competitors’ products/operations you'll capitalize on). 
  

Other Tips for Securing Investment

As you go about creating your pitch, familiarize yourself with your audience. You want to know your potential lenders inside out and back to front to tailor your pitch accordingly. 

Yes, specific metrics (like your current profits and profit forecasts) lay the framework for any pitch. Still, you'll need to tailor your core messaging to appeal to each investor's needs. 

The key takeaway: Do your homework and modify your presentation accordingly. 

Last but not least, remember business financing is a process. It's likely you'll have to divide your financing objectives into two to three rounds. Securing funds for your business when it's brand-new, (and all risk), and has very little revenue behind it, is more of a challenge. 

So, when you first start out, you're unlikely to obtain all the money you need to launch and scale your business. But, once you have a working prototype and a loyal customer base, you'll take away some of the risks, and as such, you'll probably secure more funds. Prepare for this in advance by dividing your business's growth into specific sections that you raise funds for accordingly. 

How Much Can Ecommerce Brands Raise? 

There are tons of examples of ecommerce brands furthering their business by raising capital. Take Womenswear retailer, Hush, as an example. Hush sells women’s clothing, shoes, and lifestyle items. Currently, it's retailing its products via its website, its partnership with John Lewis.

But, recently, they've secured investment from a private equity firm, True. Hush, now worth over 50 million dollars, plans to utilize these funds to expand into new sales channels and markets.

True acquired a controlling interest in Hush, (roughly a 50% stake). This is what the owners of Hush had to say about the investment:

“We never thought [Hush] would get to a fraction of the size it is,” “We could have carried on [without outside investment], but we felt...real value in bringing in a partner with a similar vision to us, but different skills, to help us grow.”

Interestingly, this is what True had to say about investing in Hush: 

“We think highly profitable, predominantly direct-to-consumer brands such as Hush...will emerge in [good] shape from this current crisis – and completing the transaction now demonstrates that we’re very much open for business and excited about the opportunity ahead of us.”

What About Crowdfunding?

If you're considering crowdfunding avenue, below are a few brands that smashed their targets. Hopefully, these examples will fuel you with inspiration:

Pebble – also known as “The Kickstarter Watch”

Pebble successfully raised $10.3m, when their target was just $100k!

This is what they had to say about the process:

“We had a pretty firm idea of what Pebble would look like. We just didn’t have a bunch of cash to start actually building the product. So, we thought of some other ways to get funding, and one of them was Kickstarter."

Bo & Yana 

These are interactive toy robots that help teach kids how to code. Product owners, Play-i, managed to raise a whopping $1.4 million when their initial aim was just $250k. 

Play-i successfully attracted investors from dozens of countries around the globe, securing 11,000 pre-orders! Interestingly, this company utilized crowdfunding to test the market and get a feel for consumer demand, having already secured $1m from Google Ventures. 

How did Play-i manage to entice so many crowdfunding investors? 

In short, they provided various benefits to their first buyers: 

“We needed to build social proof right off the bat, so we created special perks for the first few buyers. Our first 1,000 backers got limited edition, exclusive outfits for their robots as an incentive to back early. We emailed our existing audience and friends several hours before our campaign went live [to] be among the first to back the project. This gave us the momentum we needed to get off to a good start.” 

The team at Play-i also responded personally to all their audience interaction - every email, comment on Facebook, query on Twitter, etc. It stands to reason investors and customers feel more confident in your brand when they have a personal connection with you and your business. By taking the time to write customized responses to each and every person who wrote them, they ensured people got excited about their product!  

OpenaCase 

OpenaCase is described as the 'world’s most functional iPhone case is a bottle opener.'

The ecommerce brand managed to raise an impressive $283k, massively exceeding their $150k target. 

This is what the founders had to say about the crowdfunding process:

“We didn’t have the capital, so we turned to crowdfunding... When we put the idea on Kickstarter, we realized... lots of people loved the idea and were willing to put money towards it to make it happen. [There's] Nothing better than having your idea validated by people voting with their wallets.” 

They attracted attention to their crowdfunding campaign by creating a Facebook page, and contacting online publications like Tech Crunch and Gizmodo, that's as well as their local paper. They spent lots of time cultivating as much possible PR to gain the traction they needed to raise those all-important funds. 

Are You Ready to Secure the Funds You Need to Launch or Scale Your Ecommerce Business?

We hope that having read this article, you now have a better idea about raising the funds you need to take your ecommerce brand to the next level. 

As we said from the get-go of this article, Gorgias wants to help ambitious e-commerce brands scale up, so we created the Vested Interest event. If you're interested in securing finances from high-quality investors, then what are you waiting for? Apply today to get the ball rolling! If you have any questions about the show, please feel free to reach out, and we'll furnish you with all the info you need. Speak soon!