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It's been over 3 years since we've started working on the Gorgias helpdesk. The engineering team started with just me (Alex) and then gradually grew to a team of 5 people. We're a small team, but we've accomplished a lot during this period. Here are some stats from 0 code/customers/revenue in Oct 2015 to this:

• Handled over 16 million tickets.
• 2000 daily active sessions with an average length of ~4h each.
• 600 paying customers (companies).
• 17% MoM revenue growth.

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Modest numbers to be sure, but we're very proud that people use our product in a big part of their workday and hopefully are becoming more productive while doing so. The whole idea behind our product is to scale customer support with as little resources as possible. Given this, perhaps it's only natural to build our product with a small team as well?

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We've been suffering chronically from "not having enough people" - we still do. That forced us to adopt a certain engineering culture that I want to talk about in this post.

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When we first started building Gorgias, having just a few people on the team allowed us to progress at a pace where we could collect real feedback from our customers with things that really mattered to them rather than building every feature they ask for. A lot of their asks seemed legitimate, but because we didn't have a lot of people it forced us to prioritize the critical, high impact things first.

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Having a small team can act like a barrier that blocks you from building a bloated product.

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I want to make more of a case for the above statement, but first I'd like to get a bit more into what we did during the 3 year period.

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Once we've build an initial version of the app and got our first customers we quickly realized that building a "second Gmail" is super-hard:

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• Communication protocols (email/facebook/etc..) are complicated - we knew that before we even started, but it's difficult to describe the amount of work that needs to get done to make them work correctly. The amount of corner cases and weird protocol quirks is just staggering. In fact I would even go ahead and say that if you're integrating with any kind of external systems (webhooks, REST apis, etc..) then you're going to have a very hard time making them work correctly.
• Having a highly-available and fast app is very hard when you don't have a team of full-time SREs. Scalability was not our big concern when we first started because we didn't have customers, but having an app that was always on was very important, remember the ~4h average session length? It meant that we had to make some architecture and infrastructure decisions that allowed for a high uptime.
• Customer support software space has a very high barrier for entry these days. You need to have certain features before people start to even consider you as a platform. The switching costs are high as well because now you have to train your people on a new app and changing people's routine is hard.

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It takes a lot of effort to get to a point where you can compete with the likes of Gmail or Zendesk - both amazing products btw. This was definitely the case for us, for close to 2 years we had only a couple of customers and our product wasn't that good if we're being honest.

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So what changed a year ago? To put it simply: our product didn't suck anymore. Or sucked less. It had that minimum set of features and stability that made it attractive enough to our main customer base (Shopify merchants) that were passionate about productivity in the customer support space. That, and the tenacity of our CEO Romain who was convincing everyone that they should use us.

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So we started having our second wave of early adopters and all our hard work was finally starting to pay-off!

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Now that we had more and bigger customers we were starting to have performance issues, our app was slow, suddenly we were starting to get bombarded by viral facebook posts events or promotional events via an email campaigns, we didn't have enough monitoring in place, our app was pretty inefficient, the main database was a frequent source of congestion. So we started fixing those issues while still receiving numerous feature requests.

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Thankfully we didn't actually optimize our code that much before (no customers!) and there were a lot of low hanging fruits at first, but it still put a lot of stress on the team which was becoming tired and overworked and requested to hire more people to build those features and help with the performance issues.

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We all agreed that it would be for the best to have more people on the team, but hiring is hard. Competent coders are not just randomly looking for the next gig. SF is also a very expensive city and for a startup that raised $1.5M and a 2 years of money burned we couldn't really compete with other players in town. We've started working with some great devs in Europe, we worked with a few talented interns as well and we tried to get by until we could have more customers and hopefully raise some more money to hire more people.

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I could speak more about hiring in the Bay Area and there are a lot of things we did wrong and still have a lot of things to learn, but that's probably an even longer post than this one. But yeah, it's hard to find someone good, it's expensive, etc...

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So what is the situation right now? Well, it's not much better. We've raise d a seed extension round from SaaStr with Jason Lemkin and hired a few people in the Growth team, but we still have a hard time hiring in SF or remote. In the meantime we have a small team and want to talk about that.

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On the importance of saying NO

I think it's important to realize the advantages of having a smaller team and the single most important super-powers that you're forced to acquire is saying NO more often that you would with a bigger team. If you have a bigger team and say no to a feature, new platform, integration, etc.. it's harder to justify the decision. There are arguments like:

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... we have enough devs! They are paid to make features, so what's the problem!?

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... the data shows that 50% of our customers are saying that they want this or that feature, we must build it!

But do we absolutely need to build that feature? Are the customers going to be a lot less effective with your product otherwise? Is it going to be a big boost for them or just a nice improvement? Once a feature is there you have to maintain it, fix bugs, improve it, etc.. The thing with data driven decisions is that sometimes it can be biased towards some historical practice that might not have a place in your current world.

Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't listen to your customers, you absolutely have to, but be sure you understand well what they want before taking action and understanding takes time. Having an artificial brake on your enthusiasm might be a good thing.

Engineers build things, the natural tendency is to accept any technical challenge because of ego, curiosity, fun, etc... It takes discipline to say no and stick by it. A small team is making it easier to do it.

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Automation

When you have a small team you're forced to automate a lot more often some of your workflows. You don't have the luxury to do repetitive stuff so:

• You start writing more tests because you don't have people hired in QA and you don't want to repeat the same tests all the time.
• You add optional static typing, linting and other code quality tools because you don't have time to deal with random type errors or have debates about tabs vs spaces.
• You resolve repetitive bugs by doing some refactoring because you can't deal with the constant flow of tech support tickets.
• You make a lot of tasks retry-able so if a HTTP request to facebook failed you don't have to manually retry them.
• Cronjobs, cronjobs everywhere.

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Building the right culture is a long process

People that work at Gorgias come from different backgrounds and sometimes it can be challenging to be on the same page. In some cases our work processes are similar to many other companies:

• Github for our code and issues.
• Code-reviews on Reviewable - it's awesome!
• Jenkins to build our docker images and upload them to google cloud.
• Kubernetes to run everything on GKE.
• Sentry to collect production errors.
• Datadog to monitor everything.

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But there is so much more than just the above processes to engineering:

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• The way we all come together and decide how certain things will be built or fixed.
• The way we talk about a certain API decisions and refactoring.
• The way we deal with an outage and a bad bug that affects our biggest customers.

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These things need time to happen to be embedded in your engineering consciousness and if you're the first-time founder (like myself) you also need the time to understand how to operate in this environment.

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Management overhead

Never managed a big team so I can't really speak about it's dynamics, but I would expect that because there are more people there is a lot more bandwidth you have to manage, a lot more people have to agree, a lot more politics have to be settled. I don't look forward to that to be honest, the more time I can get away with hiring as little as possible without a big sacrifice of our growth as a company the more I'll try to delay it.

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I conclusion I would say that it's totally fine to have a small team, in fact, I'm considering it a competitive advantage that you should try to keep as long as you can.

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The irony

I made a point in this post that having a small team is a competitive advantage, but I also think that we are ready to grow our team a bit. Yep, we're hiring!

When Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and the other social media pioneers first developed their platforms, they likely never realized the impact they would have on ecommerce — and the world at large. 

Today, there are over 3.96 billion social media users across the globe, accounting for well over half the world’s population. When you consider that social media users spend an average of two hours and 27 minutes a day browsing social networks, it’s easy to imagine their influence.

Brands leverage social platforms for more than just marketing: social media profiles are direct social commerce platforms, allowing online shoppers to place an order without leaving an app. 

This social commerce strategy enables companies to provide customers with a streamlined online shopping experience.

This comprehensive guide will cover everything you need to know about navigating social commerce, including how it works, its benefits, and proven tips for creating an effective social commerce strategy.

What is social commerce and how does it work?

Traditional ecommerce takes place on a brand’s website, but social commerce takes marketing a step further by enabling brands to turn their social media profiles into shoppable online stores. 

With social shopping, customers can browse products and make purchases directly from social media sites without having to navigate away to an ecommerce site. That means a quicker path to conversion.

Social commerce is also everything that goes into a customer deciding to make a purchase via social platforms, such as:

• Discovering new brands organically or via paid ads
• Researching new products
• Connecting with influencers
• Reaching out to customer service

The convenience of social commerce has led to a rapid growth in its popularity, with the U.S. alone reporting $26.97 billion in social commerce sales in 2020.

The benefits of social commerce for businesses

No matter who comprises your target audience, you’ll most likely find them on social media. They’re also ready to shop.

According to Insider Intelligence, social commerce sales are expected to reach $45.74 billion in the US in 2022 with half of US adults expected to make a social commerce purchase. 

Social commerce is a huge opportunity for your business and here’s why:

• Reach new customers: As we said, over half the world’s population uses social media — these platforms are an opportunity for new customers to discover your ecommerce business
• Reach a younger demographic: More than half of U.S. shoppers aged 18 to 34 have made purchases via a social channel
• Accelerate conversion:  With social commerce, shoppers can now purchase products directly from social media platforms without navigating to the brand’s website — (and a faster buying process means higher conversion rate)
• Improve customer engagement: Social media makes it easy for customers to engage with your brand via comments, direct messaging, and mentions
• Get better customer insights: Every social media platform collects and shares metrics with you, such as impressions, engagement, and reach
• Enjoy flexibility: Social media platforms allow you to experiment with A/B tests, hashtags, and captions to optimize your social media strategy
• Build social proof: According to Matter Communications, 61% of buyers are more likely to trust a recommendation from a friend, family member, or influencers on social media

📚 Read more:

• How To Use Social Media To Grow Your Ecommerce Store
• 13 Ecommerce Growth Tactics to Boost Revenue

The most popular social commerce platforms (and how to get started on each)

We mentioned above that there are plenty of social media platforms that allow for social commerce. While we don’t recommend trying to focus on all of them at once, it's certainly nice to know your options. 

With that in mind, below are some of the most popular social commerce platforms for businesses of all sizes with examples of social commerce for each.

1) Instagram

Instagram is an image-centric social media platform that boasts 1.39 billion active users. A staggering 31.7% of Instagram users are 25-34 years old, making it one of the most popular platforms for millennials. 

It’s also a powerful shopping tool. According to Instagram, half its users have used the platform to discover new brands, products, or services and 44% use it to shop every week.

How to sell on Instagram

To get started with social commerce on Instagram, create a business account and then upload your product catalog into the Facebook Commerce Manager. You can do this either manually or by connecting to your ecommerce platform.

From there, you’ll unlock the ability to enable checkout on Instagram and to tag products in your posts and stories the way you’d tag another user. 

Plus, other users can tag your products, too. If you’re engaged in influencer marketing, for example, the influencers you work with can tag your products for in-app shopping. This way, even user-generated content is a gateway to sales.

Here’s a few ways to use those tags for social commerce on Instagram.

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Shoppable posts

Once your catalog is active, you can start tagging your products in posts to your Instagram feed. This allows customers to see a product and immediately click to purchase it.

Here’s an example from beauty brand Glossier. They posted a display of several products, and each has a tag to click through and purchase each one.

