Whether you know anything about Information Technology, IT, the one thing you know for certain is that this is the foundation of what you do as an online merchant. Without the Internet, you wouldn’t have a business, unless you have a brick-and-mortar shop as well, but even those need techie tools to survive. If you are an online merchant, these three tools are the very minimum of what you should be using and the beauty of each and every one of them is that you don’t need to be a techie to take advantage of what they have to offer.
1. Google Analytics
In any line of sales, conversions are your main goal. No matter how much traffic you bring to your web store or the marketplace you list on, if you can’t convert visitors, you will quickly go out of business. Google Analytics helps you understand why you are losing sales and at which point you are losing them. Is your click-through rate failing you or perhaps it’s your shopping cart? Maybe you are targeting the wrong demographic or maybe you don’t meet market needs at any given time. Remember, trends rise and fall, so tools like Google Analytics will help you discover what is selling and why you are losing those sales to the competition.
2. Oberlo Profit Margin Calculator
Everyone wants a bargain, and that is a fact. However, in the process of trying to undersell the competition, you might be selling yourself out of business. Have you actually done the math to see if what you are charging has enough of a profit margin to keep you in business? Do you know how much you need to realize from each product sold so that you can reinvest in new merchandise, pay the bills, and pay salaries as needed? Check out the Oberlo Profit Margin Calculator here. It’s an easy-to-use tool and when selling online, profit margins are just as important, sometimes even more so, than when running a brick-and-mortar establishment.
3. MailChimp Automated Email Tool
An automated tool like MailChimp is another necessity when growing an online business. Not only do you want to follow up on customers that have purchased from you, but you also want to reach out to those who perhaps filled out a form yet didn’t buy. As a tool for customer retention as well as getting those lost sales back to your storefront, you can’t go wrong by keeping your brand visible. Email has proven an effective way to do that. However, it will take some amount of strategy because you don’t want to be ranked among the sites that send out nothing more than spam, so the content of each and every mailing is just as important as getting them out at all.
Once you understand why you are converting some visitors and not others and price your products so that you realize a profit, it’s time to keep your brand fresh in their minds. These three tools will help you do just that and if you use no others (even though there are thousands out there!), you will have what you need to succeed. You may not be a techie, but you will have the best of techie tools for online merchants.
