Building eCommerce Websites That Work - Part 1
You want to succeed at eCommerce? Welcome to a very big family. Right off, let's be clear - there are lots of ways to do business on the internet. And lots of ways to both make and lose money. Successful eCommerce websites come in all shapes, kinds and colors and while I can't cover every type of site in this series, I will present the basics you need to consider and apply for an eCommerce web site to be successful. Let's begin by assuming you have some of the fundamentals, that you understand the language and that you are serious. I'm not going to tell you how to set up a web site or get a decent hosting account. We're beyond those basics. The basics here are the factors which will influence the success (or failure) and the degree of success your eCommerce web site experiences. First and foremost, you need to provide value for your customers. Absurd as it seems to have to repeat that, a lot of so-called eCommerce sites provide no or very little value for their visitors. Pretending to offer value is not the same thing as providing value. Promoting miserably written, hackneyed, cloned ebooks filled with questionably useful and/or outdated content doesn't make a high value web site. Sure you might make some money. Once. And you'll end up with a high refund rate - and an unhappy credit card processor. That path means you're taking advantage of inexperienced customers and abusing their willingness to trust you. This isn't the way to a long-term business with steady repeat customers. Value on the net is not very different from any kind of off-line retail sales -- a quality product line that will attract potential customers and a competitive price that will lead to purchases. An honest, quality product that will meet the expectations you've created in your buyers. Hyped junk just doesn't cut it. Next, you've got to have a smooth, user-friendly, easy to follow process all the way to your thank you page. The simpler, cleaner and clearer you can make the process, the better. Where it makes sense you can augment this user-responsive site profile by adding live-response chat. If you do decide to use call-in or live chat, it's imperative that your operators be well-trained, understand your products and your system and be customer friendly. This can be a problem if you outsource. The less expensive out-source call centers can turn out to be very expensive in terms of lost sales and customers who never come back. You'll need to check very carefully and be 100 per cent certain the operators actually speak and understand the primary language(s) of your targeted customer group. You'll need to provide extensive background information and highly flexible, well-written scripts. You should collect your own customer evaluations - separately. Don't rely exclusively on any monitoring or customer satisfaction surveys provided by the call center. Track your ROI to be sure it's money well-spent. Don't stop monitoring just because the results looked good for the first two or three months. Things change. Make sure you're tracking desired actions linked to the call center separately from those NOT related to call-in or live chat. Mixing outcomes leaves you in the dark about what's really happening. You probably should have an attractive website. An ugly site can work, but to do that you need to absolutely know exactly what you're doing and why it should work. And you'll have to test like crazy to optimize (of course, you should be doing that anyway). The ugly site tactic is not for the inexperienced. Very few individuals really have the grasp of marketing, market and customer psychology that makes for a successful "ugly" site. To provide a pleasant experience, you need to be careful in what you use - colors, text-size, graphics, animation and white space can add value to your site or turn it into a user nightmare. Test your site with people who will tell you the truth. Just because you love it doesn't mean anyone else will. In general, aiming for a professional appearing site is your best option. Look for the highest ranked, busiest sites in your business area and study the layouts they use. Extract the common features that you see on those sites. While other factors heavily influence traffic and ranking, appearance has a strong effect on visitors and sites that do testing evolve toward optimizing visitor behavior. Keep in mind that a site's desired actions affect the design and layout. You'll want to study sites where those actions are most similar to the desired actions you target on your web site. If your goal is direct product sales, there's not much point in emulating a site that's optimized for newsletter sign-ups or AdSense. If your main goal is direct sales (and if it is, then you need backend products too), provide incentives for customers to buy AND to return. The return factor is critical to a long-term strategy for success. Anyone who buys is your best possible future customer. Keep them, track them, make them special offers. Use coupons, discounts, special deals, customer-only offers and back end sales. Your customer base is your gold mine. Since they've shown enough faith in you to buy, do your utmost to never damage that faith. Treat them like the priceless resource they are. Think long-term: successful eCommerce websites are all about value and customer service. Copyright 2005 Richard Keir Richard teaches, trains and consults, on and off-line, on business and professional presentations, eCommerce, site building and programming. And writes a lot. Visit http://www.Building-eCommerce-Websites.com for articles, information, resources and links and check our blog at http://www.Building-eCommerce-Websites/blog for opinion and ideas.
Related News
|
 |
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Cheap Cigarettes, Discount Tobacco and Cigars Online - Is It Legal?
Many people online today still believe that buying tobacco products via the Internet is an experience that is doomed to failure. Either, the package will go astray, or the HM Customs and Excise storm troopers will smash down the door and abseil from the roof to collect the pennies that they are allegedly due for "tax evasion".