Shoppable stories

Those tags also work in posts to Instagram stories. When posting a product shot, you can add a tag that links directly to that product in your catalog. Again, that means customers are only a click away from conversion.

Here, the Mom Store, based in New Zealand, tagged the dress featured on the model. Also notice that at the bottom of the screen there’s a “view shop” button so customers can click to browse your entire catalog.

Shop tab

Uploading a catalog means the chance to get featured in the shop tab. You can see this tab anytime when you open the app — it’s the shopping bag icon in the bottom row of icons.

Like your main Instagram feed, the shop tab is controlled by an algorithm so the products displayed are unique to each user based on what Instagram thinks they’re interested in. That also means you can’t directly control if your products will be displayed or not.

If a user follows you or has interacted with your posts and stories, it’s more likely that your products will be displayed here. As well, Instagram curates the first listing as a “continue shopping” collection that contains products a user has previously viewed.

This functionality also comes with a built-in search engine to browse catalogs for products, creating a social commerce market akin to Amazon.

Here’s an example of how a shop tab looks.

2) Facebook

With 2.93 billion monthly active users, Facebook remains the largest social media platform in the world. Nearly 54% of Facebook users are aged 35 or older, making this social media platform geared toward a slightly older audience than other platforms. 

How to sell on Facebook

With Facebook Shops, retailers can create a fully customizable storefront on Facebook and import a product catalog from their existing ecommerce site. Because Facebook owns Instagram, it’s the same Commerce Manager used for both.

Similar to Instagram, once your catalog is uploaded you can include shoppable tags in posts to your brand’s Facebook page. Here’s an example from Mejuri.

As well, uploading your catalog creates a “view shop” button at the top of your page, which you can see here on Parade’s Facebook page.

When clicked, users can browse all your products and click to buy, either directly on Facebook or by being taken to the exact product page on your ecommerce website by a “shop now” button.

3) TikTok

TikTok is one of the newer social media platforms, but it's also one that has exploded in popularity, boasting 1 billion monthly active users as of 2021. As well, 80% of TikTok users are aged 16-34, making TikTok a great platform for reaching millennial and Gen-Z customers. 

In 2021 TikTok unveiled TikTok Shopping — a social commerce feature that allows brands to create a shop tab on their profile and import their product catalog so that users can purchase products within the app.

The downside is that the rollout has been slow and limited to certain countries. So far, users in the UK and some countries in Asia such as Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines have full access. Rollout began to US brands in 2022.

How to sell on TikTok

When active, TikTok Shopping creates a shop tab on your user profile, allowing you to display your catalog of products and the ability for your followers to shop directly on the app.

Here’s an example of the shop tab from Kylie Cosmetics:

4) Pinterest

As of 2022, Pinterest had 433 million worldwide monthly active users, with users aged 25-34 accounting for 37.4% of this total. 

Pinterest is unique in that it has been used as a shopping inspiration tool for a long time, so the transition to social commerce doesn’t seem too far fetched. In fact, 80% of Pinterest users report that they have discovered a new product or brand on the platform.

How to sell on Pinterest

While Pinterest doesn't offer the same degree of social commerce features as many platforms, Pinterest does allow retailers users to create product pins and catalogs that direct to their ecommerce site's checkout page. 

To do this, you’ll need to convert to a business account on Pinterest. From there, you’ll connect your ecommerce site and gain the ability to tag products. Pinterest has full instructions here.

Here’s an example from beauty brand Fenty of a pin that showcases a product. You can see on the right side that their setting power is a featured product, and from that button users can be directed to the product page on Fenty’s website to purchase.

5) Snapchat

One part messaging tool and one part social media platform, Snapchat has a little over 464 million monthly active users, and 39.6% of Snapchat users fall into the 18-24 age range. 

Snapchat allows business accounts to create a Snapchat shop where users can purchase products directly within the app, similar to Instagram and Facebook.

How to sell on Snapchat

Here’s a story from Shein, for example. As you can see this story includes a “shop” button at the bottom.

From there, users can see Shein’s catalog and shop directly on the app with buy buttons.

The most innovative social commerce feature that Snapchat has unveiled is augmented reality (AR) shopping — a feature that allows users to "try on" products using an AR filter. This requires technical expertise and you can read more about getting started here.

6) YouTube

Many might not think of YouTube as a social media platform, but it meets all the criteria. With 2.6 billion monthly active users, YouTube is second only to Facebook in terms of audience size. 

The average age of YouTube users is in the mid-20s, but the platform is popular among older demographics as well — 51% of U.S. adults 75 years and older use YouTube regularly. 

How to sell on YouTube

Recently, YouTube has unveiled a variety of social commerce features and partnerships, including product tags and livestream shopping. In particular, Shopify announced an integration in 2022 that connects your product catalog to YouTube.

You can find more information about how to get started here.

How to get started with social commerce

If your business doesn’t already have a social media presence, the thought of building profiles from scratch may seem daunting. However, the process is fairly straightforward — although it does require some time and patience. We’ll break it down into four steps:

1) Choose your platform(s)

First, create profiles on the social media platforms you wish to leverage. There are several high-traffic, mainstream platforms to choose from, but if you’re new to social media, you’re better off choosing one or two to start with.

Focus your efforts on just a couple of platforms rather than trying to cover all your bases at once.

2) Grow your audience

Once you choose the platforms you want to start with, you need to build your audience. 

It's much easier to generate sales when your content reaches thousands of users versus a few dozen, so focus on building an audience of engaged followers before you worry about how to generate social commerce sales.

3) Set up shop 

Next, you need to set up your social commerce shops. This process varies from platform to platform. 

Instagram, for instance, allows you to create an Instagram shopping feed with shoppable posts. These allow customers to browse images of your products and purchase them with a single click. 

Facebook, meanwhile, offers a feature called Facebook Shops where you can create a storefront optimized for mobile devices. Facebook Shops also connects your store with WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger for streamlined customer support.

4) Start marketing and selling

The final step is to start marketing and selling your products using proven social media marketing practices and leveraging provided metrics to fine-tune your approach. 

By staying on top of social commerce trends and experimenting with new marketing, sales, and customer support tactics, you can turn your brand's social media profiles into profit-generating storefronts.

📚 Recommended reading: Our ultimate guide to providing loyalty-building customer support on social media. 

Tips for optimizing your social media strategy for ecommerce

While the exact social commerce tools and features that you will have available will vary between platforms, there are a number of tips for optimizing your social commerce strategy that apply regardless of which platform you choose. 

If you want to start generating more sales directly on social media, here are the top strategies to employ:

Build a strong online community

Your first goal on any social media platform is to build followers. If you can build a large audience of engaged followers, other elements of your social commerce strategy will come easier. 

Growing your audience should be your primary focus before you even begin to start importing products and setting up your shop. But keep in mind that size alone is not the only factor that defines a valuable social media following. 

Take a look at 310 Nutrition’s online community, which shares recipes, nutrition advice, and more:

Engagement is highly important as well, and it’s essential to ensure that you provide your audience with engaging, informative, and entertaining content to keep them coming back for more.

When starting out, an organic social media marketing strategy is the best way to build followers. Post about your products, your sales, and find your brand’s voice. Engagement can be built by following other accounts, interacting with users in comments, and posting consistently. 

📚Recommended reading: Our guide to ecommerce customer community management.

Measure feedback

Most social media platforms provide plenty of tools for gauging your audience's response to your content in real-time — and you want to take advantage of these tools. 

Measuring audience feedback allows you to pinpoint the type of content that your followers respond to best so that you can develop a social media strategy that is optimized for both engagement and sales.

Create a set of KPIs, or goals, for yourself to measure performance. Follow metrics week over week, looking at:

• Follower count
• Comments
• Like or favorites
• Shares

While each platform has their own tools to measure these figures, a tool like Hootsuite combines them all into one place for easy viewing.

📚 Recommended reading: 

• 25 Customer Support Metrics To Measure Your Team’s Impact & How to Calculate
• Evaluating Your Customer Service Program: Why, Challenges, and KPIs That Matter

Talk directly with your customers

Your social media accounts should also be a place where you directly interact with your customers. Think of it as a vital channel for customer service and another way to create excellent customer experiences. 

First, engage with comments. It’s not uncommon for customers, or potential customers, to ask questions or raise issues in your comments. Responding to a question here could mean the difference between a sale and an abandoned cart.

Second, your direct messages should be open and monitored on all platforms. Customers will inevitably write in with questions or concerns instead of using a support email address and they’ll expect help.

A helpdesk like Gorgias streamlines this by pulling messages and comments on platforms like Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp right into the helpdesk, so you don’t have to check each platform individually. That means you don’t have to spend all day switching tabs.

Additionally, the Gorgias helpdesk integrates customer information like past purchases and allows you to quickly send product links, customizing every interaction to that unique customer.

Using this integration, Gorgias helps you respond quickly, build relationships, and provide pre-sales support to convert new customers. (Note: Gorgias no longer support Twitter interactions.)

📚 Read more: 

• Social Media Customer Service: How-To Guide & Useful Tools
• How to Track and Monitor Social Mentions
• 9 Tips to Improve Customer Service on Instagram

Integrate social sharing buttons into your website

Directing social media followers to your ecommerce site is one great way to leverage social media marketing, but the reverse is true as well. 

Integrating social sharing buttons into your website enables those who discover products on your website to share their discoveries with their social media followers, further growing your brand awareness and expanding its reach.

📚 Recommended reading: Our guide to ecommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Schedule your posts and post at the peak times

It's easy to understand how a post published at 3 a.m. (when the majority of your audience is sound asleep) probably won’t get the same engagement as a post published at 7 p.m. 

According to data from HubSpot, the afternoon hours are the peak times for social media posts, with most platforms experiencing peak traffic between 6-9 p.m. HubSpot also found Saturday is the best day of the week to publish social posts, while Monday is the worst.

The future of social commerce

We are already seeing glimpses of what the future holds for social commerce. Customers enjoy the purchase process of being able to browse products, make a purchase decision, contact customer support, and more directly within their favorite social media apps.

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are both poised to play a major role in the future of social commerce as well. Snapchat's AR filters for shopping is one example of what this might look like, but the possibilities are endless. 

Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, also unveiled their plans for the VR-powered “metaverse.” In the metaverse, social media users can interact with one another, play games, and shop for products within a virtual world.

But you should also know that these social commerce features are controlled by the whims of these platforms and changes are ongoing. Some are even stepping away from social commerce as it exists today.

For example, Instagram has experimented with removing the shop tab for some users, hiding it in the settings menu. Platforms are also rethinking what social commerce looks like after the pandemic online shopping boom.

Keeping up to date on industry news and changes will help you adapt your social commerce strategy as platforms change their tech offerings.

📚 Read more: Our list of the best Shopify apps for social media

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Use Gorgias to take your social commerce strategy to the next level

If you’re looking for tools to provide your social media shoppers with seamless customer support, Gorgias can help. With Gorgias, you can effortlessly turn your social media profiles into customer support channels to facilitate sales and boost retention. 

Best of all, Gorgias compiles all of your social media messages and mentions into one user-friendly dashboard, making it easy to manage multiple accounts from a single location. 

