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6 Reasons Why a Knowledge Base is Essential for Online Sellers

Last updated: July 12, 2023
Knowledge base

If your online store doesn’t have a knowledge base in 2023, then your customer experience is behind the curve. Shoppers expect immediate answers to their questions and the quickest, most effective way to provide this, is with a knowledge base.

A knowledge base also provides significant operational benefits for your business, helping you to reduce costs and the volume of tickets your support team has to handle.

Let’s take a detailed look at why knowledge bases are so crucial for online sellers and exactly how they benefit your business.

What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is a library of information that your customers – or potential customers – can use to answer questions they might have about your business, products, or service.

Knowledge bases should contain a very comprehensive coverage of every question a customer might have. It’s very important, therefore, for your knowledge base to be well organised and easy to navigate.

What are the benefits of a knowledge base

A well structured, comprehensive knowledge base is a huge asset for your customer experience for three main reasons; it’s the quickest way to answer queries, it allows your customers to help themselves, and it’s always accurate, clear, and comprehensive.

1. The quickest way to answer queries

It’s common knowledge that online shoppers expect very low customer service response times, but exactly how fast they expect an answer is still pretty startling!

According to a 2019 survey, 71% of consumers want an answer within five minutes and 31% expect a resolution immediately, or they’d abandon the purchase and go elsewhere.

If you’re using eCommerce help desk software, you’ll be able to resolve queries in the shortest time possible, but sometimes even this isn’t enough. Perhaps you’re in the middle of a sales rush, with orders flying in left right and center, or your support team are dealing with some particularly tricky tickets.

This is when a knowledge base can really help you out.

By linking to a well structured and easy to navigate chapter, you can immediately resolve a query without even needing to involve an agent. Perhaps you have a pre-sales query from a customer wondering if you ship to Hawaii. By giving them the chance to find this out straight away, you can put their mind at ease and remove the final obstacle to winning a sale.

Fast customer service responses aided by a knowledge base also help you to minimise negative feedback and protect your online reputation.

Perhaps a customer bought the wrong size bike for their daughter a week before Christmas and they want to know how long an exchange process will take. A knowledge base helps them to find the answer they need straight away. This takes the heat out of a stressful situation and potentially saves you a negative review from an angry customer.

2. Allows your customers to help themselves 

It’s long been an assumption that excellent customer service requires a human touch. This is simply not the case for eCommerce in 2020.

In a 2020 study, over 67% of consumers said they’d prefer self service over speaking to a company representative, and 91% said they’d use an online knowledge base if it were tailored to their needs.

Perhaps it’s the digital nature of eCommerce, or maybe the majority of today’s consumers are simply less social. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that a huge cohort of your customers would prefer to use a knowledge base than deal with customer support agents.

If you give the people what they want, you’ll be improving their customer experience and this will translate into business success.

3. Always provides accurate, reliable information

If you only have a few support agents who have been in the company for a long time, you can be confident that their responses to customer tickets will be accurate. But what if you’ve just hired new staff? Or maybe you’ve started selling internationally and there’s a language barrier?

By using a knowledge base, you’re able to carefully construct a comprehensive answer that you’re 100% sure is accurate and answers a customer’s query. Not only is this making life easier for your support agents, it eliminates the chance of customers receiving incorrect, or incomplete answers to questions.

Not only can you ensure that the information provided is always accurate and clearly articulated, you can also ensure that your brand voice shines through. This is particularly useful for established eCommerce businesses that have a well developed brand identity.

It’s difficult to align your brand with customer support communications from different agents, but with a knowledge base, this aspirations becomes a reality.  

4. Saves your agents’ time

We mentioned earlier how a knowledge base enables your customers to answer their own questions without needing to ask a customer support agent.

This not only saves the customers’ time, but it also saves your agents’ time by reducing the volume of tickets an agent is required to answer. This has a cumulative effect on your overall customer support response times. 

5. Helps to minimise support costs

If you’re experiencing a lower volume of tickets and saving your support agents’ time, as mentioned above, it will eventually have a positive impact on your overall support costs.

The phrase ‘time is money’ is certainly relevant for a customer support team. If you’re making more sales, you’re going to get more tickets, no matter how good your products or fulfillment services are. Help desk software with an effective knowledge base is probably the only way you’ll be able to manage, without hiring extra staff.

6. Protects your ratings

If you experience a bump in sales and you choose not to use a knowledge base or hire extra staff, your ratings will end up paying the price.

Without the ability to find answers and waiting on a busy, overwhelmed support team, your customers will get frustrated. This will inevitably lead to some angry customers leaving negative reviews and perhaps even sharing their bad experiences on social media. Needless to say, this has a negative impact on your products’ visibility on marketplaces such as eBay and Amazon. 

Final thoughts

It’s clear that a good knowledge base is an asset for your customers and your business as a whole. When done right, it’s able to provide an enhanced customer experience while simultaneously saving your support team’s time and cutting your overall business costs.

