A Few Trade Secrets Every Ecommerce Site Needs to Know

After several years of intensive work with ecommerce sites of every size and type, we’ve landed on one especially important insight: you can’t separate the brand itself (the site and the products) from the campaign (the ads, budgets, strategy). The site, the brand, and the campaign are one. Let us explain. Ecommerce is a partnership, and as an agency that promotes ecommerce brands, we’ve adopted a holistic view – the campaign and the brand as a single, inseparable unit. That means we teach and share with our clients the methods and approaches for improving their ecommerce operation beyond just the campaign. And why should only they get to benefit? Here are a few trade secrets we think you should know:

Shelf arrangement – nice to meet you, essential to apply

Just like a physical store, an online store needs a storefront window and shelf arrangement. Shelf arrangement is critical to success and to maximizing performance. It costs almost nothing, especially if you do it yourself, and it can bring in serious revenue. Why? When we analyzed a good number of ecommerce sites, we found the average number of pages viewed per visit sits at around five – meaning the average visitor will browse just five pages on your site. Some visit only one page, and some will obsessively click through every single product page by page. Let’s set those aside for a moment and focus on the typical visitor, who probably won’t make it to page 10 while browsing products.

What that means is: if we want to generate a sale (which is the whole point), we really only have about 5 clicks to hit the mark and show the visitor a product they’ll want to buy. We won’t detail the whole method here, but it includes precise recommendations on how best to arrange your online shelf, what to put in the storefront window, what goes at the top of the page, and more. As for how often to rearrange the shelf – that also varies from site to site depending on needs and character, but it’s without question something you need to do regularly.

How many products?

This one’s simple. Most ecommerce sites come into the world with just a handful of products. Loading up inventory is grunt work, but hey, you have to start somewhere, and sometimes it’s better to launch a store with a small catalog and start learning fast. Over time, though, your site needs to grow its product range. Broadly speaking, clients with large revenue (say, over ₪100K a month and up) tend to run sites with a substantial number of products. How many? As many as possible. If you’ve applied the shelf-arrangement principle above properly, the more products you have, the greater your selling power. Of course, that’s not true for every brand (at Apple, for instance, the iPhone alone accounts for 69% of total company revenue). There are boutique sites that deliberately choose to showcase a small, curated number of products, and even sites with just a single product. Again, those are the exceptions, and we’ll set them aside too. We’re talking about standard sites with a range of products, where in our view it makes more sense to grow selling power by growing the product catalog.

One small warning: don’t drop everything and start loading products onto your site like a maniac. You need to plan the move carefully, factoring in inventory, demand, Google search demand, and other considerations. Products nobody buys don’t serve you, and it’s best to add products with real selling power and demand. We do guide our clients toward a rhythm of adding around 5 new products a week for a smaller site, and 30 for a larger one, to build up meaningful mass over time. Just make sure to keep applying good shelf-arrangement principles while you add.

Full inventory

An important point when planning a new ecommerce site, or leveraging an existing one, is thinking about inventory – and plenty of it – from the start. We’ve run enough projects to understand that sites with unlimited inventory – software licenses, for example – have a massive advantage over sites with limited stock, as long as there’s demand for the product, of course. Sites with unlimited inventory can just keep selling as much as possible. In the physical world, especially retail, things are a bit different.

We’ve found a paradox that can be a real challenge: products tend to sell at one of two speeds – very slowly, or too fast, running out of stock, especially during a sale or price drop. If you manufacture your own products, be ready to run a quick repeat production of your best sellers to keep up with demand. Whether you manufacture or import, it’s important to keep a close eye on trends and spot top-performing products early so you can plan inventory correctly.

We’ve worked with plenty of long-term clients who’ve managed to build original models that let them break free from the need for rigid inventory. That flexibility reduces risk and enables smoother growth. If your inventory is very rigid – like large appliances sitting in a warehouse – you need to plan carefully: start by selling at full price as a new, high-demand item, then lower prices and run sales as demand drops, to match your stock situation and clear shelf space ahead of new models coming in.

On that note, every ecommerce site’s best friend is the outlet – a magical category where products mysteriously vanish from the main shelf into. The Israeli consumer is very price-sensitive, and moving products into a discounted outlet category is the best way to clear existing inventory while boosting sales and revenue. The outlet is also the perfect place to introduce new customers who came looking for a deal, or to re-sell to existing customers who bought at full price and would now be happy to come back for another purchase at a good value.

In short – whether it’s the outlet category, pricing, manufacturing, or planning, inventory is always a critical consideration. By the way, don’t panic when products run out of stock – that’s a normal part of every ecommerce site’s life. Just make sure to respond to it properly.

Note that we haven’t said a word here about campaigns, paid promotion, media spend, ROI calculations, and so on. We’re by no means neglecting them – the campaign is the beating heart of the growth and scaling process, and it’s critically important. But at the end of the day, the campaign and the brand are one. Getting the planning right across every front lets the campaign and the brand grow together. Happy selling!