To learn more about how Gorgias empowers a seamless social commerce experience, check out our article on more ways to use social media to grow your store. 

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The trick to ecommerce is having great products and attracting a bunch of people to your website. Right? Not quite. 

Great products and brand awareness are important, but so are all the little details that make up your website’s shopping experience. Everything — from the way your products are categorized to the live chat widget (or lack thereof) — impacts how successfully you can turn browsers into buyers, also known as your site’s conversion rate. One of the most important of those elements is your online store’s shopping cart. 

In this article, we’ll explore everything that happens after a website visitor clicks “Add to cart,” including the reasons customers abandon carts and 14 shopping cart best practices to encourage customers to keep shopping and place an order.

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How damaging is cart abandonment for your brand’s revenue?

Shopping cart abandonment is when a customer adds items to their shopping cart on your website, but leaves before making the purchase. Recent data from the Baymard Institute shows that the average shopping cart abandonment rate is 69.82%. This means that about seven out of every 10 shoppers at your store will not click “purchase.” 

Baymard also crunched the numbers to find out that companies across the U.S. and Europe collectively lost out on $260 billion worth of revenue due to cart abandonment. This revenue could be recovered through a stronger checkout flow and cart design. 

What causes shoppers to abandon shopping carts?

The next layer of navigating how to address checkout abandonment issues revolves around reasons for abandonment, which run the gamut. Baymard’s research reveals the top reasons for cart abandonment:

Let’s dive into some of the top reasons.

Multi-step checkout processes 

A checkout process that requires the customer to go through multiple steps is one reason that customers abandoned their carts, as cited by the Baymard survey from late 2021. Of those surveyed, 17% say that they didn’t complete their purchase because the process was “too long or complicated.” 

It’s vital to get your shoppers to quickly find a checkout button that actually completes the purchase, in as few clicks and screens as possible. 

Gated checkout processes

If you require customers to create an account before checking out, you’re most likely losing some of them before checkout. Simply put, people don’t want to be forced into creating an account (that will most likely lead to emails they do not care for in their inbox) just to purchase a product from your company. In the Baymard study, 24% of consumers report “the site wanted me to create an account” as their top reason for abandoning during checkout. 

Even if customers do comply and create an account, they may be annoyed or frustrated by having to do so — which your company should avoid at all costs in order to ensure an excellent customer experience. 

Not enough payment options (or missing convenient options)

Another reason for cart abandonment cited in the Baymard survey was “not enough payment methods.” This could mean that an ecommerce company doesn’t accept certain credit cards or other payment options like PayPal.

When your online store accepts multiple payment methods, you are more likely to meet each customer’s individual expectations. This leads to a sense of convenience and a smoother customer experience. 

Lack of trust in the shopping cart’s security 

Most online shoppers want to feel a sense of trust before plugging their credit card details into any website. Baymard’s 2021 survey finds that 18% of customers say they abandoned their online cart because they did not feel that the ecommerce store was trustworthy. 

It’s important to make your customers feel secure, specifically when dealing with privacy and sensitive data like credit card numbers and personal information. Social proof like customer reviews on your products, as well as security guidelines like secure sockets layer (SSL) and payment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS), are a great way to bolster trust among first-time visitors. 

Surprise shipping charges or long delivery wait times

Finally, the most commonly cited reason for cart abandonment among consumers is surprise shipping costs or long delivery wait times. According to Baymard, “extra costs” and “delivery was too slow” made up 68% of survey responses. This shows just how much shipping can impact whether or not someone chooses to go through with ordering your product.

Related: Trying to improve your shipping experience? Check out our guides on shipping for ecommerce and how to offer free shipping. 

14 optimization tips for the best shopping cart experience

1. Offer the right payment options
2. Don’t require shoppers to create an account in order to buy 
3. Add “mini cart” functionality to keep your cart visible
4. Make product descriptions and thumbnails visible on the shopping cart page
5. Limit the customer information you collect
6. Provide total cost estimates during checkout
7. Use breadcrumbs to show the number of steps in your checkout process
8. Create an abandoned cart workflow automation
9. Give your customers multiple shipping options
10. Implement an auto-save feature for items in shoppers’ carts
11. Offer a live chat feature on the checkout page
12. Make it easy for customers to move between their cart and product pages
13. Use your shopping cart for upselling and cross-selling
14. Add a “Buy now” button to skip the shopping cart

Now that you know some of the top reasons customers are abandoning their carts, let’s look at some best practices you can implement to give customers a positive shopping cart experience — and lower your cart abandonment rate.

1) Offer the right payment options for your customers 

As mentioned, a lack of payment options is one reason customers abandon their online shopping carts, so ensuring your ecommerce website has options is vital. According to SaleCycle, the majority of online shoppers want the option to pay for purchases online with either a digital wallet (digital payments not attached to a card), credit card, debit card, or bank transfer. 

The more options you have available, the better. Additionally, some payment options can also make checkout faster and easier for customers, which also helps with cart abandonment rates. 

Pro tip

Be sure to think about which payment types will make the most sense for your customers and your business size. If you are just starting out and have a limited budget, consider starting with PayPal or Venmo. Once you start growing, expand to include all the major payment options: Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Apple Pay, PayPal, and maybe even a buy-now-pay-later option like Klarna or Afterpay. 

Also, consider investigating whether your ecommerce platform has express checkout options. Shopify, for example, has express checkout options that let people pay through services like Amazon so they can skip typing out contact, payment, and billing information. Here’s an example of express pay on CROSSNET’s website:

Read more about choosing payment options for your ecommerce business. 

2) Don’t require shoppers to create an account in order to buy 

Shoppers don't want to create an account in order to make a purchase, so eliminating this requirement (if you’re using it within your online store) can be a quick fix for boosting conversions. 

The National Retail Federation reports that 97% of cart abandonment is due to inconvenience. So, keep the shopping cart design as simple as possible — give customers the option to create or sign into an account, but also provide a guest checkout option with a prominent checkout button.

Pro tip

Give customers the option to create an account via social media or their Google account after they purchase. This taps into the convenience factor, and gives you a chance for future email marketing or customer loyalty programs. 

Also, if you have subscribe-and-save functionality, make the discount clear to customers throughout the checkout process — again, without making it mandatory. Olipop’s “Add to cart” option is a great example of advertising the better deal without sacrificing usability for the shopper:

3) Add “mini cart” functionality to your ecommerce site to keep your cart visible while browsing

Keeping a customer’s online shopping cart accessible while browsing is another best practice that can help decrease cart abandonment. A mini cart makes the shopping process much more seamless because customers can easily add products to their cart — or review current cart contents — in a drop-down and without being directed to a new page. This can help minimize potential website loading issues, which Baymard’s survey cites as a top reason that customers abandon their carts during checkout. 

Pro tip

Mini carts are usually a simple add-on, depending on which platform your online store is based. Both Shopify and WooCommerce offer mini cart options that you can easily add to your shop. If you’re looking for a brand that has a successful mini cart, check out fashion retailer Marine Layer. Here’s the drop-down that happens if you hover over the cart icon:

Looking for more Shopify-specific tips on abandoned cart recovery? Read more here.

4) Make product descriptions and thumbnails visible on the shopping cart page (where it makes sense) 

Adding your product details to customers’ carts can be extremely helpful — if it makes sense for your business. 

For example, if you sell power tools and a customer is purchasing new drill bits, they may want to double-check that the drill bits they put in their cart are the correct size. So, in order to keep them on the checkout page, include a brief description below the product name. This eliminates the need to go back to the main product page, which eliminates the potential for slow page loading and frustrated customers.

Pro tip

The product description on the checkout screen doesn’t need to be long or complicated — one or two solid sentences from the original product page will do. Or, if your company sells highly visual merchandise, a thumbnail — a picture’s worth a thousand words, after all. One store that add thumbnails to their shopping carts is Glamnetic:

5) Limit the customer information you collect to only the essentials

Everyone values their personal privacy, especially when shopping online. ROI Revolution reports that ”39% of consumers say they have maintained the same level of concern about their online privacy over the past year and 20.5% of consumers say they’re much more concerned about their online privacy compared to one year ago.” Only 8.6% of online shoppers say they’re less concerned now than they were a year ago. 

This is why it’s so important to only collect information from your customers that is absolutely necessary. In a typical shopping transaction, these essentials would include things like email address, phone number, and street address. In some cases, you might also ask for some basic demographic info that’s important to your company’s segmentation, such as gender and purchase habits. You may offer the option to keep customers’ credit cards on file, but we don’t recommend doing this without their permission. 

If customers do opt to keep their credit card information stored on your site, be sure to let them know exactly how this works. Most companies take advantage of encrypted online or cloud-based storage systems. Let customers know there are even regulations that dictate what you can and can’t do with your information. This will help put them at ease and show that your brand is trustworthy. 

Pro tip

Offer customers two-factor authentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA) when shopping on your site, which signals to your customers that you take their privacy seriously. Many companies have opted for MFA or 2FA in the past few years, and you can use Amazon Pay or Google Pay as a version of 2FA on your ecommerce site. 

6) Provide total cost estimates during checkout to reduce sticker shock

As pointed out earlier in this article, unexpected fees are cited as the most popular reason that customers abandon their carts before checkout. To avoid this, give customers an estimated subtotal before they get to the checkout screen. This can be especially important for larger-ticket items because shipping a $1,000 sofa will most likely come with a higher shipping fee (and more tax) than a box of clothing. 

Pro tip

When a customer is on a product page, include an option to enter their zip code to calculate a preview of tax and shipping before they click “add to cart.” Native Union does an excellent job of this on its website. They even break down the costs for various shipping options like standard and express delivery:

7) Use breadcrumbs (progress indicators) to show the number of steps in your checkout process

The breadcrumb feature can be used in many ways on websites but has a specific use for ecommerce checkout processes. Letting customers know how much time, or how many steps, they have left in the checkout process is important to ensure they complete their purchase. Progress indicators can be as simple as a little block of text on the checkout screen that says “1 of 3,” or can use graphics for more visual appeal.

Pro tip

Take this time to think about each step of your business’ checkout process and make it as simple as possible. The more steps a customer has to go through, the more chances you have to lose them. Shopify’s default checkout page has a clear progression from Cart > Information > Shipping > Payment, which you can see on Comfort One Shoes’ site:

8) Create an abandoned cart workflow automation for customers that leave items for later

Some ecommerce sites let customers add items to a wish list or “save for later” to reduce the number of times customers add items to a cart without plans to buy them in that shopping session. Regardless of whether you have that functionality, you should create a workflow for customers who leave items behind. 

This workflow could include things like email reminders, on-screen pop-ups, retargeting ads, and sending follow-up coupon codes. It’s important to keep in mind the specific goals of your ecommerce business. What may be right for some brands may not be right for yours. 

Pro tip

Timeliness is everything when it comes to your abandoned cart workflow. When customers are ready to buy, you must be there. Some sites use exit-intent pop-ups as a hail mary for customers about to abandon carts. And while this is effective, some customers find it disruptive. 

