Survive Amazon

The good news is, local businesses still hold enormous power over their competition simply because of face-to-face interaction! For example: If you run an e-commerce shop, getting someone hooked on your products means nothing if they don’t understand how important it is to look out for each other AND keep business local! Maybe throw some custom support your neighborhood t-shirts in with their order too…? Who doesn’t love free stuff??? One way or another, remaining competitive requires that we form alliances with nearby businesses. We’ll need to shift from competing over customers to collaborating towards shared goals. It won’t make much sense to spread ourselves too thin by trying to go at it alone when it’s just as easy (and potentially beneficial) for us all collaborate toward mutual ends! And these kinds of cooperative alliances will make us stronger in every possible respect: revenue, community support and political influence. Now let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Just because I’m saying we should team up with one another to fight off corporate greed does NOT mean I think corporations themselves are evil or profit-hungry entities hellbent on harming others for their own gain. Most large corporations operate within legal parameters laid down by both national and international governments designed specifically to prevent fraud, theft and abuse among businesses large and small across sectors spanning finance, healthcare, energy/utilities, telecommunications etc., etc. Sure, most large companies compete aggressively within their industries while working side-by-side with smaller firms to maintain strong economies across countries at large.

Don’t kill your brand

This first point is probably something you already know: Don’t change your branding strategy for search engine optimization (SEO). Many people think that their website needs to be SEO ready before launch or shortly after launch. That leads them to redesign their site—changing its look and feel, sometimes drastically. Unfortunately, most people don’t realize until too late how detrimental those changes are because they never go back and analyze what search engines saw before they made those changes. The only thing worse than not designing with SEO in mind at all is designing without analyzing what Google (or Bing) saw beforehand because then you don’t even know where you went wrong. Your goal should be to show potential customers why they need your product while also showing searchers who typed similar queries exactly why they need yours. Everything else stems from those two areas. Keep up appearances: When done right, visual marketing has no limit; however, if done poorly or inconsistently, then it will destroy any goodwill you’ve built up through other means of marketing.

Stay away from Product Marketplaces

Avoid launching into a big platform like Shopify or Bigcommerce if at all possible—these services come at huge costs and require locking yourself into contracts when their functionality doesn’t always align with your needs. With open-source options such as WordPress, however, setting up something similar is both less expensive and easier to control. It may take longer than signing up for a third-party solution immediately upon launch (because developing takes time), but it will give you more flexibility down the road without additional cost.

When it comes to online commerce, your website needs more than just a big splashy ad campaign. It needs to be fast, load up quickly and give customers confidence they’re spending their money at a reputable store. And while you might be tempted to save some cash by outsourcing work overseas, be careful: Cheaply made websites often come with cheap Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques that can damage your business’ reputation over time. If you want to run an online store successfully, hire someone who knows what they’re doing and doesn’t cut corners. Remember: In business, time really is money — even if it takes an extra month or two for your new site to get off the ground. If you’re serious about running an online store professionally and profitably, don’t try to do everything yourself — hire someone else experienced in getting sites performing well on all devices from mobile phones through desktops. They’ll pay for themselves in saved advertising dollars down the road.

Focus on Online Advertising

Online advertising is more cost-effective than brick and mortar advertising, so if you want your business to stay afloat, you need to focus your efforts online. This will mean cutting back on other forms of advertising—like billboard ads and television commercials—and spending more time focusing on SEO, PPC and any other type of paid marketing. It will also mean you’ll have less control over how consumers engage with your product or service; after all, there’s no way to really predict what people are going to do when they see an ad (assuming they even see it). However, it may be necessary for survival if people aren’t willing to come into stores and spend money. After all, isn’t that what made traditional advertising successful? People had to leave their homes before they could buy anything… but now, who needs a store when you can get everything delivered right to your door? Well, maybe not quite everything… and not as fast as you’d like… which means brick and mortar shops still exist despite Amazon’s best efforts. How long those shops will continue to remain open depends heavily on factors beyond our control.

