7 E-Commerce Best Practices for Growth in 2026

With over 33% of the world’s population engaged in online shopping, e-commerce has grown into a $6 trillion industry, projected to reach $8 trillion by 2027.

As more consumers choose to buy products online, the need for innovation, seamless UX, and compelling branding has never been greater.

If you’re an e-commerce business leader aiming to get a piece of the pie, this article outlines seven best practices to help you drive sales and achieve sustainable growth.

1. Create an advanced SEO strategy

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your online store get discovered.

With almost 93% of all online traffic coming from Google Search, Google Images, and Google Maps, it’s crucial to prioritize your SEO strategy to help your site get placed near the top of Google’s search results.

Here is a summary of some of the SEO best practices for higher rankings.

Perform keyword research

There are helpful tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to find relevant keywords with high search volume and low competition.

Concentrate on long-tail keywords, such as “buy products” or “quality products,” that align with user intent. These keywords are more specific, less competitive, and tend to convert better.

Prioritize on-page SEO

Having SEO optimized content and structure is essential for increasing visibility and guiding website visitors to your product pages.

On-page SEO refers to the copy on your website’s pages.

To boost on-page SEO:

• Craft compelling and keyword-rich title tags for each page.
• Write informative and engaging meta descriptions that include target keywords.
• Use header tags (H1, H2, H3) to structure content and include keywords naturally.
• Create high-quality, relevant, and keyword-optimized content. Use synonyms and related keywords to avoid keyword stuffing (Google punishes keyword stuffing).
• Create clean, descriptive, and keyword-rich URLs.
• Use internal linking to enhance UX and guide website visitors to important product pages.

Build links

Backlinking is one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so focus on acquiring high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites. You can also write guest posts for reputable blogs in your industry.

You can use internal links to guide both users and search engines to important pages on your site, as well as to other relevant product pages. This practice enhances the user experience (UX) and helps direct website visitors along their shopping journey, especially across varying screen sizes and devices.

Be sure to check for and replace broken links in your content consistently or this could hurt your user experience.

Regular SEO audits help ensure your content remains optimized and aligned with evolving search algorithms.

Analyze your results

There are a few different ways to monitor how your SEO is performing. These include:

• Google Analytics.
• Google Search Console.
• Conduct SEO audits to ensure your content stays optimized and aligns with current algorithms.

While there are other important SEO strategies to ensure your website gets the traction it deserves, these practices are some of the basics to help you get started or review if your current processes are working.

2. Put money into marketing

Marketing should be seen as an investment rather than a cost, as it is crucial for successfully selling products. Without it, even the highest-quality product won’t be discovered by potential buyers.

Yet far too often, marketers find themselves having to prove their value to leadership.

This year, nearly 70% of marketing leaders are facing budget constraints.

So why does marketing always get the short end of the stick?

Here’s a simplified example of why it shouldn’t:

Say you’re selling the best fishing pole in the jungle. That’s great, but the local tribes have never seen or heard of you or your product. If no one has ever seen or heard about your product, how do you expect to sell it? You need to get the word out, be seen, gain trust, and show what makes it the best. That’s the crucial role marketing plays, not just in e-commerce, but in all types of businesses.

While there are various strategies to consider, here are a few marketing tactics to focus on to ensure you’re reaching your business goals.

Embrace email marketing

Email marketing continues to stand out as a powerhouse. According to Hubspot, 99% of email users check their inbox every single day, and 87% of brands say that email marketing contributes to their business’ success.

In fact, email marketing is so strong that 80% of marketers say that they’d give up social media marketing before they’d give up email marketing.

The true power of email marketing comes from sending highly targeted messages. Now, with the rise of AI in email marketing, this precision is being supercharged. AI helps uncover patterns in customer behavior, fine-tune messaging, and anticipate what your audience wants before they do. Making every email smarter, not just scheduled.

By segmenting your audience, using customer data for personalized recommendations, and implementing automated triggers, you can create email experiences that are both timely and relevant. Utilize customer data, such as purchase history and preferences, to send targeted messages effectively. This approach empowers online retailers to promote deals on products customers have previously purchased, remind them of return policies, and reach out to users who have abandoned their shopping carts.

