 Welcome to The Journey. Today we're going to talk about advanced e-commerce features to add to your online store. Being an online store is just the beginning. Once you get into the groove of marketing your store and handling your orders, it's time to consider adding advanced e-commerce features. So, you know, you can sell more products and increase your profits, win-win. Going beyond the basics and adding advanced features to your store is going to help improve your customer experience. It will also help you to sell more products. So, here are seven, yes, seven advanced e-commerce features to consider adding to your online store. As we say with every video, your business is not something you set and forget. By adding powerful reporting tools, you'll be able to see which of your products are doing well, which orders are pending, the state of your inventory, and so much more. They'll also allow you to stay on top of your store and avoid running out of stock or stocking up on the raw category of products that aren't selling well and focus on the ones that are. This includes traffic analytics that shows how your customers are finding you. So, you can set something up like Google SiteKit on your website and get all sorts of awesome data about the traffic, conversion, search engines, all that good stuff. Another advanced e-commerce feature that you can consider is integrating a blog. I love a good blog. If you're not blogging for your online store, well, it's about time to get on that bandwagon. Blogging is one of the easiest ways to promote your store while providing customers with a ton of value, right? Share your expertise and entertain us with a blog. You can create posts that talk about, ooh, one of my favorites, behind the scenes. That is so intriguing. Also, you could talk about your customer stories, share those. Another one of my favorites, you could share how your product is meant to be used or cared for. And you can also create gift guides and link to the products to your store. An active blog gives search engines more opportunities to index your online store, which, hey, that increases your chances of showing up in search results. SEO for the win. Our next advanced e-commerce feature is Abandoned Cart Recovery. So cart abandonment is one of the worst problems for almost every online store owner. And while you can't completely eliminate it, there are ways to reduce it. Simply by setting up Abandoned Cart email reminders, you can remind customers about the products they left in their cart. Chances are you have one sitting in your inbox right now. So you can send reminders out on a schedule and offer a special coupon or a deal to encourage them to come back and complete the purchase. Hey, did you leave something in your cart? Here's 20% off. Go ahead and place that order. Get them to buy, get them to buy, because that's what you're trying to do with your online store. Which takes us to our next e-commerce feature, advanced search and filtering options. So it goes without saying that your store should include a search bar and product filters. However, there are ways to improve on both of those. I love a good search bar. I know one of the sites that I get a lot of like my surf gear, they have just an abundance of products and everything surfs. So for me to get to what I'm looking for specifically and quickly, bingo, search bar. So encourage y'all to have that. For example, a live search that suggests products as the user types is more effective. That's another one I've seen as well as I'm starting to type in longboard. It starts to populate. And so this is again, it's more effective than a static search bar that returns a list of dozens of products. Also offering the ability to filter not only by size, but also by color, also by brand and materials. Another smart way to add more advanced filtering options and what it essentially does, no brainer. It makes it easy for your customer to find the exact product that they want. I use filters all the time. I'm often short on time, but in need of a product. So if I can use that search bar, that live search bar, as well as additional filters, I'm going to get to that product that I want to spend money on more quickly, which means you the business gets my money. This one should really go without saying with more than 50% of all internet traffic coming from mobile devices, your site needs to have a mobile optimized checkout. A few tips to keep in mind when it comes to optimizing your online checkout process for mobile users include confirming that your form fields are large enough to type on smaller screens, not asking for unnecessary information. They're clicking on it with their thumbs or fingers. I don't judge. Use a larger size for your buttons and calls to actions. And lastly, offer a variety of payment options such as Apple Pay and Google Pay that just make it that much easier to pay on your website. And let's not forget social media sharing, having sharing buttons on individual product pages makes it super easy to drive more traffic to your store. And take it to the next level. I mean add even a deeper integration with social media by connecting your Facebook page to your store and then make it easy for those Facebook users to buy from you, right? And you can also set up Instagram shopping. So your Instagram followers can go directly to your product page and checkout. They got money to spend too. Plan to devote some time to your store's SEO to ensure that your product titles, page titles, product descriptions and those images that you're using there are optimized for search engines as well. That's going to help you to get noticed and get found. Finally, consider adding video and in-depth product demos for your store. One of the biggest drawbacks of an online shopping is not being able to see or touch the product in person. By adding these, you'll bridge this gap and really make it easy for your customers to visualize what they're buying. Videos enable you to show how other customers are using your products while the demos allow customers to see the product from all angles. Both options make the decision to purchase that much easier and ultimately help you sell more. So features like reporting tools, integrated blogs, abandoned cart recovery and others will help you increase your bottom line and hey, make it easier to drive organic traffic to your store so you can spend less on advertising. Your journey is not over yet. We have over 200 episodes to help you with your small business. Make sure you like, sub-comment and subscribe on this video. This is The Journey and we'll see you next time.