Examine your traffic sources

Traffic might seem like a fluid entity that ebbs and flows on its own accord, but it’s not. Sources of traffic are generally consistent over time, especially if you track detailed metrics. Knowing who’s visiting your website is a huge boon for gaining visibility in organic searches. Create a list of your traffic’s top-performing sources and target your content to match up with those websites. For instance, if you notice lots of visitors coming from Reddit, your next Reddit post should have a link back to your website. Or, if Facebook is delivering almost all your site’s traffic, consider buying a Facebook ad or two to drive users back to your site.

Reduce prices

Reducing your profit margin may not sound like a viable strategy for business success, but it’s critical if you’re going to make it through the turbulent era of internet commerce. There are three things every business needs to do if they want to last: reduce their pricing on goods and services, focus on site speed and SEO. And that doesn’t mean you can slough off on other elements of marketing. You still need strong content creation, an optimized design for mobile devices and consistency across all your online platforms. But if you don’t get these three basics right, no amount of content or advertising is going to save you from an Amazon-induced apocalypse. So how does one go about reducing prices? The answer lies with unit economics, an important concept in e-commerce that considers cost per purchase rather than gross revenue to assess whether price reductions will boost sales volume enough to increase overall profits. Basically, when deciding whether to lower your margins, consider what effect each sale has on your bottom line instead of how much cash you take home at night (which isn’t always a bad thing).

Affiliate programs

Even with improved site speed and SEO, we’re not done yet. To give our physical businesses a fighting chance against Amazon and other e-commerce giants, we have work to do! If you own an e-commerce site, chances are you’ve been asked to join some sort of affiliate program. These programs can potentially earn you big bucks through clicks to your products or visits to your website. Most affiliate programs provide detailed data useful for A/B testing new landing pages and such. Over time, you can tweak your site and personalize offers to convert more visitors into buyers.

Use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)

FBA is a service from Amazon that lets you store your products in their warehouses, and they handle picking, packing, shipping and customer service on your behalf. You pay them a fee based on how much space your products take up. By selling with FBA, you can pass off some of these tasks onto an already established e-commerce platform, vastly reducing time and cost associated with running a business. This will allow you to focus more time and effort on areas where your business has competitive advantages. In most cases, choosing to sell through Amazon gives you access to millions of potential customers. Use listing optimization: Because many people who purchase items on Amazon start their search for those products directly through searches instead of browsing categories, it’s important to make sure your product shows up when someone begins typing what they are looking for into Amazon’s search bar (known as Keyword Expressions).

Set yourself apart

To really set yourself apart from competitors, be sure that your product photography and descriptions are top notch. Customers will often choose which item to buy based solely on photo quality. That’s not to say that quality isn’t important—it absolutely is—but if all else is equal, people will usually pick which product looks best. Make sure your brand’s logo stands out against images; clean lines work best here. Highlight key features in bullet points but keep copy concise. You want just enough detail so that shoppers have a good sense of what your product does or why they might need it without overwhelming them with information or causing too much scrolling. Finally, don’t forget to list your product specs. While many shoppers do use Amazon to look at products available locally and then go purchase in-store, it’s smart to give them plenty of details about exactly what they are getting before they make that choice. Including something like “Fits standard American size mattresses up to XX inches thick…” helps them feel confident knowing exactly what they’re buying before clicking “Add to Cart”.

Offer Prime benefits

Prime members spend $1,340 per year compared with non-members spending only $795 – Learn how to become eligible for Prime by providing value added services like free shipping or discounts via coupon codes. Provide buy-online pickup in store option: Online ordering works perfectly well for certain purchases, but there are certain types of purchases that shoppers still prefer to make in person. A common example would be grocery shopping—it makes little sense to drag a full cart of groceries two miles home before realizing something didn’t quite match what was originally planned for dinner. Buy online pickup in store is incredibly convenient because it allows users to reserve an item online, drive over to pick it up later that day and either get one immediately or save it on hold until later. Increase repeat purchases & loyalty program. Consider setting up some sort of loyalty program/rewards program.

