The ecommerce market has reached an inflection point. More people purchase goods and services online every day. Ecommerce now accounts for 20% of retail sales in the US alone, and global retail sales are expected to surpass $4.3 trillion in 2025. At the same time, customer expectations are on the rise, requiring merchants to digitize, modernize, and upgrade their ways of working to keep up with ever-rising standards set by the world’s digital commerce leaders.
This phenomenon isn’t restricted to retail. Online sales have become the de facto channel for all sorts of companies, from manufacturers that sell white-label goods to major retail chains to cloud-based subscription platforms that allow customers to stream music and videos on their digital devices. Whatever the sector, businesses that sell online are under constant pressure to evolve and stay apace with the latest demands. This article lays out the drivers, challenges, and opportunities that lie ahead for ecommerce merchants in today’s hypercompetitive market and provides practical tips to help modern ecommerce businesses achieve their growth objectives.
What Is Ecommerce?
Ecommerce is the digitally enabled exchange of goods, services, and data over the internet, encompassing a broad range of business models and technologies that facilitate transactions between businesses, consumers, and even governments. Far beyond its early days as simple online catalog shopping, modern ecommerce leverages advanced platforms, automation, data analytics, and AI to deliver seamless, personalized experiences and optimize operations across global markets. Its evolution has fundamentally reshaped how organizations of all sizes engage customers, manage supply chains, and compete in an increasingly digital economy.
Key Takeaways
- Ecommerce businesses must constantly evolve to stay competitive and meet the needs of today’s digital customers.
- To succeed, merchants must enhance and streamline the online purchasing journey on every digital channel their customers use.
- Integrated ecommerce platforms allow businesses to automate and accelerate their processes so teams can focus on delivering customer excellence and boosting sales.
Ecommerce Growth Explained
The world of ecommerce is sink or swim. Businesses that can’t drive sustainable growth risk missing out on market trends and falling short of customer expectations, which essentially means disappearing into obscurity. From fashion brands to food and beverage companies, the goal for every ecommerce manufacturer or merchant is to expand its reach, boost traffic to its website, convert more visitors into customers, and increase its average order values to drive profitable growth.
To achieve this, ecommerce companies must always strive for more—more customers, more sales, more innovation. And they must do this despite significant challenges, including higher customer expectations, rising competition, and an uncertain economic outlook. The key for new market entrants and established ecommerce players alike is to make frequent enhancements to the way they manage their people, processes, and technologies to better serve their customers. Growth-minded ecommerce companies are also more scalable, which means their digital sales channels can easily accommodate more transactions as customer demand rises.
A crucial factor for all growing ecommerce businesses is the regulatory environment in which they operate. This goes double for businesses that sell globally, as nations are governed by different regulations pertaining to data governance and digital purchasing. In fact, more than 80% of countries have laws related to electronic transactions, 66% have explicit privacy laws, and 56% have consumer protection regulation. Among the most important pieces of regulation for ecommerce companies is the General Data Protection Regulation, which dictates which protections and controls companies selling in the European Union must implement to protect their customers’ personal data. In the United States, data protection is legislated at the state level, rather than nationally, via laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act and the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act.
13 Tips for Growing Ecommerce Sales
Achieving growth as an ecommerce business isn’t easy. By some estimates, more than 80% of new ecommerce ventures fail within 120 days of launching. It’s also worth noting that success rarely comes overnight in today’s saturated market, and most merchants will need to wait a year or two before seeing their investments turn into profitable growth. But, by adopting the following strategies, ecommerce companies—whether B2C or B2B—can increase their sales over time and maximize their chances of success.
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Outline Ecommerce Goals and Key Metrics
Setting clear, quantifiable performance metrics allows ecommerce businesses to track their progress and make data-driven decisions that inform their growth strategies. Among the most common ecommerce metrics is sales conversion rate, which measures the percentage of customers who take a desired action after receiving a sales pitch or marketing offer; others include average order value, website traffic, and revenue per sales channel. This data provides ecommerce businesses with valuable insights into their customers’ shopping behavior. Just as importantly, it helps merchants understand which marketing tactics are effective and offers a way to gauge how well they’re performing with regard to their broader growth objectives.
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Enhance Inventory Control
Ecommerce businesses rely on inventory controls to predict demand for their products and services, manage stock levels, and optimize fulfillment strategies so as to avoid stockouts or overstock situations. To this end, automated inventory management systems are growing in popularity among companies looking to accelerate time-consuming tasks, such as order tracking, counting stock, and reordering. For example, many retailers have automated their reordering processes to ensure that they always have the right amount of stock to meet customer demand and that their employees will have more time to focus on value-adding activities, such as customer service. Automated inventory management systems also provide ecommerce businesses with real-time visibility into inventory, which makes it easier to manage stock levels across multiple storage facilities and geographies—a major advantage for businesses that sell to multiple markets.