Consider instead adding live chat to your website, ideally with proactive functionality. Live chat can have an incredible impact on sales — Ohh Deer generates about $12,500 per quarter in sales through Gorgias’ live chat — because you can reach out to customers with certain order values in their cart to ask if they need support or offer a discount to stop them from leaving. 

"When you make sales thanks to your good service, customers will come back and recommend you. That's revenue-generating."

Alex Turner, Customer Experience Manager at Ohh Deer

Check out our guide to shopping cart recovery for more recommendations on winning back lost sales.

9) Give your customers multiple shipping options

Every customer has different expectations and needs when it comes to shipping. Offering robust shipping options expands the number of situations your ecommerce business can seamlessly respond to. Beyond helping to decrease your brand’s cart abandonment rate, providing various shipping options can lead to more sales as well as higher retention and customer satisfaction. 

Pro tip

Take into account your target customers’ needs and try to cater to every shipping scenario, which could include the following options:

• Flat-rate shipping (4-5 business days)
• Expedited shipping (3 business days)
• Next-day/overnight shipping (1-2 business days)
• Local pick up, especially if you have a large number of customers in the city where you operate

Regardless of your options, clarify the price as early as possible to avoid unwanted surprises. Here’s the clear layout of shipping costs on Sol de Janeiro’s website:

10) Implement an auto-save feature for items in shoppers’ carts

At this point, you know many of the reasons customers may abandon their shopping carts online. From frustration and slow page loading speed to simply being distracted, customers leave their carts a lot, so implementing an auto-save feature on your website can help decrease your shop's cart abandon rate. A customer may be distracted and leave your website, but then come back to it a few days later. When they reopen it, their saved cart will remind them of their previous intent to purchase. 

Pro tip

Tap into your website management software to see if an auto-save feature is available. It may be as easy as flipping a toggle. If you use Shopify, you can also save carts between visits so customers can retrieve their old carts when coming back to your site.

11) Offer a live chat feature on the checkout page for customer questions

Most customers (90%) expect an immediate response to their customer service inquiries, according to HubSpot. Being able to provide your customers with this support through a live chat feature can boost the overall customer experience, as well as improve your store’s cart abandonment rate. Even more, Kayako reports that 79% of businesses say offering a live chat feature positively impacted sales (including upsells), revenue, and customer loyalty.

Pro tip

Use Gorgias for live chat (and more). The live chat widget can seamlessly integrate with your Shopify store and provide a solution for customers who may have questions at the time of purchase to drive sales. You can even use chat campaigns to target certain customers — like those lingering on a checkout page — to see if they need information or a discount to complete the purchase:

Want to learn more about the power of live chat for ecommerce? Check out these lists:

• The best live chat apps (general)
• The best live chat apps for ecommerce
• The best live chat apps for Shopify
• 22 statistics about live chat

Alternatively, if you already have a live chat app in mind, learn how to install it into your Shopify store.

12) Make it easy for customers to move between their cart, product pages, and more in your online store 

Ensuring the design and user experience of your ecommerce shop is up to par is the last but extremely important best practice when it comes to lowering your cart abandonment rate.  You’ll want to ensure customers can move through all areas of your website with ease. 

Pro tip

Explore new features and add-ons that your website software offers. If you’re currently building everything yourself, we encourage you to check out how a tool like Shopify can drastically elevate your customers’ experience while not taking too much time away from your team. For inspiration from an online retailer who does this well, check out skincare brand Then I Met You. 

Related: Learn how to offer proactive customer service to improve your customer experience.

13) Use your shopping cart for upselling and cross-selling — with limits

Your shopping cart can be a good place to recommend additional products to browsers. This is especially true if some of your products require others for full functionality. 

As you can imagine, pushing items onto customers before they’ve even decided whether they want to make a purchase in the first place is dangerous. They could get annoyed and abandon the purchase altogether. So, if you do decide to add this to your store, do so strategically. For example, Little Poppy Co. uses in-cart recommendations to offer a discount and subscribe-and-save option, which many customers may appreciate.

Tools like In Cart Upsell and Cross Sell can activate this feature on your store. 

14) Add a “Buy now” call to action (CTA) button to skip the shopping cart altogether

As we described above, the shopping cart is a bit of a minefield. Customers can fall off at any second and decide not to buy anything or, worse, check out your competitor’s website. One way to avoid issues is to let shoppers skip the shopping cart altogether and let customers just buy the product. 

If you use Shopify, check out their article on Buy Buttons for more information, including some words of warning about the button’s shoddy functionality. 

Check out Loop Earplug’s website for a good example of a clear, visible button to skip the checkout process and buy now:

Check out our customer story on Loop Earplugs to learn how Gorgias helped them increase 43% of their revenue from CS.

“We’ve seen 43% increase in revenue from customer support since we launched pre-sales flows. Quick response flows give us the ability to build trust with our customers and that’s priceless. When customers get a quick and honest answer, they often end up buying more than one product in a short span of time. Seeing customers live the life we’re aiming to create for them in Loop Earplugs is extremely rewarding for us.”
‍‍- Milan Vanmarcke, Customer Service Manager at Loop Earplugs

3 amazing ecommerce shopping cart experiences to inspire you

Finally, let’s take a look at what we consider to be the gold standards of ecommerce shopping experiences. Don’t hesitate to take some ideas back for your online shop — they may be exactly what your ecommerce strategy needs.

Revolve

Clothing retailer Revolve is a top example of a clean, efficient customer checkout process. The brand doesn’t force customers to log in or sign up for an account in order to purchase — but does give the option. Revolve also provides a live chat option, as well as text and phone numbers to get a hold of a customer service rep should a question come up. 

Amazon

Amazon is another leading example of a shopping cart experience that covers a lot in a small amount of space. Though it may seem busy for some customers, Amazon features additional information about the product a customer is buying right in the checkout screen, such as the stock count (if there is a low number), eligibility for free shipping, and even information about if the product is Climate Pledge Friendly. 

Nike

Third, we’re highlighting the athletic wear brand Nike. The company takes a similarly minimalistic approach to Revolve, but is a top-tier example of breadcrumbing and providing estimated additional fees like shipping and tax. The brand also provides a product description on this page, which can be especially helpful when purchasing shoes. 

Take your ecommerce customer service to the next level with Gorgias

Providing a smooth shopping and purchasing experience can lead to a satisfying, stress-free customer experience. Ensuring a positive customer experience will lead to greater customer experience which has a huge impact on your revenue.

To make the process even more seamless, we recommend checking out Gorgias to manage all of your customer support in one place. The all-in-one platform was built specifically for ecommerce businesses and can integrate easily with other online shop platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento. Learn more about how Gorgias can optimize all customer interactions and streamline your business.

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Your social media presence serves many purposes, from creating a brand image to testing out new product ideas. And whatever type of social media posts your brand creates, one thing is certain: people are going to reach out to you there.   

Using social media as a support channel can be unwieldy and time consuming for ill-equipped teams. Customer inquiries pop up in many different places, like in the comments on your paid ads, in direct messages, or as comments on your posts. The tricky part is keeping up with the customer service issues that arise while still maintaining a positive, engaging presence. 

However, the benefits of social media customer service outweigh the negatives, especially with the right tools and approach. 

Below, learn how to leverage your social media channels for customer support in ways that stand out to your customers and support your team. 

What is social media customer service and how can it benefit your shop?

Social media customer service is when brands answer support queries through one or more social media platform. Support tickets often come in through direct messages (DMs) or as comments on paid ads or organic posts. This differs from social media marketing, as it’s a largely reactive type of engagement.   

How social media is used in customer service

Service interactions on social media usually happen:

1. As part of an omnichannel approach to meet customers where they are
2. To manage brand reputation and resolve public comments privately
3. To offer support in the format and on the channels people like to use 

1) As part of an omnichannel approach to meet customers where they are

Social media can be used as a way to further connect with your customers and potential customers in the spaces they’re already active in. When teams answer support across different channels that seamlessly connect, that’s part of an omnichannel customer service approach. And, according to research from Shopify, 58% of people claimed that their purchase decision was influenced by getting support on their preferred channel.  

2) To manage brand reputation and resolve public comments privately 

Beyond answering direct messages from customers on social media platforms, maintaining a brand presence on social media helps you keep tabs on mentions of your brand, as well as engage and provide customer support via comments or threads. 

Showing customers that your brand is available whenever they have an inquiry builds trust. In fact, 69% of Facebook users in the U.S. who message businesses report that it makes them feel more confident about the brand, according to Meta for Business.  

In addition, social media is a public form where anyone can view comments, whether they’re positive or negative. Everyone who looks at your brand’s social page will be able to take a look at what people are saying. Because of this, it can define what people think of you and change your brand’s perception. 

These customer queries get the most eyes on them by far as compared to a one-on-one channel like email, direct messages, interacting with a chatbot, or making a phone call.  

3) To offer support in the format and on the channels people like to use 

Not everyone wants to make a phone call when they need help. 

Shoppers are more likely to actually reach out to you if they can do it on a channel they like, as opposed to not reaching out and just being upset and posting about that publicly, telling their friends, or simply never purchasing from you again.  

📚Recommended reading: Should you delegate social media to your customer support team?

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Differences between social media customer service and traditional methods

It’s (sometimes) public

Customer support via social media differs from traditional email or phone support because it’s public, so your customer support team members’ responses are on display for others to see. 

While emails, phone calls, or direct messages are handled privately, Instagram comments, public tweets, or Facebook comments are public to your entire audience. The way your support team handles these customer interactions could influence your future sales and brand perception.  

High-volume requests across many channels can get lost

Customer service requests on social media can get out of hand quickly because they can come in through many different channels in many different ways. If your team isn’t using some level of automation or a tool to capture each query, it’s easy to lose comments and ignore upset customers who really need support. 

Each social media platform is different 

To provide excellent customer service on social media, your social media customer support reps have to consider the nuances of each social media platform as well. Depending on your brand, you may use LinkedIn, TikTok, or even Snapchat for customer service. Below, we focus on three of the most common social media channels.

Facebook (and Facebook Messenger)

According to research by the Pew Research Center, Facebook is the second most popular social media channel with 69% of US adults saying that they use it. The research center also found that Facebook is popular with all different demographics, so chances are you’ll find some of your target audience there. Because Facebook is such a large platform, it’s important that you have some sort of presence there. 

📚Recommended reading: Best practices for using Facebook Messenger for customer service

Twitter 

When answering customer questions on Twitter, opt for speed. Twitter is built on the idea of immediacy and short-form in-the-moment takes. According to a study conducted by Twitter, one in four people Tweet at a brand because they want a faster response. 

Note: Gorgias no longer supports Twitter interactions. But you can manage Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, SMS, and WhatsApp posts from within Gorgias.

Instagram 

Instagram has pivoted into a shopping platform. People are scrolling through family photos just as much as they’re shopping for items and discovering new ecommerce stores. According to Shopify’s Future of Commerce report, 30% of US internet users now make purchases without leaving the social platform they’re on. Now, Instagram claims that half of users use Instagram Shopping to make a purchase weekly. 

These shoppers need to be able to get support in-app because they want to make purchases without exiting the app as well. If your business doesn’t offer support on Instagram, you could lose sales. 

