288. 2024 eCommerce Trends or the Tried & True Strategies that Never Go Out of Style?

In late 2022 I released a podcast episode eCommerce Trends 2023: How to Stay Relevant & Compete in the Online Space

To date that is still a top listened-to episode, and according to Spotify, was how most of my new followers found me on the platform last year.

Like a good little marketer, I originally intended to release a similar episode at the beginning of 2024, but since not much had changed in terms of what was trending, I prioritized other topics that I wanted to talk about on the show.

As the year has progressed and I’ve continued to have 1:1 conversations with eCommerce entrepreneurs at all levels, some through the Lounge, some through other programs I guest coach in, and some OG clients that I catch up with periodically, unsurprisingly, I find myself having a lot of the same conversations over and over. 

Most businesses are struggling with the same things. 

Reach on Instagram is down, traffic to their websites is down, people aren’t spending as much and they’re flying by the seat of their pants, treading water, and running on that hamster wheel trying to keep things moving. 

They start looking around at what’s happening in the eCommerce space and ultimately end up just adding more to their plate, spreading themselves even thinner, and still not making progress.

Sound familiar?

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What Most Entrepreneurs Get Wrong

Believe me, I get it. Every day I feel like I should be doing more in my business. I’m looking around my industry seeing what others are doing and think I should be doing it too. 

I was chatting with a biz friend the other day on Voxer; we were talking about how we both have all these ideas in our head about all the cool things we want to do – events we want to host, programs we could create… but the truth is, we’re both have some foundational things we need to finish up for certain projects and we have major resistance to them. At the end of the day they’re those boring things that don’t have the allure of shiny objects – but they’re the things that will help our businesses run on autopilot and ultimately grow. 

No, of course, the quickest answer to this struggle is to outsource. Some of which we’re doing. But we’re also going to hold each other accountable to make sure they get done so we can chase some of those new shiny objects. 

I tell you all of this to say, it’s completely normal if you’re feeling this way. Literally, every entrepreneur struggles with this – I promise. 

And it can be really easy to think if I just do this one trendy thing, all will be right in my business. 

But, like my friend and I admitted to each other, and like I see with the majority of eCommerce entrepreneurs I talk to… It’s not the trends that are missing, it’s the foundations. 

Trends are Still Important

That’s not to say trends don’t matter…

But at the end of the day, chasing every trend in the marketplace isn’t going to give you sustainable growth if you’re not also capitalizing on and optimizing the strategies that never go out of style. 

Let’s take TikTok shop as an example. Yes, this is a trend right now – as is social shopping in general. Research for my previous episode showed that

• GenZ uses TikTok more than Google to find products
• 48% of consumers are likely to buy from TikTok
• And global sales through social media are expected to reach 2.9 trillion by 2026. 

Some more recent numbers show the percentage of online shoppers in the US who buy through social is 63%. When you compare that to places like Thailand, India, UAE, and China, which are all over 80%… it may seem low, but that just means there is still a lot of opportunity for growth and you haven’t necessarily missed the boat. 

Now, this isn’t an episode about TikTok shop or social commerce, but I bring it up because while this is an obvious trend with a lot of opportunity for brands… 

It doesn’t mean that you just hop onto TikTok, add your products to TikTok shop and all of a sudden everything in your business blows up overnight. 

You still have to create content that attracts your perfect customer, you still need to optimize your website for conversion & AOV, you still need social proof to make new customers more comfortable buying from you, you still need to utilize email marketing to ramp up your touchpoints with customers, you still need general marketing campaigns to create a reason for people to pay attention to you, you still need to create a great customer experience so they come back and buy from you again and again, etc. 

So the real answer to the question of this episode – eCommerce trends or tried and true strategies – is BOTH. 

2024 eCommerce Trends

First, let’s knock out some of these trends. We’re not going to spend a TON of time here. Truth is, you can listen to episode 181 and it’s essentially the same thing I would say if I were recording that episode today. 

But to give you a quick rundown…

• Social commerce, influencers & content creators
• Omnichannel shopping experiences
• Mobile-first website optimization
• Video & augmented reality
• AI for personalization & operations
• Voice search
• Sustainability
• And of course… putting the customer experience first 

These are all eCommerce trends that will carry through 2024 and beyond. 

