Launching an eCommerce store for the first time is pretty exciting. But the excitement can soon wear off when you realize that your rivals are tougher to beat than you thought… and Amazon is even more dominant than you thought.
We all live in the shadow of the Big A, especially now that its private labels have broken out. Competition is one-sided at times, with Amazon’s batteries alone growing over 90% each year.
Then there’s the fact that Amazon has loads of weapons in their armory that so few of us can compete with - staggeringly low prices, super duper fast shipping, and Amazon Prime among them. In the face of all this, what can you do?
Fortunately, there are answers. Roll your sleeves up, put your best game face on, and let’s take a look at 5 ways your eCommerce store can beat Amazon.
1. Make a Connection with Your Customers
Low price is a good reason for someone to want to buy a product from Amazon. But lower prices are not the only reason we purchase products - retail loyalty is one of them.
Retail loyalty is one thing that Amazon’s private labels can’t really generate as well as you can - by building a store that actually means something to our customers.
Amazon’s private label products perform so well because Amazon has an astronomical budget that allows them to promote and market their products in the right way. As a small eCommerce store, you probably don’t have that.
This is why it’s important to go straight to your customers and focus on making a connection and building a strong relationship with them. This means interacting with them as much as you can through your social media and email channels. Immerse your customers in a proper brand experience; build a brand that’s easy to recognize, one that people will trust.
If your store is on Amazon, that’s okay. But it’s important that it’s not just on Amazon. You should also create a website and social media so that you’re cutting out the middleman and dealing with your audience directly.
If you stick to just Amazon, your customer won’t be able to recognize your brand or immerse themselves in a proper customer experience - and this can hurt your sales and cede advantage to Amazon once again. Remember, Amazon is Amazon’s marketplace. To build a strong relationship with your customers, you need to sell in your own marketplace.
2. Tell Your Story
If you sell on Amazon, there’s no need to jump ship. But to compete and beat the online monolith, you need to go on the defensive.
And you can do this by telling your brand’s story.
Standing out from Amazon is largely a matter of building your brand so that people recognize you, trust you, and want to buy from you. Stories let you build your brand so that you achieve all three things.
Millennials are now the dominant group in America, and they don’t like to be sold to - they prefer to be marketed to. With stories, you can let your brand’s personality shine without veering into obvious selling territory.
Storytelling also hits emotional buttons. If you tell your stories, make sure that they’re real, honest, and genuine if you want to have as much impact as possible.
Here are some tips to help you tell your brand’s story:
- Tell stories that your audience can relate to.
- Only use numbers and facts once you’ve made an emotional connection first.
- Don’t take too long to get to the exciting bit - start in the middle, as opposed to from the very beginning.
- Don’t include too much detail - get as straight to the point as possible.
Recommended: How to Craft Brand Stories that Attract and Sell (Very Well)
3. Go Where the Customer Goes
The modern shopper is also what we call the omnichannel shopper. This means they’re pretty much everywhere. One moment they’re researching a product on their mobile device, and the next they’ve switched to a desktop.
Then, they’re inside the physical version of the store, picking up a product they ordered online a few hours ago.
Amazon is very agile - it goes wherever the customer is. Amazon Go was launched to reduce queuing at grocery stores, for example.
If you want to beat Amazon, it’s crucial that you follow their lead and go wherever the customer is going, too.
At first, this is as simple as selling on Amazon and off it. Make your products available on Amazon’s marketplace, but make them available on your website, too.
Make sure that your website is mobile responsive. Mobile usage overtook desktop in 2016 for the first time, which means that if your website isn’t ready for it, you’ll be losing a lot of customers.
Adopt an omnichannel sales strategy. Make it easy for customers to switch devices without any issue. Let them browse and research online and pick up in store. The easier the shopping experience is for people, the more often they’ll come back.
4. Make Good Customer Service a Mindset
Good customer service shouldn’t be an afterthought or something you do because you “have to.” From now on, good customer service should be a mindset that you adopt.
The more value you create for customers and the better you treat them, the easier it becomes to win online. You need to care about your customer, and once this becomes a mindset, it’s no longer a tactic that you pay lip service to.
Good customer service creates loyalty - and retained customers are key to your success. It also encourages people to leave glowing customer reviews for your business. This is important because most customers now say that online reviews sway their decision to buy or not. The more reviews you have, the more credible you look.
Essentially, spending money on good customer service is almost as good as spending money on advertising, except your own customers will do the “advertising” for you in the form of reviews.
Customers are there to buy from you, but they’re also there to be leveraged. Treat them well, implement chatbots to answer their questions 24/7, boost loyalty, secure their reviews - and then leverage these reviews.
5. Innovate with Pricing
Amazon is home to a lot of products. It also prices a lot of their products low while providing fast shipping. All of this is very attractive to customers, but there’s also no reason why you can’t compete - and even beat - Amazon when it comes to pricing.
How? You just need to be innovative in the same way that subscription box services are.
Or you could take a look at the Dollar Shave Club’s pricing strategy - a strategy that transformed the whole shaving industry. For $1 per month, subscribers receive five cartridges of twin blades, and they also get a stick tossed in for free. The upsell is four cartridges containing four blade razors for $6 per month.
Despite starting out 3 years ago, the Dollar Shaving Club is now behind only Gillette in America when it comes to selling blades.
Uber disrupted the cab-hailing industry with their innovative pricing strategy a few years back, too.
Are you going to dethrone Amazon with yours? No, but you can take back the sales for your sector if you’re creative with how you structure your pricing.
All in all, Amazon is leading overall, but when it comes to your niche, you can compete and even beat the retail giant by doing the right things. In 2019, this means building your brand, meeting customer expectations, and getting a bit smart with how you price your products.
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Aljaz Fajmut is a digital marketer, internet entrepreneur, and the founder of Nightwatch— a search visibility tool of the next generation. Check out Nightwatch blog and follow him on Twitter: @aljazfajmut
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