📚Recommended reading: 9 Tips to Improve Customer Service on Instagram

5 strategies to improve your social media customer care

There are four major strategies you can implement in order to use your social media customer service channels in the most successful ways possible. 

1) Have genuine conversations with your customers 

As mentioned above, social media is casual and customers will reach out on social media instead of a traditional method because they want a genuine answer without the formalness of an email. Use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, or even WhatsApp to build relationships with your customers by having engaging conversations.

When a customer feels that your brand is being genuine they are more likely to trust you, become a loyal customer, and write a review or recommend your brand to their family and friends. This can lead to more new customers because 60% of consumers believe customer reviews are trustworthy, according to HubSpot Research. Even more, SuperOffice finds that 86% of customers are ready to pay more if it means they get a better customer experience. What all of this means is that building relationships with each and every customer will lead to the further success of your brand. 

📚Recommended reading: The Ultimate Guide to Personalized Customer Service

2) Move conversations into direct messages  

When you’re replying quickly to a lot of questions, it's sometimes easy to forget that you’re essentially in a public forum. Make sure you have systems in place to prevent customers’ personal information like phone numbers, shipping addresses, or order numbers from being viewed by the whole internet. Additionally, in the event of more complicated issues, you can comment publicly and ask the customer to private message (DM) you to help them resolve their issue. This shows that your brand is responsive to customer comments, but also that you value your customers’ privacy.

If you’re using a helpdesk like Gorgias, you can send and receive DMs on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger from right within your helpdesk. You can create a template, called a Macro in Gorgias, for moving public social media conversations to DMs.

📚Recommended reading: Your Live Chat Support Guide: Benefits, Best Practices, and Helpful Tools

3) Share self-service style content

Another great use for your brand’s social media account is sharing self-service content. Oftentimes, customers ask the same questions over and over again. To help them get their questions answered quickly and efficiently, it can be beneficial to track which questions are very common and put together a document or self-service page to direct them to. 

Information that can be common to include in this type of document is contact information, return policy information, shipping information, and location information if your brand has brick-and-mortar locations. This proactive information also helps keep customer support freed up for the more complicated, in-depth customer inquiries coming through social media. 

Consider sharing your most popular FAQ page on social media

Though it can be extremely beneficial to direct customers on social media to a separate webpage that allows for self-service options, consider sharing your most popular FAQs on social channels. This will create more ease of use for customers and potentially get their questions answered even quicker. 

4) Create a handle specifically for customer service support

Depending on the size of your business, it may be a good idea to consider creating separate social media handles dedicated to customer support. This can be especially helpful for customers who have specific support needs. You can cross-promote your two different social pages on both accounts for ease of use. This way customers will be able to identify where to go for the quickest answer. In the event that a customer contacts the wrong social media account, it is important that a customer service rep responds to them from the correct account. This way, they’ll know where to reach out in the future. 

This practice can also be beneficial for your internal teams, if you have two different teams within your organization managing social media. For example, your marketing team may be running ads and posting content, while your customer success team is sifting through comments and messages to tend to customers’ needs. Having two separate accounts can make it way easier on your internal teams, as well as keep everything more organized.  

5) Reply quickly to exceed customer expectations

As mentioned previously, quick responses are vital to a great customer service experience. This is especially true in the context of social customer service. Social media moves extremely fast, and customers expect speedy replies. 

The longer a customer service agent waits to reply, the less likely the customer will be satisfied with the support you provide. However, it can be a tricky balance to respond quickly (which you can measure with metrics like average response time and resolution time) while also maintaining quality (which you can measure with metrics like customer satisfaction or net promoter score). 

If you’re first starting out with customer service on social media, it may be helpful to understand what your customer base expects. To do this, you can consider asking them to fill out surveys. Surveys can also be used to continuously track customer satisfaction. 

📚 Recommeded reading: Our list of the most important customer support metrics to track.

Pro tip: Aim to respond within 15 minutes (if possible)

This can be difficult outside of business hours, but if you have customer care team members who already work at night or on the weekends, this could help immensely. You can also dedicate space in your social profile’s bio to business hours and typical response times. This is a great way to manage expectations if you have a smaller team or are in an extremely busy time period. 

How Gorgias helps ecommerce stores offer helpful, efficient customer service on social media

When it comes to support, social media management gets challenging quickly. Even though your marketing team could attempt to keep up with comments or messages that require support, as your brand grows, it’ll only get harder. 

A helpdesk like Gorgias has functionality that helps you to keep track of all social support mentions in one place, lets you create pre-written templates for common questions, and can even automate responses or like and hide posts on your behalf. It helps create workflow automations for your team to deal with high amounts of volume. 

What can you respond to from within Gorgias?

Before you implement a helpdesk like Gorgias, you’ll likely want to let your social team research what kind of responses do and don’t work for your target audience, and then start getting good results. Then, that’s where Gorgias comes in: Take those learnings, manufacture efficiency with Gorgias, and pass the support side of the channel onto your support team to set channels more on autopilot. 

Here’s what you can respond to on each channel from Gorgias’s central platform. 

• Facebook and messenger: Respond to comments, ad comments, mentions where you’re tagged, and direct messages.  
• Instagram: Respond to Instagram messages, comments, ad comments, and mentions from posts and Stories. 
• WhatsApp: Respond to WhatsApp messages and calls.

Leverage autoresponses 

Especially on paid ads, sometimes there are just too many comments for a small team to manage without letting support quality falter.

Gorgias lets you autorespond to posts based on sentiment, so you can like promoter posts or auto hide angry or inappropriate comments. Auto-liking shows engagement without spending tons of time on going through each post on every channel daily.  

This has helped themed party apparel brand Shinesty increase revenue. “The Facebook ad commenting has been very interesting,” says CX Manager Cody Szymanski. “People have been converting right there thanks to a simple social interaction.”

See all customer interactions in one central place 

“Having quick access to the side bar is super convenient and helps us turn our support agents into sales people. For instance, if a potential customer asks a question about sizing, the agent can quickly have a look at their previous order info,” the team at MNML shared. 

This way, you can also see the customer’s entire history, including order info, past support interactions, and comments on social channels. 

Create Macros for common social interactions

Most likely, you’ll start to see the same questions or comments come in across social channels. Gorgias lets you create Macros, or templates, for the most common customer service messages you get on social media. This saves time for your support team and gets resolutions to your customers faster. 

Like a Facebook comment, send a shipping status in a private Instagram message, or answer questions on Instagram – all from Gorgias’s centralized helpdesk.

Essential tools for social media customer service

Now that you have some solid social media customer service strategies, the next step is to understand how to streamline the process through social media customer service tools. Below we’ll cover how Gorgias, Chatdesk, Gatsby, ShopMessage, and Octane AI could help your brand. 

Use Gorgias for efficient customer support

Gorgias is an all-in-one customer service platform built specifically for ecommerce brands that seamlessly integrates with your entire stack (Shopify and Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, and Magento). 

Through the platform, you can manage all of your organization’s customer service channels in real time, from live chat to email to social media. When it comes to social media specifically, there are many integrations Gorgias has that can allow your team to transition to social media customer service while keeping sales flowing and without slowing down support. 

Learn more about how ‎Gorgias can help you manage social media customer service with ease.

Chatdesk

Chatdesk is a social media monitoring app that allows your customer support team members to manage social moderation across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. It also integrates with email and chat.

Gorgias’ Chatdesk integration could be perfect for your brand if you strive to respond quickly — and around the clock — to all your Facebook comments, Instagram comments, DMs, and more. The app even allows for in-depth response personalization for your U.S.-based super fans.

Related: Our list of the best social media integrations for Shopify.

Gatsby

The next tool within Gorgias that will help your brand with social media customer care is Gatsby. Gatsby is a type of social listening app that allows your customer success team to view and track insights specifically on Instagram when responding to tickets, as well as track mentions and engagement for your brand. This tool can also be used to automate ecommerce influencer workflows

Here’s how it could work for you: With Gorgias and Gatsby integration, the tools can help you identify influential fans among your customer base. So, if someone is reaching out to support, you’ll be able to see if they are of “influencer status” thus, taking into account how they should be prioritized. This information can also be extremely valuable if you’re running customer engagement or customer satisfaction surveys.

ShopMessage

If your organization is heavy on Facebook Messenger — or if you’re hoping to expand in that area — ShopMessage could be a worthwhile tool you can integrate within your already-existing Gorgias platform. This tool sends messages to customers that can drive sales. It can contact customers via Facebook Messenger about things like abandoned carts, browser abandonment, welcome communications, upsells, shipping notifications, and custom Messenger menus. 

ShopMessage also has the capabilities to help your customer success team with Facebook Messenger Marketing by making it simple to set up automatic, personalized messages to your customers. 

Octane AI

Octane AI works as a messenger bot platform to help you and your team automate your brand’s conversations on social media channels. It works like this: When a customer sends a message to your brand via social media, Octane AI will automatically create an open ticket in Gorgias.

This means it’s simpler than ever to respond to your customers as quickly as possible. Having all your messages from various social networks in one place will also help prevent any from slipping through the cracks, thus creating an amazing customer experience.

Learn more about how Gorgias and Octane AI integrate.

Real-life examples of social media customer service

Finally, to complete your understanding of social media customer service, we’ve rounded up some real-life examples of companies using social media for customer service. We hope these leaders of industry can inspire your future strategies. 

Graza 

Trendy squeezable olive oil shop Graza has become the choice for influencers filming content in their kitchens. The fun bottles are filled with liquid gold: high quality olive oil for sizzling and drizzling. With 24k followers on Instagram, the brand is growing, and its audience is highly engaged. 

Recently, the brand ran a big promotion — but a loyal customer missed out because they had made a big order before the sale started. Graza responded to their comment, asked them to send in a DM, and implied that they would honor the promotion on that order. 

Graza uses Gorgias to help manage their social media interactions at scale. 

Nike

Nike currently has 9 million followers on its main Twitter page, @Nike, and about 202,000 followers on its customer service Twitter page, @NikeService. Nike is a perfect example of a brand utilizing both types of social media accounts to its advantage. For example, the brand often receives complaints from upset customers on its main Twitter account, but responds to the customer with its @NikeService account. 

Here’s an example of a recent Twitter exchange where Nike handled a negative comment from an unhappy customer with ease and professionalism. 

GoPro

Technology company known for its action cameras, GoPro is another great example of solid social media customer service. The brand doesn’t have dedicated customer service accounts on social media, but is highly active and quick to respond to customers posing questions in the comments on their Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook pages. 

For technology companies especially, it’s highly beneficial to have customer success reps who can answer customer questions with precision and accuracy. However, regardless of the industry your company is in, quality should always be a priority when responding to customers on social media. This also helps signal to other customers that you take your social media seriously, thus making others feel more comfortable to reach out there if they have a question or concern. 

Here’s one recent example of an in-depth response to a vague GoPro customer inquiry. 