I’ll stick links in the show notes where you can dive deeper into some of these strategies. 

Tried & True eCommerce Strategies

What I really want to be the message and take away from today’s episode are the foundational things you should have in place to grow your business in 2024. 

And before you tune out because you’ve been in business for a while and you think you have all of this place already… please stick with me. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been in business for 1 year or 10 years, are generating 12k a year, or multiple millions per year… there’s a pretty good chance you don’t have one or more of these as dialed in as it could be. 

These are the tried & true strategies that never go out of style + those foundational things you should be implementing in your business. 

Now like the trends, we’re not going super deep into any single items, I’ll put links to other episodes and resources where you can dive deeper if you need to. 

But think of this like a checklist you can use to audit your business and make sure you have all of these things dialed in as we move into the back half of the year. 

Email Marketing

This would not be an episode of the eCommerce Badassery podcast if I didn’t talk about email marketing. 

I have been talking about the importance of this channel since day one of this business. But, I still have students, clients, and listeners who I know aren’t sending enough email.

That alone is a great reminder how important it is to repeat yourself. Because even though I talk about it all the time, people still aren’t doing it. The same is true for your audience. Just because you’ve shown them that product before, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t show it to them again. 

This is part of the reason why email is so important – because people do need to see and hear things multiple times before they’ll take action. 

If you are someone who struggles with staying consistent with email, please know you’re not alone. I seriously have this conversation at least once a day, if not multiple times a day. 

And when it comes to why someone isn’t sending email, it usually comes down to one of two things, or both of them. They’re afraid of being annoying or they don’t know what to say. 

When it comes to getting over your fear of sending email, I have a few different mindset shifts to offer you. Pick the one that works for you…

• If you have something that your subscriber needs or wants and you aren’t showing up to remind them that you exist… you’re doing them a disservice
• If you’re not emailing your people your competitors are
• Every email you send is a chance to make sales

Knowing what to say in your emails. That one is a little harder to summarize. It’s going to depend a bit on your business and what you sell, but the number one piece of advice I can give is you’re likely overthinking it. But I know you need a bit more guidance on that so make sure you check the show notes for additional resources. 

If you’re not sure whether you need to up your email game or not, here are a few things to consider. 

• You should have at least these 6 email automations
  • Welcome series
  • Browse Abandonment
  • Checkout Abandonment
  • Post-purchase
  • Winback
  • Never Purchased
• If you don’t have those 6, please get started there. 

In terms of your campaigns, you ideally want to be sending at least 1 email a week. The bigger your list, the more items you sell, the more emails you can send. The sweet spot is generally 3-4 times per week though plenty of businesses see success sending emails every day. 

If you’re not at least sending 1 a week though, carve out some time to prioritize that and plan ahead. Again check the show notes for additional resources. 

Once you’ve got all that in place, then the main thing you’ll want to look at is how much of your total revenue is being driven by email. 

And then if you’re doing all that, but you’re still not sure if email is performing as well as it could, you should see anywhere from 20-30% of your total revenue coming from email. That will of course fluctuate depending on your business. Subscription businesses for example will see a lower number if the majority of your revenue it automatically recurring. Hobby businesses with a high customer return rate will likely see a larger percentage. But that should give you a pretty good idea of whether or not your email is doing it’s job. 

Cross-Sells, Upsells, & Bundles

Your average order value is another item you should be optimizing in your business. There aren’t benchmarks here because it completely depends on the price of your products and how many items your customers typically buy… but your goal should always be to be better than you were yesterday. 

If you haven’t already implemented some sort of cross-sell, upsell, or bundles on your store please do that as soon as you finish listening to this episode. I would even say you can pause this episode and implement it right now, but the podcast algorithm will punish me if you don’t actually finish the episode, so please don’t do that. 

Whether you choose a cross-sell, upsell or bundle is going to depend on your product assortment and in some cases you can implement all three – but here is an example I gave to a Lounge member recently. 

For context, she sells stamps & embossers to people who create wedding invitations and businesses who want custom branding items. 

