Analysis & Reaction. Two simple words that many companies tend to ignore. The best way to increase your sales is to analyse the data your platform gives you and act upon it.

Yes, you should have SEO, responsive design, promotions, updated organized and well-presented content. We are all aware of this by now, so let’s skip that for now.

If you still don’t do this or don’t know what we’re talking about, you really need to start doing it and consider it the foundation for your business because, with the internet, we are now competing with everyone, even those who don’t sell anything, so we must have a pro-active style well above average and an exemplary reactive capacity.

We must have the capacity to quickly identify issues in our store before our customers do, and we must foresee situations that can change, even if temporarily, customer behavior in our store.

With the rapid change in information and its unpredictability, having someone who can make fast and right decisions is crucial, and thinking that we have everything under control can be fatal.

We must analyse our past and try to predict our future. We know the market we are in, and we also know its unpredictability. We must have the ability to foresee it, to make it predictable, cyclic, with an almost fully automated response. It depends on the sector we are in, but we may be talking about awards season, new products launch, media special attention, among others.

If we know it happens, why can’t we take pre-emptive measures? We can’t be caught off-guard. Not even once.

Existing e-commerce platforms are already capable of warning about anomalous situations and show possible actions to take.  A very high number of searches for a specific topic, an unusually high number of product views, among others, are signs that there is an opportunity in place to increase your sales.

A third-party event has the potential to drive our sales up, so we take that change and make the best of it. Landing pages, highlighting the product being searched for, creating value packs, special pages dedicated to the event that is triggering all the visits, etc., are small things that should be done and that will increase your sales. Even though, as an isolated event, it might not have generated as much as you would expect, you must remember you provide the best possible answer to a customer situation.

These are the kind of customer service situations we can’t measure from an isolated perspective.  Check your abandonment cart numbers. Check the need for other payment methods and shipping methods. Check your incoming traffic origins and exit. If the origin is from a page that relates to the product you sell, the rejection rate cannot be high. You don’t need anyone that knows magic to increase your sales, you just need someone that knows how to read information and act accordingly.