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Invest in SEO for a Strong Foundation
Discoverability is essential for any business that wants customers to purchase its products and services. For companies that sell online, discoverability starts with search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the process by which ecommerce merchants optimize their website content and structure so that their products and services rank high on the list of search results generated by popular search engines like Google.
SEO best practices for ecommerce range from keyword optimization to backlinking among the different web pages that make up the customer experience. With more people now using generative AI platforms like Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity to search for products online, ecommerce businesses will need to factor in the ways in which customers interact with these technologies when honing their SEO strategies.
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Understand Your Target Market
To grow sales and revenue, ecommerce companies need a deep understanding of their customers. By targeting the right market segments and adapting ecommerce strategies to suit their specific needs, businesses will make their marketing and sales efforts more personalized and, therefore, more effective. One way to do this is to develop marketing personas for each target audience. This involves combining audience data from across the sales funnel to create fictional representations of a company’s ideal customers. By identifying customer goals, preferences, and pain points, ecommerce merchants can adapt their marketing approaches and strategies to target each customer group with relevant experiences that inspire them to buy.
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Reach Prospective Customers Across the Sales Funnel
Most ecommerce companies visualize the customer purchasing journey in the form of a sales funnel, which illustrates how prospects go from being unaware of their products and services to making a purchase. By targeting marketing and sales activities to every stage of the funnel, ecommerce businesses can improve their chances of engaging prospects and nurturing leads wherever they are on the purchasing journey. In practice, this means building awareness through personalized advertising and SEO-optimized website experiences, garnering interest in products and services via in-depth content, building demand through promotional offers and positive customer reviews, and inspiring action with seamless checkout processes that make it easy for customers to complete their purchases.
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Be Strategic With Your Channel Strategy
Just as brick-and-mortar stores choose physical locations based on where their customers are most likely to shop, successful ecommerce businesses choose a mix of marketing and sales channels that consider where their online audiences spend their digital lives. For instance, email marketing campaigns can help an ecommerce company raise brand awareness, entice customers to visit its website, and drive loyalty by targeting prospects with future offers and promotions. Meanwhile, social media marketing allows businesses to educate audiences about their products and services in their preferred format, be it static advertisements on Facebook, outtakes on Instagram Reels, or promotional videos on TikTok.
With the rise of in-app shopping, ecommerce companies are now making it possible for customers to complete purchases right from their preferred social platforms, thereby making the purchasing journey even more convenient and seamless. Another popular ecommerce marketing tactic on social media is influencer marketing, which involves partnering with online creators and leveraging their followers to build credibility within specific market niches.
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Automate Manual Tasks to Scale Growth
Growth drives sales and revenue for ecommerce merchants, but it also requires them to scale their operations to manage rising customer demand without falling victim to inefficiencies that can eat into their profit margins. By automating time-consuming manual tasks—for example, email marketing and customer follow-ups, inventory control, and elements of fulfillment—ecommerce companies can make these processes more efficient. Automation also allows employees to dedicate more time to shaping and executing strategic tasks, such as launching a new product line or rolling out innovative customer experiences, to differentiate their business from the competition.
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Ensure Your Site Is Easily Accessible
Designing an ecommerce site to be accessible can be as simple as using a clear and legible font for easy browsing; or it can be more involved, such as facilitating product discovery for blind customers by giving them the option to search for items using voice commands. No matter the level of complexity, all website ecommerce processes should work optimally on mobile, desktop, and tablet devices, and with the various operating systems used by these devices. To ensure the effectiveness of these tactics, ecommerce companies should test and refine their accessibility strategies at regular intervals. Some online merchants even partner with external firms that specialize in making ecommerce experiences accessible for all, regardless of device used.
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Adapt Ecommerce Strategy as Necessary
In the face of fast-changing customer habits and market dynamics, success for ecommerce businesses is all about continuous improvement. This is particularly true for ecommerce marketing, with companies increasingly relying on performance analytics to determine whether their campaigns are effective and to identify promotional tactics that will drive maximum return on investment. Similarly, many ecommerce businesses apply A/B tests to their marketing and sales campaigns to gauge the effectiveness of different messaging, personalization, and channel strategies so they can adapt their approaches for maximum impact and revenue potential.
