You’ve probably already seen dozens of articles about how to sell more. Most of them are akin to this joke:
In a word, kind of useless. We wanted to come to you from the point of our own experience based on actual Magento metrics. Our question is, can we use Magento itself to learn what needs to be done right here and right now to sell more tomorrow?
The answer is yes. Yes, we can. We know how to sell more. And we are going to tell you, too.
Here are The Basics of ECommerce Design That Help You Sell More
Improve Your Store Based on Actual User Data
Magento is not the kind of platform that pours data on its users. If you want lots of nice charts and trend analysis you have to find it somewhere else. In Magento, you are pretty limited to what you can actually get.
But don’t get discouraged about this brevity. In reality, you can put this data to work and use it to boost sales further. What kind of data are we talking about? This one:
Bestsellers tab is extremely important here. While you might know your bestsellers on a practical level, it shows you the exact Top 5 products of your store, with period-based sell volume. Now go to the Most Viewed Products and compare your Bestsellers list with the list of products users actually view most of the time. Do you see the difference? Do you think you could sell more if you put your top performers in the spotlight? We bet you could.
Turn this data into more sales. Take your best selling items and put them where your customers can easily see them whenever they visit your store. Consider making a dedicated TOP SELLER sidebar or a special hand-picked store category, or start a focused email marketing campaign – just do something with that data, don’t let it sit around!
Amazon Homepage with highlighted best sellers
Learn from the best: don’t hesitate to get inspiration from the designs of the best performing stores in online retail. They can teach you a lot.
Use Magento Search to Fix Underperformers
Ever wondered what your customers are here for? Why did they land on your store and not someone else’s? Use Magento search stats to find out what your users can’t find with just their eyes.
When you look at the number of searches you can easily spot products that could perform way better if only they were more on display or easier to find. Take this challenge as an opportunity to put your potential new bestsellers to the spotlight.
See if you can put them somewhere with more user traffic, like at the top of other products, inside a more obvious category, or even design dedicated sections of your store just for them. When we are talking about thousands of search queries per month, the investment is definitely worth it.
Review User Behavior Patterns Over Time
This tip is harder for Magento store owners who use a barebones store setup without any additional trackers. We strongly advise that you use at least Google Analytics to track user interactions, analyze changes in the UI, see historical data and specific trends, and much more. The idea is that you can’t see what you can’t see meaning if you don’t monitor the situation you have exactly zero control over it.
Only active monitoring will bring you the necessary data to invest time and resources into meaningful changes and see how your customers react to them.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can help you with creating a solid user behavior monitoring system. It is robust and simple enough to use and only requires expertise in sitting upright. You might need to learn how to properly set up goals and custom metrics but, in the end, it will be worth it.
Adopt the Business Intelligence Mindset
The following step requires a leap of faith and a commitment to configure and actively use real Magento business intelligence instead of just Magento metrics. After the successful merge of Magento and Adobe, Magento community got additional integration opportunities with old-time Adobe products such as Magento Business Intelligence (former RJMetrics), now a part of Adobe Experience Cloud family.
Magento BI is a different tool from Google Analytics and does things differently. Google Analytics is more about user behavior, likes and dislikes, knowing what customers do, where they want to go, which products are their favorite and which are left out, etc. GA offers a broad-strokes picture where you can’t look too closely on individual patterns and events because that would involve breaching the first layer of user privacy.
For Magento BI, the data itself is more identifiable than what Google Analytics is allowed to show. You can see the individual journeys of every user, from the first contact to the final purchase. You can identify trends, patterns, lifetime value, groups of shoppers, and other BI-specific things. This means some level of incursion into user privacy but the payout is well worth the effort to track so many individuals at once.
Business Intelligence uses Google Analytics data and other available sources to build a picture of each user group. MBI will be able to dig up ERP, CRM, and accounting data to glue together the shopper’s profile from small parts of their Internet presence.
The biggest pro of Magento BI is that in addition to showing stuff it can give advice based on analytics. For example, increase stock for the forthcoming holidays, or redirect marketing efforts towards a different activity, change product strategy or retention investments, etc. The kind of data that is hard to analyze or understand with human eyes. We are talking about meta-analysis here, where multiple datasets that are not directly connected with each other become analyzed and result in actionable advice to business owners.
If you decide to try MBI, take a look at these 10 reports:
- customer lifetime value (average),
- top purchases from new buyers,
- lifetime value by acquisition channel,
- top customers by revenue,
- average check,
- the retention rate for users who opened customer support tickets,
- the success rate of negotiated quotes by status,
- time-to-last-order,
- top sellers by volume / top sellers by revenue,
- chance of a new order from a first-time customer.
Ecommerce Efficiency in the Dawn of an AI-Powered Era
Online stores still need to monitor closely the same 3 key metrics of eCommerce: customer lifetime value, customer acquisition, and customer retention.
Where GA offers great opportunities to see generalized behavior trends and an overview of some user interactions with your store, BI can outline these 3 KPI metrics much more clearly and at the same time give you decent advice on how to improve every one of them (improving your sales in the process, too!)
We recommend that you use all available tools to design such an eCommerce experience that is efficient, innovative, and exciting to you and your customers.