The examples I gave her were: 

If she wanted to offer a return address stamp when someone bought another wedding stamp, I would do that in a cross-sell pop-up after someone adds an item to cart. 

If she wanted to sell a business branding bundle that included a few items, I would sell that as a premade bundle as a separate product on her store. 

If she had a handful of bestselling products that she wanted to offer to everyone based on the general category they purchased, Ex. Wedding stamps get product A, teachers get product B, then I would do that as a post-purchase cross-sell.

You could also implement this more passively by using the complementary products with the free Shopify Search & Discovery app.

When it comes to bundles, one thing I do want to mention is that the majority of the time a pre-made bundle will sell better than a build your own bundle just because people really need the mannequin. It doesn’t mean you can’t do both if it makes sense, but if you were to choose only one, I would start with the premade bundle. 

You can learn more about building a cross-sell and upsell strategy on episode 275. How to Increase Your eCommerce Average Order Value

On-Site Shopping Experience

Another important thing to focus on is your on-site shopping experience. That includes everything from your navigation to your collection merchandising, and even your product filters. We’ve talked a bit about this on the podcast recently, I’ll stick links in the show notes to those episodes but this is something I want everyone to look at, even if you think you don’t need to. 

The first thing to know about your eCommerce website is that the average online conversion rate is only 1-3%. 

That doesn’t mean you don’t have the opportunity to convert better than that. You absolutely do. But I also caution you not to spend too much time tweaking your site if you are within that range. Most of the time you just need more traffic. 

But I do want you to make sure you’ve done your part to set up your site to do the selling for you. Think of your website as your sales associate. It’s got to guide your customers to where they need to go and give them all the information they need to make a buying decision. 

Since you probably spend so much time looking at your site and you know your products really well, it’s going to be hard to do this objectively. 

I recommend you ask a few friends, or even a few of your best customers to act as your website testers. The best way to do this is to give them specific tasks to complete. That might be finding a specific product, getting an answer to a specific FAQ, or signing up for a PDF download. 

Either have them screen-record the process or hop on a video call with them so you can watch them navigate the website. You want to get a sense of what they try to do and where they get hung up. 

You can of course do this with heat mapping software that records your site sessions, but the visual will hit a bit different when you know the specific task they are trying to complete.

Again, I don’t want you to get too hung up on this but even if you are in that conversion rate I would at least take 30-60 minutes to look at your site, look at some of the big guys in your space, and ask yourself is there anything you can do to improve the on-site shopping experience. 

Profit Over Revenue

One of the absolute MOST important things you have to focus on in your business is profit over revenue. While there are a lot of things to consider when prioritizing profit, the foundation of that is your gross margin. 

In most cases, I want you to shoot for a 60% gross margin across all of your products when you’re selling direct to consumer. While some might be lower and others might be higher, ideally you’ll average out to about that 60% mark. 

I also want you to consider the margin of your products when you’re thinking about what you’re going to focus on in your marketing. 

Recently I was chatting with a Lounge member who was trying to get a better handle on her inventory. For her assortment and what she sells,  we were working through her numbers at the category level. 

As she was setting her forecast for the months ahead, I noticed that for one of her categories she was calculating a larger increase than was typical for that time of year. 

Because she had been trending down from the revenue goals she set, she was hoping because that product category would potentially make a good add-on, she wanted to increase her focus on that category to make up for some lost sales throughout the year. 

There were two problems with this strategy. One, it wasn’t contributing much to her business at this point, and two, the margin on it was really low. 

Even if she could make the argument that the reason it wasn’t selling well was because she didn’t give it much attention… because the margin on that category was so low, she would have to sell a ton of units to make a measurable difference on her bottom line. 

Instead, I recommend she focus on increasing sales of her existing best sellers and highest-margin products by putting them front and center in her marketing efforts. Could she use an on-site cross-sell strategy to sell this as an add-on? Sure. 

But I didn’t want her to spend money on bringing in more inventory of a not-so-profitable product in the hopes that she could make up for in volume. That’s really hard to do unless you’re a big box retailer. 

As you’re planning on what you’re going to focus on for the rest of the year, please make sure the math is mathin’

Stop Trying to Sell all the Things

And that brings me to my favorite catchphrase, bring them in with the best and then sell them the rest. 