Home Sweet Home Page
"Your home page is the world's introduction to you and your company. Make it COUNT!" ? Heidi Richards
How to Gain Your Visitors Trust
If you are serious about selling on the world wide web and being successful, your number one priority must be gaining your visitor's trust. Without trust you won't sale much and that's really being optimistic. How do visitors know that they can trust a web site enough to buy? In this article I'll show how to gain the trust of your visitors.
Creating Legal Framework for E-commerce Taxation; non-tax statutes
We have to make amendments in existing substantive and procedural laws to make it compactable with changing technological advancement of e-commerce?
Doing Business Online ? Private B2B Exchanges
Business processes are the building blocks of an enterprise.
If one of these processes fails to live up to its expectation,
business starts to flounder. How to minimize the risks, get a
better monitoring of the processes and, at the same time, reduce
costs involved? The answer is ? business process automation.
The Top 10 E-Commerce Ways to Follow up with Clients - Part 1
Did you know that 80% of all sales are made after the 5th contact?
Online Lead Generation: Can it Work for My Business?
Business-to-business service providers have a wide range of tactics they can deploy to gain new clients or customers. Direct mail; cold calling; TV, radio or print advertising are all ways in which B2B services gain new customers. In the last 10 years, the Internet has become another strategy to boost business, through advertising, web site optimization and online lead generation.
The ClickBank E-Commerce Solution
ClickBank.com can offer you multiple solutions for
your e-commerce business. Here are some of the
advantages of using ClickBank.
Internet Merchant Accounts For Innocents Abroad
If you want to sell on the internet, your need to accept credit cards. To accept credit cards, you need a merchant account, or access to one. There're two ways of getting this: Get your own merchant account, or 'pimp' off someone else's.
Shopping Online: What You Should Know
For some people, shopping online is as normal as driving a car. It's become part of the norm. For others, the prospect of making internet purchases is a scary one. Here are a few tips to make your online shopping experience more rewarding.
The Webmasters Assistant
There are many tools available to a webmaster to analyse website traffic allowing them to monitor the number of visitors, see what pages have been accessed and even the length of time each visitors spends accessing the website.
The Lowdown On ECommerce: Making All The Pieces Fit Together
The Lowdown on Ecommerce
A Tale of Two Revolutions - Ecommerce: A Historical Perspective
The World As It Then Was
Is ECommerce Right for Our Business?
If your business features products or services for sale, undoubtedly the topic of eCommerce has come up. What is eCommerce? Literally defined as "the conduct of financial transactions by electronic means," it refers to purchases made over the Internet. There are popular slang terms such as ebusiness, click and mortar, dotcom, cyber-mall and multiple spellings (eCommerce, e-commerce, E-Commerce), but they are all basically the same thing. Don't let the different phrases confuse you, it all comes back to the same principle: selling online.
Saving Money On Your E-commerce Site
After building and transferring many e-commerce sites it still amazes me that owners of e-commerce businesses are still wasting money in three basic ways. For fear of stating the obvious, saving money is the same as making money $100 saved is $100 added to your profit margin. Here are three basic ways to save money on your e-commerce site and increase your profits. While they may be simple we know they are overlooked time and time again resulting in thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
Is Your Business Afraid of the Internet?
My Business is Afraid of the Internet
Chinas Online Shopping May Be Booming In The Next Few Years
Data from China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) shows that till June 2004 Chinese online user has reached 87 million, of which, 7.3% has experience of online shopping.
Getting Started in ECommerce ? Part Two
In Part One we talked a little bit about what Ecommerce is, getting a domain name and setting up a merchant account. Ecommerce is more than that, much more. To have a really good online presence that gets people to stop and shop you need a strategy for success. Your strategy must include your USP or Unique Selling Position in the marketplace. What makes you stand out from all the other online entrepreneurs looking for the same type of customers as you? Can you stand out from the competition based on quality, price or benefits? Once you know your USP, you can begin the monumental task of telling the world about your site. A really unique selling position will give you an advantage over all the competition ? well that and a lot of planning and investing of your time and money.
Is ClickBanks Popularity Drawing To An End?
ClickBank is the Internet's most popular payment processor for online payments but with many rivals appearing on the scene is ClickBank's popularity drawing to an end?
Rules for Achieving Online Success
The Internet brought a great deal of benefits to our life. Access to a lot of free and useful information is, probably, one of the most important out of them. However, this abandon of free information has also become a problem to some extent. You started to spend a little too much time on the Internet. For you emails, chat rooms, messenger services along with aimless web browsing dominate substantial portion of your workdays. As a result you feel that you are loosing control of your working hours, your productivity is decreasing and you are accomplishing far less in a day than you are capable of. This makes you frustrated, miserable and negative. What to do? How to get out of this mess?
|
