E-Commerce

E-Commerce

Overview

DefinitionShort for “electronic commerce,” ecommerce is any business or commercial transaction conducted electronically. Examples: Most well-known for the process of buying and selling physical or electronic items online, ecommerce examples include online retail shopping, auction sites such as eBay, trading goods and services between corporations and online banking.

For an e-commerce business, revenue can be calculated by multiplying three variables: number of customers X average order size X average order frequency. While this equation isn’t rocket science, too many e-commerce businesses focus their marketing on the first lever (total customers) to grow revenue, and pay too little attention to the other variables. In reality, all of the levers are important, and the most immediate return / most logical approach is often to start first with strategies for getting customers to rebuy at a higher rate (frequency), then focus on how to get customers to make bigger purchase (average order size), and then once those mechanics are well-established, work on more driving more new customers.

To illustrate the business match some more, let’s use the scenarios below. If an e-commerce business wants to double their revenue, it’s harder (and less cost effective) to try and double total customers. Whereas an increase of 33% across all three variables will actually MORE than double revenue for the business (example below).

100 customers X 3 orders on average X $30 average order size = $9,000
200 customers X 3 orders on average X $30 average order size = $18,000
130 customers X 4 orders on average X $40 average order size = $20,800

With this in mind, the strategies below highlight ways an e-commerce business can achieve the trifecta of converting more customers, increasing purchase frequency, and growing their average order size.

Types of eCommerce

Business to Business (B2B)

One business sells directly to another business

Business to Consumer (B2C)

A business sells directly to consumers

Consumer to Consumer (C2C)

One consumer is selling to another via auction, social or marketplace

Call Prep Stats

An estimated 70% of total ecommerce traffic will be generated via mobile devices by EO 2018.

Ecommerce will account for an estimated 17% of all retail sales by 2022

All ecommerce customers need some type of shopping cart software. The most popular one, which is also natively supported by HubSpot, is Shopify. Others include BigCommerce, Magento and Woocommerce

Challenges They Face

Driving Organic / New Traffic

  • Decreasing Reliance on PPC

Conversion Paths other than Transactions / Discounts - TOFU MOFU

Increase LTV / Upsell / Crosssell of their database

  • Capitalizing on Lost revenue opportunities - disengaged customers / shopping cart abandonment

Marketing Hub: Tool Adoption

Sales Hub: Tool Adoption

Service Hub: Tool Adoption

Good-fit Add-Ons for eCommerce

Dedicated IP

They have a large database so they want to be in control of their IP health.

Transactional Email

They can provide post transaction receipts.

The Reports Add-on

They want to get granular reporting on purchasing, email, revenue...etc

Qualifying Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

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