As a practitioner in the online home goods mall industry, I often worry about issues such as traffic, conversion rate, return on investment, website stickiness, and shopping experience. Among these, traffic is the most important, especially for self-built malls. Without promotion, it's like an information island that no one cares about.
Currently, many search engine optimization companies boast to e-commerce businesses that they can bring a lot of traffic to e-commerce websites through some long-tail keywords, meaning that there's no need to do paid promotions on search engines, as they can naturally rank on the first page. The way SEO operates is by building many website clusters, each with keyword links pointing to the website that needs promotion, thereby increasing the weight and ranking of the promoted website on search engines. However, the conversion rate of such traffic is usually very low.
Promoting through search engine keywords isn't cheap either. Currently, some popular terms cost up to 10 yuan per click, and without a budget of at least 1 million yuan per month, you shouldn't even consider this option. But compared to the traffic brought by SEO, this type of traffic has a higher conversion rate.
Promoting through banner ads on portal sites is something e-commerce businesses without tens of millions of investment should not consider. Although it is expensive, the effect is indeed good, and the conversion rate of such traffic is quite high, especially for kitchenware. However, opinions differ regarding the return on investment, and if your website stickiness and customer shopping experience still need improvement, you shouldn't go down this route.
Promotions on forums, blogs, and groups are now generally frowned upon, so it's better to do less of them. Of course, if you've just opened or have information about free gifts, you can still try these channels, because people are greedy for small bargains, and the traffic may be quite substantial.
If owners of Taobao stores don't participate in some of Taobao's activities, it's a pity, because you'll lose a lot of traffic. To participate in Taobao's activities, however, isn't easy. You need to apply continuously, and your product prices need to be competitive. Personally, I think when selling products on Taobao, consumers are more price-conscious unless it's a well-known brand; otherwise, you can't expect too much profit.
The advertising promotion below after logging into Tenpay or Alipay also has pretty good results, with the highest conversion rate. As long as the shopping experience on your website is good, loyal customers will immediately emerge.
All of the above results come from my own promotional experiences with my mall, Jupins (http://www.jupins.com). I hope it's useful for friends.