With eDesk, you’re able to combine eCommerce help desk software with a customisable knowledge base. This provides you with everything you need to minimise your customer support response times, improve your ratings and reduce your costs.

Did you know that over 60% of US online retail purchases were made through Amazon last year? Amazon’s hold over eCommerce is well established, with 9.1 million active Amazon sellers worldwide and an average of 66 thousand orders per day. Newer sellers may be wondering how they can get more sales on Amazon in such a competitive environment.

The truth is, they absolutely can because with Amazon’s booming market share come many opportunities. We’ve assembled this digestible list of 14 quick wins and strategic moves, to help you up your game and sell more on Amazon.

1. Do keyword research

Having the right keywords can be one of the most important tactics in reaching your target audiences. Using the keywords that are common to searches for your products is the objective, but search engine optimisation (SEO) is a constantly evolving game. That means that keywords used successfully in the past may not be as effective with updated search engine algorithms today.

The terms used by customers to find products change daily and are affected by seasonal, cultural, and economic factors. Hence, it’s important to stay on top of the latest SEO trends and make sure you cast a wide net when implementing keywords for each product listing.

Each product should be optimized with as many relevant keywords as possible – into the hundreds! This gives you the best possible chance of getting your products found by customers, helping you sell more on Amazon.

Amazon keyword research tools like Helium 10, SellerApp, Jungle Scout, and AMZ One can help by generating a list of related keywords with search volume, competition level, and other useful metrics, making it easier for you to choose the best keywords for your product listing

2. Use a repricing tool to get more sales on Amazon

When it comes to sealing the deal and making a sale, price is a main deciding factor for many customers. As an Amazon seller, you always want to make sure you’re pricing your products competitively, but equally, you don’t want to lose your margin! 

This is something that using repricing software can help with. Repricing software automates the pricing process in real-time, ensuring your prices stay in line with those of competitors, and with market fluctuations, while you get more sales on Amazon.

Repricing software also has many customisable features that allow you to set prices at optimal levels to help drive sales, without compromising profit. It’s worth taking a trial to see how it can help lift your sales. 

3. Get more Amazon reviews

Online reviews are important to spread confidence through word of month and for building credibility for your brand. It’s also a fact that 72% of shoppers won’t buy until they’ve read reviews of a product from people like themselves – people they trust. 

Even a strong product with great marketing behind it still has to overcome the fear of the unknown if there’s no social proof. Plus, positive reviews are a significant factor in deciding which products win the Amazon Buy Box.

Get more Amazon reviews by encouraging feedback from your customers. The best way to do this is by utilizing feedback software to automate the process.

4. Provide great customer service

Customer service is absolutely essential in eCommerce. Offering top-quality customer service not only adds value, but helps retain customers. A big part of making a sale is assuring the customer that they can trust you to deliver, and that trust is hard earned but easily lost. Providing good eCommerce customer service is critical, and committing to providing great customer service is all the more so!

As an Amazon seller, you need to be on top of your customer service. Responsiveness, a friendly manner and quick and easy resolution processes are all ingredients that make for a winning approach to great customer service. 

But it can be confusing trying to streamline it all. Thankfully, there are all sorts of tools available to make this job easier, like helpdesk software to keep all your customer interactions in one place. This helps you to respond quickly and accurately to customer inquiries when they come in, so that your customers always know you’ve got their back.

5. Leverage Amazon seller tools

The best part about being an Amazon seller is that you don’t have to go it alone. There are numerous tools available to help you maximize your business and get the most out of selling on Amazon, whether third-party or FBA. 

From repricing tools, to help desk software, to review software and even shipping assistance, many tools exist on the market today that specifically help Amazon sellers optimize their listings, prices, feedback, shipping, customer service and even their taxes. 

There are many different seller tools available, so it’s worth reading about options and making an informed decision about the right ones to choose for your business. With the right tools, you can grow your business more than you ever thought possible. 

6. Get more sales on Amazon with ads

Running ads is almost guaranteed to help you get more sales on Amazon, but it’s easy to just throw money at them and hope for the best. You can do better! Pay attention to your advertising cost of sales (ACOS) metric, the figure for how much ad spend you need in order to make a sale.

By advertising more efficiently, you lower your ACOS and ensure you get more bang for your buck. Over time, you’ll learn what works and you can employ a strategy with regards to how you run your ads. Taking an insight-driven approach to Amazon ads results in a more profitable Amazon business!

7. Optimise your product pages

The old saying goes that 80% of readers never make it past the headline of any piece of content. That means once you’ve written your product title, you’ve effectively spent 80 cents of your dollar.

When writing product titles, stick to the formula of:

  • Brand name
  • Product name
  • Features (size, colour, gender etc). 

This lets you include the right keywords in the right order to immediately tell shoppers that this is the product for them.