Use Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of those channels that never goes out of style, especially for new and growing businesses. Many entrepreneurs think email marketing is strictly for e-commerce, but it’s not. Email marketing helps you build relationships with your audience and opens opportunities for re-marketing and building an email list. In 2022, use email as a tool for retention and engagement more than anything else—it’s cheap and easy to set up, so there’s no reason not to do it. If you do choose to sell products through email, personalize emails based on user behavior (traffic sources and browsing history) to increase click-through rates. When email marketing becomes overwhelming, try using an automated service like Benchmark Email to help manage contacts for drip campaigns.

Use A/B Testing

If possible, start experimenting with different versions of product pages or emails before launch (but even after launch!). Create variants for all your core content assets: title copy, headings, photos etc., then A/B test these variants by showing them randomly or based on specific behaviors (browsing history). There are many plugins available that can make these changes automatically – try using WordPress’s Dynamic Headers plugin if running tests within WordPress is important to you. That way, you can track how they perform over time and adjust accordingly. You may also want to consider leveraging services such as Optimizely or VWO to help with online A/B testing.

Site speed

Some businesses work better at certain times of year than others. But timing issues aren’t nearly as problematic as lagging websites. In 2016, 80% of people left sites after just three seconds if pages took longer than two seconds to load. To ensure users stick around long enough to buy something from you—or even visit again later—be sure your page loads under two seconds. For example, when you search for a product on your favorite online shopping site, it’s important that those pages load quickly. Studies show that people spend less time on web pages with slow page load times and they don’t buy as much from sites with slow page load times either.

A Good Website Will Be Fast and Responsive

There are many ways companies can lose revenue due to slow page-loading speeds.

When designing a website intended for global users on a diverse range of devices (smartphones included), being quick matters more than anything else — studies show that while 50% of internet traffic worldwide came from desktops in 2016, mobile browsing will soon overtake PC usage entirely as more developing countries adopt smartphones (China alone has 600 million smartphone users). Indeed, if someone from Mumbai visits your e-commerce store today, they’ll probably be viewing it from either India’s second largest browser (UC Browser) or Opera Mini—both optimized for minimal bandwidth consumption. The good news is that high-quality websites can load up almost instantly across most platforms with just a little forethought and planning. The bad news is that you’ll need to make compromises between design elegance and loading times – but remember, performance should always come first.

Content delivery network

The best way to speed up a website is by using a content delivery network (CDN) —this helps keep pages loading fast and it improves your search engine optimization too. As far as site-speed optimization goes, there are many different strategies you can use but CDNs are one of your most effective tools. Their ease of use makes them very popular among large companies such as Netflix and Facebook, which both used them to make their websites faster. If you sell products or provide any kind of service through your company’s website, you should consider getting a CDN; it could be just what your business needs to stay competitive in today’s digital marketplace. Also keep an eye out for Google’s upcoming focus on mobile—making sure all your pages load quickly will become even more important soon!

Use Site Speed Optimization Techniques

When you’re trying to improve your site speed as an e-commerce store owner, these are some technologies worth considering. There are plenty of other ways you can optimize a website for better performance, including minimizing server calls and making sure third-party plug-ins work smoothly with your code. But starting off by looking into CDNs is a great idea since they’re easy to implement into any site design and they’re very affordable too. The faster your web pages load, the better they will perform in search engine rankings and with consumers. Small improvements like eliminating unnecessary graphics from your website can have a huge impact on how fast people are able to buy from you online; optimizing code so there aren’t flash of unloadables also helps speed things along for users but requires specialized SEO knowledge as opposed to just technical ability.

For example, Google rewards websites that are built using its own tech stack – so code something custom instead of using one of WordPress’ predesigned themes because it’s better optimized for search engines. A good Idea is to employ an architect for your entire online setup. That can save you a lot of money on restructuring and scaling up in the long run. Also ensure that your pages look good across different platforms by testing them on a variety of browsers and screen sizes before releasing updates – especially on mobile! Remember, most people now use their smartphones as their primary Internet-browsing device – so optimize accordingly. The best site speed is achieved via an application-level web cache like Varnish or Squid (starts at $50/month) alongside CDNs (Content Delivery Networks), which cost around $500/month but reduce load times by routing requests through geographically separate servers all over the world. Ultimately there is no substitute for trial and error when it comes to figuring out what works best for you, but once you do figure out what works, stick with it.

