One of the aspects in which physical stores still outperform online stores is the shopping experience: getting into the store, interacting, being able to try the products… With Internet evolution, online stores have managed to reduce the barrier of shopping from anywhere in the world. The ritual of going to a shopping centre has shifted to being able to buy products from your favorite social network. Digital marketing has been largely responsible for improving the user experience to make them feel comfortable and safe, which will lead to more conversions.
In this guide we will give you the necessary tools to optimize your store’s position in the highly competitive sporting goods sector.
Assess the content of your online store
E-commerce have a big disadvantage compared to traditional shops: they do not have a showcase where customers can see what they are offering. For this reason it is important to consider developing accurate and in-depth product descriptions to improve the positioning of your items on the web. Therefore, it will be essential to do a keyword search to improve the volume of organic searches for your online business.
In order for the descriptions of your articles to be shown more in search engines, they have to be complete and done with few words, since you do not have much space; the customer has to know what he is going to buy. Images are an essential resource to promote your products.
User experience is important to the success of your business. To improve it, it is important to design a home page where customers can find out where they are and what they can buy. Investing in content marketing is an interesting option, which will give more substance to your e-commerce and help evangelize your customers.
It is worth taking into account the device through which your store is accessed, such as mobile devices, tablets or computers. Using Google Analytics gives you an accurate view of the users you have and what kind of technology they use to access your business, giving you valuable information to develop your e-commerce content.
You should adapt your e-commerce to each type of device to maximize the user experience. Having a live chat to answer any questions, help with refunds or have a FAQ page are all elements that will add an extra mile to your online store.
Adjusting prices to increase sales
For consumers, the main factor when it comes to choosing a product to buy is the price, so to improve the sales of your items, it will be necessary to be competitive. The first step to make your prices better is to investigate the market and the competition. Once this is done, you can use different criteria to evaluate the competitiveness of your online business: evaluate by market, evaluate your store globally or in specific products.
Once you have checked the level of competitiveness of your e-commerce, it is time to take a step forward. How? By adjusting the prices of your products. You can do this process manually, although it is not recommended, since it is not efficient to change so many products and it is an almost impossible task to be updating them in real time. We recommend the use of a Dynamic Pricing tool, since it allows you to automate the whole process of price readjustment with just one click.
These tools work through pre-established rules such as “I want to be 5% cheaper than the competitor who has the lowest price” or “Every time a certain competitor lowers the price, I want to be 2 euros cheaper”. These rules have a hierarchy to safeguard the profit margins of your products. This tool will not only help you to be competitive in the market, but in certain occasions (for example, when you are the only competitor with stock in the market), you will be able to profit by increasing your prices.
Final Thoughts
The two main pillars on which to base your marketing strategy to improve the position of your online sports store are: increasing the content of the website, making it more attractive to your target audience, improving the user experience, etc. The other is based on price, you have to have the most competitive products to be able to get the first results in platforms like Google Shopping. To do this, you can adjust your prices dynamically, through a big data tool that will automate the process of price readjustment automatically, following the rules you set.