Essentially, stop trying to sell all the things in your marketing. 

Whether it’s your organic social, your paid ads, or even your automated welcome series. You don’t have to try and sell every category to every customer. Focus your efforts on your best-selling and most profitable products. 

Then, once people get to your website you can use cross-sells and bundles to promote the rest of your items. 

Not only does this make your life easier, but you become known for something that makes it easier for people to understand who you are, what you sell, and when they should refer you to one of their friends. 

Be Intentional & Consistent in Your Copy

The last thing I want to talk about today is being intentional and consistent with your copy. In addition to being laser-focused on the products you’re promoting, I also want you to be laser-focused in the words and language you use.

I know a lot of people sometimes struggle with what to say in their marketing. Whether it’s an Instagram caption, an email, or even a paid advertisement – most people think they need to be a wordsmith to connect with their customers. 

But that’s not true. 

I’m going to stick some links in the show notes to help you with this, but there are really three keys I want you to keep in mind when it comes to writing copy in your business. 

1. Use the words your customers use
2. Speak directly to the outcome they’re looking for from your products
3. Ask for the conversion

If you were to talk to any copywriter about the number one most important step to writing great copy – they’d tell you it was research. Not only do they research your brand, product, and industry… but they research your customers. What are the things they’re saying about products like yours in reviews, what questions are they asking, what objections do they have, what is the real outcome they’re looking for? 

Then they aim to answer those questions and overcome those objections using the same exact language they use when they’re talking about a product like yours and the outcome they’re looking for. 

If you don’t know what to say, it might be because you’ve skipped this research step. It could be because you feel like you’ve said it all before and you feel like repeating yourself is annoying. 

But as we’ve learned multiple times in this episode already, repetition is your friend

This podcast episode is a great example of repetition. The fact that I have said multiple times, I will link you to other episodes where I dive deeper into this just means that I’ve already talked about all these things on the podcast. But my conversations with you reveal that the message hasn’t quite clicked yet. 

And believe me – I myself need to hear things multiple times before I take action too. It’s just human nature. 

So don’t let the fear of being annoying hold you back from marketing your business. 

And then, there’s asking for the conversion. You have to tell people what to do. As you probably already know, I’ve always had a problem with authority and I certainly don’t want to be told what to do. If you’re an entrepreneur there’s a pretty good chance you don’t like being told what to do either. 

But…your customers. They love it. They need it to be spelled out for them like they’re an 8 year old. Click this link, comment on this post, reply to this story, sign up for this list, learn more about this product, shop now! 

Make sure you include a call to action in every piece of marketing material you put out in the world and that the next step is super clear.

So… speaking of making the next step super clear. What’s your next step?

First, I want you to take a quick audit of your business and the tried & true strategies we discussed here

• Email marketing
• Cross-sells, upsells & bundles to raise your AOV
• Your on-site shopping experience
• Profit over Revenue
• Focusing your marketing on your best sellers and being intentional and consistent in your copy

If you don’t think you can look at your business objectively, enlist the help of your team, a biz friend, or come join the Lounge so you can get my brain on your business. 

Prioritize getting these things dialed in before you worry about chasing the next eCommerce trend. And this doesn’t have to take a long time. 

Even if you had to optimize and improve everything on this list, with some deep focused work you can get it done in the next 30 days. 

Don’t have any email automations? No problem. Get up an MVP and you can improve on it later.

Progress over perfection. 

Listen to the Episode

Episodes Mentioned

See the full eCommerce Badassery Podcast Database

181. eCommerce Trends 2023

187. How to Write Product Descriptions that Convert

69. How to Create Content That Converts

267. How to Better Communicate with & Convert Your Customers

266. Stop Marketing All Your Products

275. How to Increase Your Average Order Value

274. The Power of Profit Goals with Ciara Stockeland

282. Conversion Rate Optimization: Putting Your Customer Journey First to Increase Sales with Chase Clymer

185. How to Convert First-Time Website Visitors with Rishii Rawat

Other Resources

The Lounge eCommerce Membership

Social Commerce Statistics

Content Badassery: Email & Content Ideas for eCommerce