As 2025 rolls around, more people than ever are shopping online, and global sales are soaring. For Cyber Monday 2023, over 75 million Americans browsed for deals online, 3.5 times the number of in-store shoppers! Now is the perfect time for your store to grow. This guide shows you how to scale an e-commerce business for greater profitability and long-term growth.
How To Build Your Brand Recognition
To stand out from the competition, you need to create a distinctive brand identity. Branding helps customers remember your business. Be playful, caring, cool, gritty, or sarcastic — whatever your target audience responds best to.
Go beyond selling t-shirts and athletic wear — create a lifestyle. Make clients feel like part of an exclusive group. You get loyal customers and valuable referrals out of it.
How To Grow Your Average Order Value
Did you know that the average customer acquisition cost in e-commerce is nearly $90? Making sales of $30 here and $50 there doesn’t cut it anymore.
To scale your average order value, you have to create a shopping experience that naturally encourages customers to spend more on every visit. Offer the right incentives:
- Bundles: Create “better-together” bundles to entice bargain hunters and create a sense of urgency.
- BYOB or BOGO: Let customers put together their own discount bundles for greater customization.
- Tiered rewards: Offer free shipping, gifts, or discounts if customers reach a certain order minimum.
- Upsells: Offer lower-cost items to capture attention but recommend products with higher profit margins at checkout.
- Cross-sells: Recommend products at checkout that pair well with the item customers are buying, such as premium cases for smartphones or shoes with dresses.
- Memberships: Create a subscription or “club” option for your store that gives customers much greater long-term savings if they come back.
How complicated is it to add these systems to Shopify? With apps like Automatic Discounts & Upsells, it’s a breeze. There are integrations for build-you-own bundles, tiered discounts, gift personalization, and more.
How To Scale an Ecommerce Business Sales Funnel
Without knowing it, you could be missing out on countless opportunities to turn website visitors into happy customers because you’re only looking at the bottom of the funnel.
In e-commerce, the sales funnel has five stages:
- Awareness (top): Visitors arrive on your site from search engines or ads. It’s the first time they interact with your brand.
- Interest (mid): These are visitors who know what they want, but they’re still narrowing down their list of choices.
- Decision (mid): At this point, you’re close to making a sale. You just have to convince the person that your product is the right choice.
- Purchase (bottom): Visitors decide to buy, placing items in their carts and starting the checkout process.
- Follow-up (bottom): You reach out to past customers, sharing offers or deals to persuade repeat purchases.
Are there areas where you can improve your customer journey? For example:
- Top of funnel: Do you have a blog on your website? Buying guides, FAQs, and comparison guides all help e-commerce stores.
- Middle of funnel: Do you use videos and images to show your products clearly? Make sure product descriptions include bullet points with key advantages and features.
- Bottom of funnel: Is the checkout process easy and convenient for customers? Keep checkout forms short and sweet, with upsells alongside, not in the way.
The smoother your user experience, the more leads, customers, sales, and recurring revenue you get.
How To Optimize for Mobile Devices
Any Shopify store that isn’t optimized for mobile is missing out on tremendous sales opportunities every day. There’s no reason to hold back:
- Mobile devices now drive over 50% of web traffic
- Over 55% of e-commerce sales come from mobile instead of PC
- Over 75% of shoppers have used a mobile device to buy something
- Nearly 65% of all Google searches happen on mobile
- Six in 10 shoppers said they were more likely to buy from mobile-friendly websites
For Shopify, mobile optimization means two things: reducing page loading times and making your site easy to navigate with one hand. Using images and videos is a great thing, but you need to balance resolution with fast loading.
Keep text clean and simple. Use a sticky CTA so your “buy now” buttons are always on the screen. Shopify store themes with expandable (+) tabs are great for only showing extra info when customers want it while improving the user experience for everyone else.
How To Scale a Shopify Store With Better Customer Retention
Growing your Shopify store doesn’t only mean bringing in new customers. You can also boost sales significantly by nurturing your relationship with existing clients.
You know these people are your target audience because they’ve already bought from you. It’s far easier to convince happy customers to make another purchase than to convince someone new to trust you.
How do you improve customer retention? A big part of it is engagement. Keep in touch via social media interactions, thank you confirmations, special “members-only” sales, discount coupons, and email reminders.
And for the love of everything good, if a customer responds to one of your social media posts, make the time to reply! It only takes a minute, but it makes customers feel important.
Replying — even to complaints — makes social media users 25% more likely to recommend your brand to friends and family, and it boosts customer loyalty by almost 90%.
How To Boost Your Profit Margins
Another outside-of-the-box way to look at scaling your business is to increase your overall profits. More sales are good, but higher profit margins are often easier to achieve and require less investment. As an example, clothing stores can take home more money each month by reducing return rates. Apps like Kiwi Sizing help you build accurate size charts and personalized size recommendations. In turn, you get happier customers and less wasted time and money.
Learn How To Scale a Shopify Store With State-of-the-Art Apps
The right Shopify apps streamline growth by helping you do more with less effort. Automate everything from sales and discounts to bundles and order fulfillment. Contact our team for personalized recommendations on how to scale your Shopify store’s growth.