Additionally, you can automate emails, generating 320% more revenue than emails that aren’t automated. Automation allows for scalable outreach while ensuring optimized content delivery across devices and screen sizes.

To further maximize this strategy, include A/B testing and responsive design, ensure your emails have clear calls-to-actions (CTAs), and maintain engaging, value-driven content to foster loyalty and drive conversions.

Improve your content marketing

Content marketing has become a standard practice, with 90% of marketers implementing it into their strategy. This widespread adoption highlights content marketing’s crucial role in connecting with audiences, building brand identity, and enhancing online visibility.

Unlike traditional advertising, content marketing focuses on creating valuable, relevant content to attract and retain a specific audience, ultimately driving profitable customer actions.

Its versatility allows it to be utilized across various channels, including social media, blogs, and email campaigns, each aimed at deepening the consumer relationship with the brand. This extensive integration of content into marketing strategies marks a significant shift in how companies communicate with their markets and prioritize customer engagement.

Audience research is the key driver behind successful content marketing campaigns. By understanding your audience in-depth, you can create content that resonates with your target demographic, addressing specific needs and interests. This tailored approach results in more engaging and effective messaging, significantly increasing the chances of campaign success.

Prioritize loyalty marketing

Building customer loyalty involves effective brand messaging, community management, and driving social media engagement. However, the simplest and most effective way to foster loyalty is through a well-designed loyalty program. When creating a customer loyalty program, some best practices include:

• Providing multiple opportunities for customers to enroll to ensure the process is straightforward and easily accessible.
• Offering rewards such as a point system or birthday gift to keep customers coming back.
• Giving points meaningful value (e.g., avoid setups like 1,000 points for a dollar).

Programs that reward shoppers who’ve bought products or left customer reviews help build trust, foster customer retention, and encourage them to buy products again.

Finally, come up with a catchy name for your loyalty program. A memorable name adds brand appeal and makes the program more enticing.

3. Stay true to your brand

Your brand is your business’ identity.

However, sometimes businesses forgo working on their brand identity, because branding efforts don’t see immediate results and can be difficult to measure.

But just like a fine wine, branding takes time. And sometimes, the best things in life can’t be fully measured.

While it may be difficult to obtain hard data from branding work, 90% of customers say they’re willing to spend more if a brand is trustworthy.

And that’s branding’s overall goal—to build trust. It achieves this by letting consumers know exactly who you are, what you sell, what you stand for, and the quality of your products.

That’s why everything from your font, website design, color palette, and tone to your mission and value statements should be carefully thought out and tested to unify the user experience.

Visual content influences perception and helps shoppers envision owning what you’re selling. Great images combined with detailed descriptions and strong branding increase the likelihood that visitors will buy products from you instead of your competitors.

For example, let’s take a look at these three brands. Do you know who they are without seeing their name (and without looking at the sources provided beneath them)? Do any thoughts or opinions come to mind when you see each logo?

I’m going to guess you knew at least two out of three.

What’s impressive is that a recognizable, wordless image or a product photo can communicate a plethora of information—including a name, the type of products sold, recent news, sustainability initiatives, and more).

And that’s the power of branding.

4. Take a hybrid customer service approach

Exceptional customer support is essential for reducing abandoned carts and increasing customer retention. According to an Emplifi report, 80% of people abandon a brand after just two poor experiences or interactions. This highlights the critical need for e-commerce businesses to consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences.

To ensure customers leave your site happy, you should take a hybrid approach to provide the best shopping experience possible.

Here’s how to do it.

Use AI to streamline support

While personal interaction with customers might be limited in e-commerce, you can still provide outstanding service using artificial intelligence (AI). These tools can emulate the care and dedication you would offer in a physical store.

Here are seven tips to customize AI tools to maximize your return on investment (ROI):

1. Develop a repository of standardized responses for common customer questions to ensure quick and consistent support.
2. Build an indexed help center to address the most frequent customer issues efficiently.
3. Implement chatbots or virtual assistants to provide instant responses to customer inquiries.
4. Ensure your site’s search functionality is optimized for natural language queries and popular keywords to make it easy for customers to find what they need.
5. Utilize predictive algorithms based on past user behavior to offer personalized product recommendations.
6. Improve UX by addressing FAQs instantly and offering personalized assistance.
7. Use data like purchase history and behavior to improve bot interactions and streamline the checkout experience.