Starbucks

Beyond staying on top of customer inquiries and troubleshooting on social media, the opportunity social media presents when it comes to building customer loyalty and brand identity can’t be overstated. Starbucks is a great example of a brand that is doing just this. The company has a distinct voice on all of its social media pages (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok) as it interacts with customers on a daily basis. Even something as simple as a heart emoji on Instagram comments, or a quick, sweet encouragement when a customer comments about how much they love a signature Starbucks creation can do a lot to create a brand that customers want to interact with. This also helps customers feel more connected to the brand. 

Starbucks also takes this approach further when it comes to responding to customer suggestions. For example, the Facebook post below shows a concerned customer sharing their ideas about creating more accessible Starbucks stores after the brand shared a post about its commitment to inclusivity and accessibility. Starbucks responds promptly and thanks the customer along with more information about how the company is sticking to its inclusivity and accessibility goals. 

Wayfair

Online home decor and furniture retailer Wayfair is another brand with standout social media customer service chops. Though the brand doesn’t have separate customer service social media channels, it is constantly keeping up with customer comments. Wayfair currently has 78,000 followers on Twitter, over 7 million likes on Facebook, and 1.7 million followers on Instagram. 

Through its social channels, the company displays another great way to interact with customers on social media about its products. Because the brand sells home goods, many social posts are interior design photos featuring their furniture, which elicits a lot of customer questions about which pieces are which, and where they can purchase them. Wayfair does a great job of responding to customers’ product questions with clear and concise information. Take a look at one example below:

Xbox

Lastly, we want to highlight the video game console company Xbox. The worldwide success of the company means there are also a lot of customers who have questions and want their voices heard. Xbox does a great job responding to customer complaints and questions via Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, however, the brand also makes it a point to have some fun with their responses, too — further connecting with customers on a personal level. 

It can be really challenging for massive brands to show personality and remind customers that there are people behind the scenes who actually care and like to have fun, but social media is the perfect channel to make this fact known. The brand recently launched a marketing campaign featuring actor Andre Braugher where he is promoting Xbox’s new All Access monthly subscription service. The video was posted to all of Xbox’s social channels, and the brand took the opportunity to connect with customers in the comments.

Here are a few snapshots of how they are doing it:

Enhance your social media customer service with Gorgias 

From troubleshooting customer issues and answering their questions to simply showing off your brand's personality, social media customer service can be an extremely effective avenue to explore to boost your company’s customer experience quality.

Jumping into social media customer service for the first time can be exciting but also a lot of work, so to help make the process a bit easier, we recommend checking out Gorgias for an all-in-one solution for your customer service team that also has standout live chat tools and amazing integrations.

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Learn more about Gorgias and how you can get started.arn more about Gorgias and how you can get started.

As a Talent Acquisition Specialist, I firmly believe talent sourcing is a crucial component of recruitment. It involves proactively reaching out to good-fit candidates to broaden your talent pool and make key connections well in advance, rather than just waiting for the perfect person to find and apply to job postings once they go live.

Talent sourcing helps us at Gorgias cut through application noise and get the highest quality candidates possible. Our outreach emails for Engineering positions, one of the most challenging roles to fill, see 26%-46% response rates. And in this deeply competitive labor market, getting in contact with those gem candidates is especially important. 

In this article, we’ll discuss the merits of talent sourcing as a hiring strategy, as well as the tools and tactics we use for talent sourcing at Gorgias.

The state of the hiring market in Q1 2022 (post-pandemic)

The state of the hiring market in 2022 is worrisome, to say the least. It seems like every single company has at least 10 open roles, and they’re all competing over the same pool of top-notch candidates.

Let’s take a step back and look at the last couple of years. Compared to Q1 2020, iCIMS reports job openings in Q1 2021 are up by 86%, hires are up by 45%, and job applications are down by 11%.

Meanwhile, 78% of companies report being unable to find enough talented candidates in the market to fill their open roles. Why? As we mentioned above, the labor market has tightened. This means that naturally, there are more jobs open than people to fill them, which consequently makes hiring even harder.

2022 continues these trends. There are now a record 5 million more job openings than unemployed people in the US, according to this article published by CNBC (which contains many top takeaways from the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.)

Also, like always, certain roles are particularly difficult to fill right now. Full-stack engineers are most in-demand right now, meaning they’re especially difficult to find and hire. Fortunately, a shift toward hiring remote talent in smaller regions is taking place. Software engineers who are open to remote work receive 20% more interview requests.

Part of appealing to this pool of in-demand talent is understanding software engineers’ top priorities. Here’s below the full list of the biggest motivators for software engineers, according to the 2022 State of Software Engineers Report: 

These motivators are valuable insights because they can help you market your open roles (and, to get back to the topic, talent sourcing outreach) more sharply. 

What exactly is talent sourcing?

There are differing opinions about the exact definition of talent sourcing. But the basic definition of talent sourcing is engaging candidates who are not active applicants. We call the targets of talent sourcing “passive talent,” which excludes candidates who apply traditionally, through a job posting.

For us, the goal of talent sourcing is to build a pipeline of talent that operates throughout the year as a proactive approach to the company’s hiring needs. Sourcing allows us to connect with potential fits long before a need develops.  Considering that hiring a new employee can take anywhere from a week to several months, getting a head start on promising candidates is a great long-term strategy.

Why do we believe talent sourcing is an essential best practice?

In Q1 2022, it took our team an average of 53 days to extend an offer. In Q2, we were able to send out offers in 39 days thanks in part to talent sourcing. Therefore, we managed to speed up the process of extending an offer by 26% thanks to talent sourcing.

We looked at some statistics outside of Gorgias and here’s what we found: 70% of the world's workforce are passive candidates, and 86% of the most qualified candidates for your open positions are already employed, hence not actively looking for a job. That said, LinkedIn has found that 90% of the professionals active on their platform would like to hear about career opportunities.

Talent sourcing helps bridge the gap between the companies hiring and passive candidates (which, again, make up 70% of the workforce). We can build relationships with promising talent well before we’re urgently looking to make a hire. 

Gem found that talent sourcing is the second most important recruiting trend (after diversity recruiting), according to their 2022 Recruiting Trends: Data-Driven Recruiting. 

The impact of talent sourcing on key hiring metrics

Why exactly is talent sourcing such a prominent trend? Because it’s a strategic approach to improve many of the most important metrics a recruiting team pays attention to.

Time to hire

Talent sourcing can improve your time to hire because you can start refining a pool of candidates well before you have a live job ad. For us, one of the best tactics was to use outreach to identify a pool of talent that uses our tech stack. That way, when you post an engineering, product management, or non-tech role, you don’t have to source from scratch and filter out candidates because of basic misalignments.

Once a job posting goes live, our team has a huge headstart (and can therefore crush previous time-to-hire metrics). Instead of going to LinkedIn and starting a search from scratch, I would go to our refined pool of (currently, but forever growing) 111K candidates that match our company’s needs, tech stack, or overall preferences and start my search there.

Candidate quality

Talent sourcing helps us create a pool of pre-vetted candidates, so we’re never in a situation of having to accept a mediocre candidate because of a time crunch and lack of inbound interest.

Also, when a high-potential candidate doesn’t end up receiving (or accepting) an offer, they go back into our talent pool so we can potentially find another opportunity to work with that high-quality candidate.

Diverse hiring

We use Gem for robust top-of-funnel diversity reporting. The tool lets us deep dive into our natural sourcing tendencies and analyze passthrough rates across demographics like gender. This helps us point out some of the unconscious biases we each might have, so we can keep diversity and inclusivity in mind, implement action items, and source a diverse and strong team.

Our approach to building a Talent Pool

Explore our ATS for candidates we want to re-engage

As you likely know, a candidate’s potential (and journey with your company) doesn’t necessarily come to an end after a rejection. To make the most of high-quality candidates who have already gone through our screening once, we check out junior candidates we talked to 2+ years ago and marked as under-qualified. We do the same with candidates who have kept warm after rejection and candidates who withdrew from the process because they took another offer.

These candidates have already expressed an interest in our company and therefore get consideration to introduce into our ongoing talent pool.

Optimize our recruiting tech stack for searchability

One of our most helpful tools is HireSweet. The tool enables us to explore all of the 4,000 candidates who live in our ATS much easier than just searching the database. One of the best features is that HireSweet allows us to find candidates that may have switched careers completely but live in our ATS under an old position.

But the question still stands: how do we expand our talent pool to 111K people?

Source, scrape, and upload a massive number of leads

We don’t reach out to leads by hand: we contact them in bulk by sourcing and scraping. Before we explain our process, the important thing to keep in mind is that your search and bulk leads import should always resonate with the company’s hiring strategy. Simply put, we don’t do volume sourcing for the sake of doing high volume.

Bulk imports can help you in a few ways:

1. While searching for candidates, you want to keep profiles that are not an exact fit so you can find them when a better-fit role comes along
2. You want to reach out to a higher volume of leads
3. You want to anticipate and pre-source for the future

Here’s an example of how we might pre-source our industry to collect a high volume of good-fit names:

• Find a list of start-ups (related to your industry if you want to be more precise)
• Break it down per country
• Find the companies’ LinkedIn pages (with automation, if possible)
• Scrape the “people” section of said pages
• Clean the data, and import it into your 3rd party tool to enrich it
• All employees that mentioned working for the companies you’re targeting are now in your talent pool

We use the following four tools to execute the process described above:

LinkedIn will limit the number of profiles you can scrape each day. If that’s the case, you can set up bot automation to run multiple times a day. With fewer profiles scrapped more frequently, you can stay under the radar.

Additional ways to improve your talent sourcing and recruitment marketing

Did you know that 66% of people who changed jobs were aware of the company they joined before they applied? That’s why we encourage you to do everything you can (with the resources and buy-in you have) to take a proactive approach to your talent strategy. Some more tactics include:

Create clear, engaging outbound messaging 

A well-written message tailored to each candidate (or at least each role) is a terrific approach to draw top talent in, keep them interested, and persuade them to discover more about the company.

At Gorgias, we do our best to include the relevant information without plopping an entire job ad in the first message. We typically try and highlight a couple of unique features (including compensation, which we share with our SaaS calculator).

Encourage your non-recruiting team to source talent

Talent sourcing doesn’t just need to be a recruiter activity. We encourage employee ambassadorship, wherein the entire company is invited to source talent for live and upcoming roles. (They aren’t scraping LinkedIn, but can refer candidates our way and spread the word.)

When employees establish a direct relationship with candidates, they can provide a meaningful testimonial and sneak peek into the company’s culture.

Engaging passive candidates involves more effort than engaging active candidates because you have to persuade someone to be interested. But the effort is worthwhile: at the very least, you spread the word about the company.

Speaking of engaging your team, check out our article of five tips to engage a hybrid or distributed team. 

Let us know your take on talent sourcing

At Gorgias, we managed to reach a 26%-46% response rate for our outreach emails for Engineering positions.

Even though recruiting and sourcing tactics constantly evolve, the mindset is still the same:

• Grab candidates’ attention
• Engage with them in a clear, helpful way
• Build relationships that make great placements easier in the longterm

Top talent is in high demand, and competition for their attention is severe. That’s why we need to establish a presence wherever potential candidates are — starting with their Inbox.