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Simplify Payment Processes
To drive sales, ecommerce companies must be able to convert website visitors into paying customers. The challenge is that 70% of visitors abandon their carts before completing a purchase, which is why successful ecommerce businesses do everything in their power to simplify the checkout and payment process. Effective tactics to boost conversions include providing customers with clear instructions throughout their purchasing journey, minimizing the number of steps involved in the payment process, and supporting different payment methods, from major credit cards to digital payment services like Apple Pay, Klarna, and PayPal. It’s also a best practice for ecommerce businesses to ensure that their payment process—and their entire website experience—is mobile-optimized so customers can complete their purchases using their phones and other smart devices.
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Provide Purchase Incentives
Ecommerce merchants can offer customers incentives to encourage them to complete their purchasing journey. One popular tactic is to offer first-time shoppers a discount if they sign up for a company’s email newsletter—a win-win scenario that saves the customer money and gives the business an opening to target them with future campaigns and offers. Other purchase incentives help ecommerce businesses increase their average order value, such as offering free shipping to customers if the total value of their purchase exceeds a certain threshold. Still others are meant to drive retention and loyalty, such as points-based systems whereby customers earn rewards for their purchases, ranging from early access to a merchant’s latest products to exclusive discounts and promotional offers.
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Offer Exceptional Customer Service
The importance of top-notch customer service can’t be overstated. In a world where customers are spoiled for choice, a single poor experience can cause them to lose faith in one ecommerce brand and take their business to another. The flip side is that excellent service builds loyalty, making it more likely that customers will return to the same ecommerce business time and again for future purchases. In the best case, they might even refer a company to their friends following an excellent experience, thereby driving additional awareness, positive market sentiment, and growth opportunities for the brand.
What does exceptional service look like? For one thing, ecommerce businesses can proactively address their customers’ questions and needs by creating a frequently asked questions page on their website or offering free user-friendly guides to their products and services. They can also make themselves available to customers via a range of channels, including phone, email, social media, and AI-powered live chats. Finally, ecommerce merchants should collect customer feedback and analyze this data to identify areas for improvement.
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Connect Your Technology Solutions Together
The best ecommerce businesses work in an integrated fashion, ensuring that all their data is consolidated and accessible to key stakeholders and decision-makers. This is essential when it comes to customer data, which forms the foundation of an ecommerce merchant’s customer relationships and, therefore, the success of its marketing and sales operations. Given the stakes, many ecommerce companies install a CRM system to provide marketing, sales, and customer service teams with a single source of truth for customer data that they can use to build and strengthen their customer relationships. CRM systems are generally integrated within a business’s broader ERP system, critical business software that compiles data derived from every department into a common database to allow leaders to monitor the pulse of their company at all times.
Drive More Traffic to Your Ecommerce Store With NetSuite
To position themselves for growth, ecommerce businesses first need a granular and integrated understanding of their critical operations, from inventory and order management to marketing and customer service. NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce ecommerce solution breaks down the silos within diverse systems, providing businesses with real-time visibility across their organization to promote informed and timely business decisions. Using the SuiteCommerce mobile-optimized ecommerce platform, B2B and B2C merchants can improve their website traffic, convert more visitors into paying customers, and grow their revenue.
Furthermore, responsive website design features allow ecommerce businesses to create content that automatically adjusts to different screen sizes. User-friendly drag-and-drop site management tools let teams publish content or create new landing pages without requiring IT assistance. Crucially, SuiteCommerce is also built for agility and growth. The cloud-based platform improves the flow of information among systems and teams, accelerating decision-making while eliminating the time, cost, and hassles of managing disparate point solutions.
Digital sales channels continue to grow in number and relevance for customers, a situation that presents significant growth opportunities for ecommerce merchants able to capitalize on demand and deliver experiences that resonate with their target audiences. At the same time, uncertain and volatile market conditions require online businesses to be more prudent and cost-efficient in the way they operate. Competition will be fierce, but ecommerce companies that strike the right balance of customer excellence, innovation, and operational efficiency stand to unlock new growth opportunities and position themselves for long-term success.
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Ecommerce Growth FAQs
What kinds of obstacles limit ecommerce growth?
Ecommerce growth can be impacted by market forces, such as economic uncertainty or increased competition from rival companies. It can also be limited by a business’s own shortcomings, such as website performance issues or poor customer service. Finally, ecommerce growth can be stunted by a merchant’s inability to adapt to changing customer needs, particularly when it comes to the channels, devices, and interfaces they use to make online purchases.
What percentage of sales are completed online vs. at a brick-and-mortar location?
Online sales have been on the rise for years, and although this growth has begun to plateau, all signs point to continued uptake among today’s digitally savvy customers. Recent data suggests that roughly 20% of retail sales are made online.
What is the number one reason people make online purchases?
Above all, people choose to buy products and services online because it’s more convenient than visiting a brick-and-mortar location. Ecommerce sites allow customers to shop 24/7 and, in most cases, have their purchases delivered directly to their home or place of business.
