Technology advancement and the increased usage of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube have increased consumers’ preferences to shop online.  Therefore, businesses who do not have an online presence are prioritising building a website which includes their e-commerce store.  For those businesses who already have an ecommerce store, they are taking the necessary steps to increase their online sales.  The steps that they take are geared towards the objective of giving the shopper an experience like shopping at their physical stores. 

The first step is to ensure that their ecommerce store is user friendly throughout the whole shopping process.  The shoppers will be able to browse the items in an orderly manner, receive recommended items based on their search, add and remove items to and from their cart effortlessly and finally checking out to make payment hassle free, including the ability to apply the promo codes that they have. 

Secondly, the businesses must adopt various types of marketing strategies to attract their target markets to visit and purchase items from their e-commerce stores.  The types of marketing efforts depend on the profile of their target market and the occasions that their items are suitable for. 

As female teens make up a large part of the online shoppers, we will use this target market as an example to further elaborate on the steps that businesses undertake to increase sales.  Most of the female teens love online shopping.  Their buys are easily influenced by the social media, for example if their favourite celebrity, Instagrammer, or YouTuber rave about a certain product, they will rush to buy that product.  Therefore, one of the marketing efforts that businesses undertake is to promote their products in various social media platforms and engage influencers to promote their products.

In addition, the female teens are great bargain hunters as well.  They will spend hours comparing the prices among the different ecommerce sites and scoured for promo codes that they can use to get a good deal.  Hence, businesses must ensure they have done a good analysis of their prices and offer promo codes every now and then to increase the revenue from this group.

As the preferences for the teenage girls vary greatly by age, in order for this group to browse the items in orderly manner, the e-commerce stores must have items properly categorised by age group, for example they needs to have a dedicated page listing down the best gifts for 15 year old teenage girl or popular items suitable for elderly.

Lastly, for this target group, they are more fickle minded and their tastes change constantly to the trends.  Therefore, businesses should also ensure their marketing efforts evolve to these changes and have their marketing campaigns featured on the female teens’ favourite hobbies and fashion trends’ website.

These steps can also be applied to other target market group to help business increase their online sales revenue.