Moreover, making sure to visually design your product pages so that they’re clean, simple and easy to read will also help win over shoppers. No one wants to read through a cluttered page. The more straightforward (yet informative) and the cleaner you make your design, the more likely you’ll be to win over those elusive eyeballs!

8. Win the Amazon Buy Box

The quickest way to get more sales on Amazon is by ensuring that your products show up consistently in the Amazon Buy Box (the area in the top right of a product page, where shoppers can ‘Add to Cart’ or ‘Buy Now’). This is because over 82% of sales happen through this highly sought after space.

Although the exact formula to win the Buy Box is unknown, there are a few things that we know are essential. These are mainly metrics that prove the seller is providing a good customer experience. Customer reviews play a big role here. The more positive reviews a seller can amass, the likelihood of winning the Buy Box increases. 

In addition to reviews, something else that’s obviously very important to Amazon shoppers is price! By using repricing software, you can automatically set your prices at the optimal level to win the Buy Box and maximize profit, even if you’ve got an enormous inventory.

9. Amazon account health rating

The Amazon account health rating (AHR) is a new feature that helps you monitor your account health based on its adherence to Amazon seller policies. 

It considers both negative factors (such as the number of unresolved policy violations on your account) as well as positive factors (how your account positively impacts the customer experience through its selling activities). 

Each account will be given a rating, which is regularly reviewed as Amazon monitors the performance of its sellers. If your account is off-target, you will be notified so that you can improve your performance. Conversely, a good AHR rating will work in your favor, helping assure customers that they’re doing business with a compliant seller. 

10. Maintain your Amazon SLA

A big part of being a seller is cultivating trust with your customers. That means showing them that you operate in an above-board manner and that you’ll make good on your promise of fulfillment to them. One way of doing that is by making sure your Amazon store has a Service Level Agreement (SLA). This is a promise to your customers that they’ll receive their orders on time. When it comes to fulfillment, the SLA is based on the capacity to fulfill open orders and on-time shipping and delivery. 

SLAs help manage customer expectations by defining standards and outlining circumstances under which you as the seller won’t be liable for unfulfilled promises (e.g., natural disasters preventing shipping, etc). 

eDesk’s customer service solution is designed to alert you when your SLA is expiring, so your business is never caught without one. Having a current SLA helps you maintain transparency with customers, thereby building trust which helps ensure customer loyalty.  

11. Focus on products that already sell

Most ambitious business owners want to try new streams of revenue, but it’s important not to lose sight of the things that are making you money now. 

By doubling down on the products that already provide your Amazon store with a reliable revenue stream, you not only deliver to market demand but ensure that you have the financial runway required to take risks on innovative new products, if need be. 

Review your financial statements every quarter and look at the items that are performing best in your store. Think about how you can continue to market these with ads, SEO keywords and upgraded images to maximize their selling potential in your online store. 

12. Sync your inventory

Inventory can be a delicate balancing act. Hold too much inventory for too long and you need to pay over the odds to store it. But hold too little inventory and you lose out on vital sales, or even customers, due to an inability to fulfill. Amazon can also penalize you if your inventory performance isn’t up to standard.

Stock control is something every seller needs to understand and have the capability to manage for optimal results. Smart inventory management is an under-appreciated way to increase your Amazon sales and profit margin. Fortunately, there are tools that can help. Investing in the right tools and software can help sellers take the stress out of balancing supply and demand.

13. Expand into new Amazon marketplaces 

Amazon currently has 20 marketplaces around the world, which include the US, Canada, Mexico, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, Singapore, Brazil, Australia and more. 

You can scale your brand by moving into some of these marketplaces. This can involve doing market research to find out which products are popular in each market and then uplevelling your shipping operations in order to be able to ship globally.  

But expanding into new markets also means you’ll need to take language into consideration and localize your listings so that they feature each marketplace’s local language and SEO keywords in the appropriate language. Multilingual customer service is also needed in order to be able to service customers across various marketplaces in their local language. 

Sounds complicated? It doesn’t have to be. eDesk’s help desk solution is designed to support customer service and workflow in multiple languages, so you can expand your business without investing in the overhead of hiring a global team. 

14. Spy on your competitors

Ok, maybe “spy” is a bit of an exaggeration, but profitable sellers are always on the lookout for what their competitors are doing. You want to make sure you’re offering the right inventory for your market at the right prices. Repricing software will monitor this for you, taking the guesswork out of pricing at the right levels. 

Using data gleaned from helpdesk reporting can also help you gather valuable insights and feedback from your customers, which will help you to better understand what customers want and need. Acting on analytics-driven insights from easy-to-read reports means you’re always one step ahead of the competition. 

Final thoughts

The quest to increase your store’s Amazon sales doesn’t need to be an uphill struggle. There are many resources available to Amazon sellers today to help them optimize their store and develop a healthy sales pipeline. 

By staying in touch with how the Amazon platform grows and using the right tech tools to drive your business, you can continue to do what you do best: building a great brand, winning customers, retaining existing customers and improving your bottom line. 

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