By implementing these tips, you can establish a robust AI-powered customer service system. This will not only improve ease of access to your products and website but also speed up the resolution of customer issues, ultimately enhancing their overall customer experience.

Employ people to talk to your customers

Nothing beats real human interaction. There are few things more frustrating than screaming “talk to a representative” into the void (aka your phone), especially when you have a problem.

That’s why retailers shouldn’t completely swap out humans for bots. Customers need a real person to talk to and resolve their query in real time. Real-time chat with trained agents reduces abandoned cart rates, manages returns policy concerns, and builds better customer journey flow.

When utilizing chatbots, it’s important to have a plan for when they fall short. If a chatbot is unable to assist a customer effectively, smoothly transition them to a text or chat support channel for further help.

When taking this approach:

• Narrow down the issue by asking clear, specific questions.
• Create support templates to speed up your team’s response time.
• Combine personalized responses with basic ones.
• Prioritize tickets to address the most urgent requests first.

Most importantly, manage customer expectations. They may request things beyond your capacity to provide, like gift coupons or discounts. Kindly offer them what’s owed and leave it at that.

By combining AI and a human support team for a hybrid approach, you increase your chances of keeping your customer base happy.

5. Improve your site search & discovery capabilities

One third of shoppers admit they’ll leave a website after a failed search. Given that conversion rates through site search can be up to 50% higher than the average, it’s essential to optimize it for business growth.

The best option for scaling your site search is adopting a platform focused on search & discovery. When selecting your platform, choose one that provides personalized recommendations based on visitors’ previous search behavior. Additionally, ensure the platform includes analytics to evaluate your site search performance and identify areas for improvement.

Site search suites, such as Luigi’s Box, further enhance search & discovery capabilities through features like:

• AI and machine learning (ML).
• Autocomplete, which fills in queries before the customer finishes typing.
• Synonyms, recognizing slang and words with similar meanings to produce relevant results.
• Ranking features that promote the right product at the right time.

The more intuitive your search is, the better the user experience, and that leads to fewer abandoned carts, smoother checkout processes, and more purchases.

6. Utilize zero-party cookies

In Cisco’s 2024 Data Privacy Benchmark Study, 94% of organizations say that consumers won’t buy from them if their personal data isn’t adequately protected.

The same study found that 91% of organizations admit they need to do more to reassure customers about how their data is being used with AI.

With the phasing out of third-party cookies on the horizon, businesses should shift focus to zero-party data, which empowers connections on customers’ terms. This type of data is willingly provided by consumers, and includes their preferences, interests, and buying aspirations.

Despite its potential, only a small portion of brands currently utilize zero-party data. However, those that do often see increased customer satisfaction and loyalty because they can create personalized experiences that resonate deeply with individual preferences.

There are several ways to collect zero-party data, such as through customer surveys, offering incentives, integrating with customer relationship management (CRM) systems, personalizing marketing campaigns, and ensuring data privacy. This approach enhances personalization, builds trust, and drives better marketing outcomes.

7. Offer flexible payment options

Lastly, it’s important to cater to diverse customer preferences by providing various payment methods. Steps to consider include:

• Offering options like credit cards, digital wallets, and buy-now-pay-later services
• Implementing secure sockets layer (SSL) certificates and other security measures to protect customer payment information
• Reducing the number of steps required to complete a purchase to minimize cart abandonment

By expanding the types of payment methods you accept, you’ll open up more opportunities for your site visitors to buy products.

Conclusion

By adopting these seven e-commerce best practices, retail decision makers can create a successful online presence that meets the needs of today’s consumers.

Create an advanced SEO strategy, invest in marketing, prioritize branding, take a hybrid customer service approach, improve search & discovery through platforms like Luigi’s Box, use zero-party cookies, and offer flexible payment options to drive sustainable growth and remain competitive in e-commerce.

Frequently asked questions