We’re hungry for lifelong learning and growth, so we want to hear from all the recruiters and sourcers out there. What’s your take on talent sourcing? How are you approaching it in your company? What can we learn from your practice?

Send me an email and let us know!

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At Gorgias we've been very fortunate to work with some amazing people who did their internship with us:

Amit Poonia
Astrid Parmentier
Emilie Drouin
Hadrien de Lamotte
Ram Goli

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Thank you all for your work!

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Their contributions big and small make an indispensable part of what Gorgias is today and what it will be in the future. We are very grateful for their hard work, and we want to continue working with them after they finish their studies. To make returning more attractive for them, we've decided to take into account their stock option vesting period if they ever decide to return as full-time employees.

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What exactly does this mean?

Interns that decide to return to Gorgias within a limited amount of time and choose to take our stock options offer upon the start of their full-time employment will have an accelerated schedule of their stock option vesting period. The offer will be judged case by case with our board's approval.

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Let's take the example from our friends at Cockroach Labs (which this decision was inspired from):

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For example, our standard option vesting schedule is that 25% of the stock options vests after 12 months of service from an employee’s start date (the “cliff”), and the remaining option vests in equal installments over the following 36 months of continuous service. However, if an intern spent four months with us, on their hire date, they would only have eight months until they hit their one-year cliff date and vest 25%.

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We hope that by doing so, we're showing that we're taking their time seriously and we show our intention to work with them beyond their internship.

SMS is a convenient way for customers to contact your brand and receive fast support. It’s no wonder it’s one of the top five channels that consumers expect to engage with brands, alongside email, voice, website, and in-person. 

Every Gorgias plan now includes two-way SMS at no additional cost, making it easy for your brand to start offering this conversational channel.

Why offer SMS support?

There are many reasons to offer customer service messaging, but here are the top four:

It’s fast and conversational

SMS is a conversational, real-time channel. The benefit of this is that customers tend to keep the conversation short and reply quickly to follow-up questions, meaning your agents can resolve the situation quickly, too. 

Customers can contact you while they’re “on the go” 

Most people keep their phone with them everywhere they go. With SMS, it’s easy for customers to start the conversation and follow-up as they move throughout their day, instead of feeling stuck to a chat conversation on their laptop. 

It’s natural for younger customers

Sending text messages feels like you’re texting a friend, even if it’s actually between customers and your brand. Younger clientele will feel natural using this support channel, and it can even help you build that friendly-feeling into your brand perception. 

It makes sending photos back and forth easy

Does your refund or return policy require photo evidence to kick off the process? If your customers ever need to send pictures of damaged items or wrong products, SMS is the perfect channel because they’re probably taking those photos on their phone anyway. 

Still not sure if SMS is a support channel your brand should prioritize? Try it for 2 weeks. Because SMS is included in every Gorgias plan, it’s easy to turn off if you decide it isn’t right. 

Recommended reading: Our list of 60+ fascinating customer service statistics.

How to add SMS to your helpdesk 

You’ll need two things to get started with Gorgias SMS. (Don’t worry, they’re both quick!) 

If you’re new here, get started on the  Gorgias helpdesk. It only takes a few minutes to create an account, and you can always book a call with our sales team if you have questions. 

The second is a Gorgias-owned phone number, meaning you either created it in Gorgias or ported it from your previous phone provider. You can do both of these actions in Settings > Phone Numbers. 

Note: SMS is currently only available for US, UK, and Canadian numbers. 

Once your phone number is ready in Gorgias, you can add the SMS integration to it. You can do this from Settings > Integrations > SMS. 

Once the integration is active, you’re ready to start replying to SMS conversations from your customers. 

To tell your customers they can now text your brand, we recommend adding “Text us,” plus your phone number, in some or all of these places: 

• The footer of your website
• The “Contact Us” page of your website
• Your Gorgias Help Center
• Transactional emails (order confirmation, return initiated, etc.)

4 automation Rules to help you get started 

Below are four top automation rules to take full advantage of SMS customer service. We also have a full guide on customer service messaging that includes templates and macros to upgrade your SMS support.

Auto-tag with “SMS”

SMS is an official channel in Gorgias, meaning you can see SMS-specific stats or create SMS-specific Views out of the box. There may be times when you also want to Tag tickets with “SMS” however, in which case you can do so with a Rule like this: 

Auto-assign to a real-time team

SMS is a fast, conversational channel, so you’ll want to assign these tickets to agents that can keep up with the pace. If you have a dedicated chat team, they’ll be naturals at answering questions via SMS, as well. Here’s a Rule that will automatically assign SMS tickets to a specific team. 

Auto-reply: Message received

When customers text your brand, they’ll expect a fast response. In order to buy your agents some time, we recommend sending an auto-response to let the customer know their message has been received and an agent will be with them shortly. This will also give them confidence that the text message did in fact go through, so they don’t follow-up right away. 

Auto-reply: Order status

Whenever you add a new communication channel for your customers, you should consider how you’ll respond to WISMO (“Where is my order?”) questions on it. With SMS, you’ll want to keep the length of your reply in mind so you’re not sending an insanely long text message back to customers. We recommend creating a Rule that can A) make sure the reply follows the best format for SMS and B) save your agents from having to answer these WISMO questions manually.

Next: Connect your SMS marketing apps for a seamless experience

Gorgias SMS empowers your brand to keep the conversation going on SMS, even when your customers are on the go.

We also integrate with SMS marketing apps, making it easier for agents to answer promotion replies from one workspace. They can work more efficiently while turning SMS questions into opportunities for better customer value. 

In the Gorgias App Store, you’ll find some of the top ecommerce integration partners like Klaviyo, Attentive, Postscript, and more. 

If your brand is using any of these apps to drive sales via SMS, we highly recommend integrating with Gorgias so your team can work more efficiently toward your revenue goals. When SMS marketing and SMS customer service work in tandem, they are far more powerful.

Want to see an example of a brand that successfully launched SMS customer support and effectively drove customers to use the new channel? Check out our playbook of Berkey Filters, an ecommerce merchant that did just that.

Ready to get started with this conversational support channel? Add SMS to your Gorgias helpdesk today or book a call with our team to learn more.

Did you know that back in 2019 ecommerce sales worldwide were $3.5 trillion?

We don’t have the data for 2020 yet, but worldwide sales last year were projected to reach $4.2 trillion, though they have almost certainly exceeded that due to the pandemic.

And the ecommerce market is likely to continue growing in the foreseeable future, with the projected worldwide sales for 2022 being $6.54 trillion.

To ensure that your company continues to get a piece of the ever-expanding ecommerce pie, you must research, think strategically and plan your objectives annually by creating a roadmap.

In this post, we are going to discuss exactly how to create an ecommerce roadmap. It will display where your ecommerce store is going and the steps it will take to get there.

We will cover:

• Setting goals
• Creating a budget
• Building a team
• Managing that team
• Project planning
  

…and more.

Let’s dive in.

Analyze Your 2020 Performance

Okay, so before we start discussing the 2021 roadmap, it’s important to look back at the previous year. 

Seasonal Trends and Peak Periods From the Previous Year

Every ecommerce business is subject to seasonality.

Some are seasonal in nature, such as those that sell winter sports gear.

But the vast majority of them see spikes in sales on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and winter holidays.

You need to analyze the performance of the entire previous year if you want to properly prepare for 2021.

• Which month was the busiest?
• Which month was the least busy?
• Which products brought in the most sales during specific seasons?
  

Understanding this will help you create a more robust budget that won’t be thrown off by the seasonal ebb and flow of sales.

Moreover, once you know which periods resulted in the biggest increase in sales, you will be able to allocate your marketing spend more effectively. Tim Katz, Co-Founder of DYODE explains why this is important:

“Ensure that you have your merchandise, marketing communications, and project calendar planned out for the year; while this may seem like a trivial task it is a helpful habit to ensure cross-functional partners are aligned and in sync to support your growth. Look to refresh your remarketing efforts with relevant creative and messages and exclusive content and offers in order to ensure you are maximizing your most loyal audience.”

He continues:

“As online competition increases so does the cost of acquisition. Because of this, you should focus on nurturing your biggest fans with exclusive content, product, and communication. This is a new world that we live in and you should continue to evaluate your branding and product mix in order to stay relevant.”

Which of Your Channels Were Strongest/Weakest and Why?

Look at the campaigns you ran in the previous year and what marketing channels they utilized. 

You need to figure out which of these marketing channels are the right ones to get your store the most ROI. Marketing channels can range from search engine optimization, PPC, social media, referrals, email and more.

Ask yourself:

• Which marketing channels brought the most sales?
  

• Which marketing channels brought the least sales?
  

You may want to apply the Pareto principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, which states that:

For many outcomes roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes.

The odds are that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your marketing channels while only 20% of your sales come from the remaining 80% of marketing channels.

Once you have identified the 20% of the marketing channels that generate 80% of your sales, consider allocating a significant amount of your marketing budget there.

Note: the exact ratio may be different, but a few marketing channels are likely producing disproportionate results. You want to double down on them.

Set Long Term and Short Term Goals for Your Ecommerce Store

Now that you have analyzed the previous year’s performance, it’s time to set goals for 2021.

Make Sure That Your Goals Are SMART

Arguably the most common mistake that people make when setting goals is being too vague.

That’s why it’s so important to set SMART goals.

SMART is an acronym that stands for:

• Specific. What exactly are you trying to achieve?
• Measurable. How will you measure whether you have achieved?
• Achievable. Is it realistic?
• Relevant. How does it fit into the big picture?
• Time-bound. By when do you intend to achieve it?

For example:

Instead of saying that you want to “make more money”, you can set a goal to “increase the annual profit by 25%”.

Why You Need Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Which metrics should you use to measure your progress towards your goals?

That’s where the Key Performance Indicators, also known as KPIs, come in. 

Here’s the KPI definition:

A KPI is a business metric that is directly relevant to a specific business goal.

For example:

Let’s say that your goal is to increase the annual profit by 25%. 

Obviously, the main KPI here is the annual profit, but what other metrics are relevant?

• Revenue
• Profit margin
• Number of sales
• Average order value
• Cost per customer acquisition
  

They are directly relevant to the goal because improving them would lead to an increase in annual profit.

You want to pick 3-5 KPIs to focus on.

Now let’s take a quick look at the important ecommerce metrics that you want to pay attention to in more detail:

Cart Abandonment Rate

Cart abandonment rate is the percentage of customers who put items in their carts but do not finalize the purchase.

For example:

Let’s say that 100 people put an item in their carts.

Out of those 100 people, 88 of them left without buying.

That means that your cart abandonment rate is 88%.

And if that number seems crazy high to you, note that the average cart abandonment rate worldwide in March 2020 was 88.05%.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a metric that shows how much it costs you to acquire a new customer.

Its basic formula is this:

Marketing Expenses + Sales Expenses / The Number of New Customers Acquired = CAC

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a metric that shows how much an average customer spends throughout their “lifetime” as a customer.

It’s a more complicated metric, but here’s the main equation:

Average Order Value x Purchase Frequency x Estimated Customer Lifespan = CLV

Average Order Value

Average Order Value (AOV) is a metric that shows the average value of a sale.

