1 – Select the Right Product Line
When selling online it is really important to choose the product line with care and to fit in with your personal circumstances. Avoid products that are too difficult to ship, including large, fragile, easily damaged, perishable or inflammable goods. The best products to sell online are those that can be packaged and shipped easily and without damage. It is much easier to sell goods that can be bought without the need to touch or taste them as people are wary of buying fresh goods without being able to check for quality.
2 – Pick a Good Domain Name
This is one of the most important steps in setting up an online shop. Giving your site a relevant easily remembered domain name is definitely a trick you should not miss. Try using a domain that includes a popular keyword for example if your e-store sells jewellery, you should search for keywords relating to jewellery and use it as your domain name. Incidentally, Google now favours sites that have relevant keywords in the domain name. Keep your domain name as short as possible with no more than three words, and make it memorable so that people can talk about it easily. If you are planning to sell overseas choose a domain name ending in .com.
3 – Make Sure Your Website is Appealing and Usable
Is your online store attractive, simple to navigate and straightforward to use for even your most timid web visitors? The ease with which a customer can navigate your online shop and perform tasks to buy online is what is going to be pushing up your sales. A hesitation to buy online often stems from a lack of knowledge about how to use websites, so if your ecommerce website is difficult to use your customers will go elsewhere – you’d better believe it!
4 – Automate Your Online Shop
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you only need to automate your site when it becomes big and successful, it is in fact best to automate your entire ecommerce website before your launch date. Successful ecommerce sites automate as many tasks as they can to allow them to streamline the order processing system. If you use reliable tried and tested software with state-of-the-art Modules you won’t go far wrong.
5 – Always Provide Excellent Customer Support
If you want to become rich and successful remember the business mantra “the customer is always right.” If you want to build up a successful ecommerce company then customer support is vital; and not just when it suits you. One of the great advantages of an online shop to the customer is that it never shuts. Therefore to build customer loyalty and trust it is imperative to answer customer queries immediately. Reply to emails within 24 hours and try to answer the phone as often as you can. Of course customers can be a real pain – it’s their function in life, but don’t forget it is their money that is going to pay your bills!
6 – Launch an Ongoing Marketing Campaign
Marketing is not just for Christmas – it’s for life. Nobody is going to visit your ecommerce website if they don’t know it’s there. Don’t panic, there are lots of ways to promote your online shop and many of them are free. Marketing strategies include submitting your site to the search engines, putting your shop details on free directories such as www.freeindex.co.uk, exchanging links with other ecommerce websites, posting to various mailing lists and news groups and even banner exchanges. Other excellent ways to get visitors to your site are to write a series of articles about your particular products for article sites, set up an email newsletter campaign where you can review new products or focus on special deals and last but not least submit regular press releases to some of the better free press release sites such as www.prlog.com.
Paid for marketing strategies include Google Adwords and other pay per click campaigns, using a PR company, advertisements on other websites and adverts in magazines or newspapers. Only go down the paid for route if you have plenty of cash to splash – Google Adwords alone can eat up literally thousands in a year.
Never neglect existing customers, remember it is far cheaper to retain an old customer than try to acquire a new one. Keeping your store regularly updated, sending them regular ezines, having a rewards program and even an affiliate program are some of the best ways to encourage repeat customers. Another great marketing ploy is to offer repeat buyers a discount on future purchases.
To ensure the success of your ecommerce website you must continuously evaluate what your customers want, so gather information and data about customer behavior, analyse data, make changes and implement them and observe customer responses.