Optimize for search engines

Utilize Good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques. Google Analytics reports show where users enter our websites and where they leave them most often. This information helps us discover points of weakness and make informed decisions concerning website design. For example, if we know visitors tend to leave our website via our About Us page, then we know that would be a good place to put links leading toward higher converting areas such as contact info and product catalogues. We also use data collected by Google Analytics to optimize titles, meta descriptions, keywords, descriptions, and images on our product pages. And that’s not all.

Maintain Your Site as Quickly as Possible

A lot of effort went into creating that perfect site layout – don’t make an entire new version just because you’re bored or have a new logo. And remember to always keep your infrastructure updated – computers get faster every year. If you use cheap outdated hardware physical or virtual, not only will your website run slower, but it might also be prone to crashing entirely.

While third-party services like Cloudflare can help reduce web page load times by caching content closer to end users through its geographically diverse network, at least part of your site speed needs to come from optimizing every component separately. For example, any big download (like images) should come via Content Delivery Networks so people downloading them don’t have slow connections further slowing things down due to their local Internet Service Provider’s connection speeds. Google recommends no more than two seconds for page load time, otherwise it might penalize your site and affect user experience negatively. Although one-page checkout systems are ideal for sites that receive large amounts of daily traffic (millions per day), remember not to sacrifice long-term revenue generation potential in favor of immediate gratification since testing suggests conversion rates are worse on these types of pages versus traditional multi-page checkout systems where potential customers have time to weigh their options before committing to purchase something online. Mobile optimization should also be prioritized since over half of Google searches now occur through mobile phones; check out this guide by Kissmetrics which covers everything from responsive design techniques to reducing byte size, latency, pixel density issues etc.

Secure your assets

And last but not least: secure your site. You don’t want to invest a lot of money and effort into your online business and lose it overnight to ransomware, denial of service, fraud, or vandalism.

First and foremost, make a list of all digital assets you have, including cloud VMs, compute and storage instances, proprietary code, frontends, backends API’s, third party software, customer accounts as well as your own accounts at various providers and vendors. Secondly, set a risk appetite for your business, meaning what damage would be considered catastrophic and must be avoided at any cost, as well as up to what level you could tolerate loss without investing any additional money into security.

Hire a reputable vendor to inspect and correct your access, infrastructure, code, and communications to make sure that the catastrophic damage doesn’t happen. Cutting excess security spending on insignificant risks is a good secondary goal of such review.

Backup your site completely and do that often. Perform business recovery exercise. Turn the switch off at your main site (non-production environment, of course) and switch to the backup site. Measure how fast you can do it and what you would lose, should it happen in real life.

Audit access and permissions often. Don’t assume people wouldn’t log in to your site when they leave or get fired.

A word about ransomware: lock your stuff or someone else will.

Conclusion: you still have good chances of thriving

So don’t surrender just yet. Fight back, sell a better customer experience, discover new market segments. Focus on those. A lot of people don’t even know they want what you have until they find you. You just need to tell them about it and make it easy for them to get it. Build a great experience and keep trying different strategies (paid ads, SEO, whatever works) and continue improving your site. Even if I personally think that we’re going towards a fully digital future where brick-and-mortar stores will become a thing of memory and commerce will be done 100% online, I’m not sure how quickly that will happen. There is no doubt that commerce is rapidly changing but there’s still plenty of opportunities for retailers who are willing to fight back! Now, more than ever before! Go, go now. Apply these insights ASAP. Don’t wait any longer: retail is dying . . . maybe. It certainly has changed drastically over time, but nothing guarantees it will change more than it has in recent years—for worse or for better? Only time can answer that question with certainty; in any case, don’t forget it means potential changes ahead; so best to be prepared from now on. Improve yourself and take advantage of current fluxes by being more focused than ever before!