It’s a simple metric to calculate:

Revenue / The Number of Orders = Average Order Value

Note that all these metrics have a direct impact on the bottom line which is why it makes sense to consider using them as KPIs.

Create a Budget

Cash is the lifeblood of any business.

Once you run out of it, that’s it, you’re done.

That is why it’s so important to be financially responsible, manage cashflow well, and establish an emergency fund.

In psychology, there’s a phenomenon called the planning fallacy:

“The tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of future actions and at the same time overestimate the benefits of the same actions.”

Basically, everything will probably take longer, cost more, involve more risk, and yield fewer benefits than you think.

It’s crucial to keep the planning fallacy in mind when creating the budget for the upcoming year for your ecommerce store.

Make sure to:

• Be realistic. Look at the historic cashflow data. What can you reasonably expect?
  

• Add slack. Once again, everything will likely cost more than you think, so don’t make your budget so tight that every cent is allocated before it is even earned. Leave some slack in your budget.
  

Your top priority should be the growth of your ecommerce store.

Build Your Team

Ecommerce growth requires constant human resources and infrastructure. 

This is why it’s crucial that you recognize there’s only so much that your current team can do to successfully scale your store. In fact, the chances are that in order to achieve your goals you may need to hire more employees throughout the year. 

Begin this process by accurately determining your staffing needs.

Who Should Hire And When Should You Hire?

Company leadership should be working on the business, and not in the business. However if you are currently without an HR department, you may need to dedicate some time to finding the right hires and training them.

That’s why it makes sense to start hiring as soon as you map out what departments need additional roles.

Hiring Full-Time Vs. Hiring a Freelancer

When it comes to expanding an ecommerce team, you have two options for most positions:

Full-time employees and freelancers.

Full-time employees can be expensive. It’s not only their salary that you need to think about. There’s also sick leave, vacation days, health insurance, etc. 

However, when you hire a full-time employee, you can expect them to give your business their undivided attention. Moreover, a full-time employee is likely to feel invested in the success of your company. Why? Simple. They don’t want to suddenly find themselves out of a job!

You only hire freelancers when you need them, you only pay for the work they do, you don’t need to provide any employee benefits. 

However, they are likely juggling a bunch of clients, projects, and deadlines, which means that they won’t be as focused on your business.

It’s up to you to decide what is more suited to your ecommerce store.

Where To Find Top Performers?

Hiring a full-time employee?

Then your best bet is probably DynamiteJobs job board, assuming that you are hiring for a location independent position.

Meanwhile, if you are looking for a freelancer, then UpWork is a good place to start.

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You may also want to post your job ad on skill-specific job boards.

Problogger job board is the most popular writing job board, so if you need written content, you can probably find a writer there.

Manage Your Team

Building a great team is not enough.

You also need to manage it well if you want your team members to do their best work.

Create a Job Description for Each Role

You want to have a specific job description for each role that explains exactly what that role entails.

That way you’ll avoid confusion, resentment, and shifting of responsibility (e.g. “I thought John was supposed to do that!”).

Assign Key Performance Indicators to Each Role

You should also assign KPIs to each role so that each team member would know what they should focus on. Dan LeBlanc, Founder of CEO Daasity explains:

“For the Merchants we worked with that saw triple-digit-growth in the past year they heavily invested in aligning their teams around the essential metrics to prioritize key initiatives. They ruthlessly tracked performance across their teams to make quick decisions on where to invest and where to reallocate budget.”

This also makes it easy to evaluate their performance. 

Create a Timeline and Set Milestones

You also need to manage each project correctly if you want it to be done on time and at the expected cost. 

Mapping out milestones and timelines in detail will do exactly that, by helping your team members know exactly what they need to do to get their tasks completed.

Step 1: Write a Project Scope Statement That Outlines the Deliverables

Every project should start with outlining the deliverables and what needs to be accomplished for it to be a success.

These deliverables should be specific. 

For example:

If you want to build a blog this year, then one of the deliverables could be to publish one article per week for the entire year (52 articles in total).

Note that this is a deliverable that the person who owns this project can control.

Articulate the steps it will take to achieve your objectives.

Step 2: Create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)

Once you have defined the deliverables for the project, you need to create a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). What’s that?

Here’s one definition:

“Deliverable-oriented hierarchical decomposition of the work to be executed by the team to accomplish the project objectives and create the required deliverables.

Here’s an example:

Step 3: Create a To-Do List for Each Work Package and Assign It to the Right Team Member or Department

Once you have created your Work Breakdown Structure, it’s time to assign each work package to the team member who will own it.

You also want to create a to-do list for each work package so that the person would know exactly what is expected of them. To-do lists are essentially checklists that list the actions one needs to take to perform a specific task. They reduce the number of mistakes team members make. 

Step 4: Determine Total Time for Each Task and Therefore for Each Deliverable

Now that everyone has their work packages and to-do lists, you should estimate the total time required to complete each task.

Once you have these estimates, use them to determine the time required for each deliverable. This will speed up the process because the person working on a task doesn’t need to waste cognitive energy thinking about how long they should set aside.

Just remember the previously mentioned planning fallacy. Everything will probably take longer than you thought it would. Make sure to account for that.

Organize Quarterly Reviews

It’s crucial to regularly evaluate your progress if you want your team to stay on track throughout the year. 

You can do that by organizing quarterly reviews where you:

• Evaluate the progress of each team member
• Evaluate the progress of the entire team
• Determine how you can help people to get back on schedule if they have fallen behind
• Evaluate each marketing campaign
• Evaluate analytics closely
• Decide on the next steps to take

Now let’s take a look at the marketing strategies of your roadmap.

Q1: SEO Planning and Content Creation

Want to get more organic traffic from Google?

Then you need to step up your SEO game. First, you must:

Conduct a website audit

You should start with auditing your ecommerce website. Site preformance is particularly important, as Ben Crudo, CEO of Diff agency explains:

“Don’t let your store slow down. Customer experience, sales, the Google ranking of your website, and mobile performance are all impacted by site performance. Making a habit of regularly auditing your site for speed, and taking steps to optimize it will ensure that your store keeps up with customer’s expectations for performance.”

Here’s what you want to know:

• Is your website mobile-friendly?
  

• Are there any outdated pages, broken links, etc. that need to be updated?
  

• Which content gets the most organic traffic?
  

• How is product organization?
  

• How are usability and speed?
  

• How is the customer experience?
  

You also want to critically evaluate your content. How can you make it better?

Choose keywords

Next, you want to identify keywords that you could rank for.

Here’s an overview of the keyword research process:

Find Keyword Ideas

You can use your knowledge of your niche to find keyword ideas. What are your potential customers interested in? Brainstorm these seed keywords.

You may also want to go where your customers hang out online and observe the conversations happening there. 

Finally, be sure to check out what your competitors are doing, especially what content ranks well on Google.

Create a Keyword List 

Once you have identified enough promising keywords, you should compile them into a keyword list.

Do Keyword Analysis

Once you have your keyword ideas, use a tool like Ahrefs to analyze the relevant keywords. 

Which ones seem promising? Look at metrics like keyword difficulty, search volume, clicks and traffic potential.

Note that you want to focus on keywords that you can realistically rank for.

Develop a content strategy

Now that you have a keyword list, it’s time to develop a content strategy.

Go through your keyword list and turn each of these keywords into an article topic.

Then create a content calendar so that you would know when each article should be published.

Content creation

Once you have a content calendar, it’s time to start writing.

You can write the articles yourself or you can hire a writer to do it for you. 

You may want to post a job ad on the previously mentioned ProBlogger job board if you choose the latter option.

Plan link building opportunities

It’s important to understand that creating great content is not enough. You also need other people to link to that content. Why?

Google uses backlinks as one of the top ranking factors to determine how valuable the page is to the visitors and where it should be placed in the search results pages for that keyword.

But not all links are made equal. The higher the domain authority of a website, the more valuable the link. 

You can use the Moz free Website Domain SEO Analysis Tool to see the domain authority of a specific website. 

Your aim should be to get as many backlinks as you can from authoritative websites so that your content will rank and in return, your ecommerce store will gain organic traffic.

Tackle the technical SEO basics

You also need to have your technical SEO on point if you want your content to rank on Google.

Here are a few basics of you need to optimize:

• Site structure
• Site speed
• Indexing issues
  

Q2: Focus on your website

Okay, so now you are on track to increasing your organic traffic, but how can you make the most of it? By optimizing your website.

That’s what you should focus on in the second quarter of the year.

Customer Journey Analysis

You want to start by analyzing the customer journey. 

Look at your data.

What steps do the customers take to get from that first interaction with your company to completing a purchase? 

You want to map this out so that you can then improve this process by finding the answer to questions like:

• Why did that customer not find what they searched for?
  

• Did this person not complete their order?
  

• What changes do I need to make to the layout of my ecommerce site to increase conversions?
  

Create a customer support powerhouse

There is often a lack of personal interaction between consumers and companies. This has led to a growth in customers feeling frustrated, since they often run into issues and can't easily find a customer support agent to talk to. 

Even worse, some companies make their customers wait a long time for a response or don’t get back to them at all.

And since 95% of consumers say that customer service is important for brand loyalty, your ecommerce store needs to implement a fast and proactive customer support strategy that guides visitors through the customer journey.

The following tactics will delight your customers and keep them coming back for more.

Reduce your first response time

First response time (FRT) is the time elapsed between a customer submitting a query and how long it takes a customer service agent to get back to them. 

Today, customers expect a fast response. In fact, data shows that 88% of customers expect a response to their email within 60 minutes and 30% expect a response within 15 minutes or less.

Fortunately, a helpdesk like Gorgias now offers the ability to create macros. 

Macros are canned responses that agents can use for dealing with specific topics. This makes it much easier and faster to answer your customer’s queries. You can also add other pieces of information to your macro, such as Shopify data, like a customer’s order number. 

Reduce your resolution time

Resolution time is the average amount of time it takes your customer service agents to close a ticket after it has been opened. 

To reduce your resolution time, all of your customer’s tickets must be managed from one centralized hub in a multichannel helpdesk. This means your customer support team will have a full view of all your customer’s messages, no matter what channel they reach out from. 

Keep in mind that your customers reach out through various channels, (i.e. social, chat, email, phone).

The number of your one-touch closed tickets will also increase, which is important. After all, 33% of all consumers consider the most important aspect of good customer service experiences to be being able to get their problem solved in one single interaction. 

High customer satisfaction (CSAT) score

One way ecommerce stores measure their success is with the key performance indicator Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT). It is a survey that determines a customer’s level of satisfaction at key interaction times, such as a support ticket exchange.

The types of questions you would ask in your survey would be variations of “How would you rate the support you received?”.

Then, respondents answer by using the following 1 to 5 scale:

1. Very unsatisfied
2. Unsatisfied
3. Neutral
4. Satisfied
5. Very satisfied
   

I recommend that you present a CSAT survey after a ticket resolution, since this would be the perfect time to gather customer sentiment. 

Then, take onboard their feedback and see how you can make your other customers happier by improving your customer support strategy.

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