Do you dream of a passive income for life? Do you want to simplify the sales process and allow customers to buy online? E-commerce is the way to go. Every item in the catalogue generates cash in a global marketplace without the cost of a sales force. With the proliferation of shopping carts and Paypal, selling online has never been easier or more popular!
To be successful, you need to recognize a few elements that encourage people to shop online. Technology, usability, product, price, the level of trust you enshrine in the experience, plus the culture of the shopper, all have their impact. But on the whole online visitors are increasingly at ease with the ecommerce process and many have online Paypal accounts to make payment easier and safer.
If they fail to buy on your site, you need to investigate why.
However… Most people check out 3 or 4 links when they search for something online. Even if your offer is great, they want to know if someone else can do better. When they decide to buy, they are likely to buy from the vendor they are visiting, rather than go back to a comparable offer elsewhere, so in the 30 seconds that you have them on your site, you need to be direct and enticing with an offer that outsells your competitors.
As with any sales job, this requires that you know your competitors, what they offer, and where they fail. Your offer is unique and forewarns the prospect of what others may be hiding. You may be the original, the best quality, the cheapest, or most reliable. You may provide fastest delivery, free add-ons, novel features, a wider range of colours, a longer service warranty or a guarantee that covers customer satisfaction. Whatever you offer, it needs to stay in the mind of the buyer so that while they are browsing, they keep your webpage open, and when they are ready to buy, they come back to your website.
They won’t buy if you prevent them. Make sure the site works end to end through rigorous usability testing. Anything that prevents a visitor from completing a sale and receiving the correct order, needs to be fixed. Make sure your customer can clearly see at all times exactly what is happening and that the hooks to inventory control and shipping are flawless. I recently tried to buy software online from a European company that couldn’t understand my credit card information. I couldn’t back out of the shopping cart to make the purchase with Paypal and had to start again from the beginning. Every time I ran into a problem, I wondered about the security on the site.
Track the window-shoppers. Remember that some people only check prices and features online; others look around for a while, check 2 or 3 sites before they come back, sometimes days later. Look for ways to track these visitors too. Coupons are one option, setting a cookie to track repeat visitors is another. Without these, your apparent ROI is skewed and an effective site may seem to be losing customers, when in fact it is winning them over.
Requirements for building ecommerce.
Plan the site with care. What are you going to sell? How will products be categorized? Do you need a full-blown shopping cart or will Paypal do?
Reduce the probability that visitors abandon their shopping carts:
- Brand the site to promote trust.
- Make the catalogue easy to use.
- Encourage customers to add products to the shopping cart.
- Use familiar layouts and procedures for shopping.
- Make the “buy now” and “return to catalogue” options easy to find.
- Let customers access the rest of your site without closing the shopping cart.
- Only ask for information you need.
- Link the catalogue to the shopping cart.
- Link the shopping cart to a secure ecommerce gateway.
- Provide payment options.
- Let return visitors login without re-entering personal data.
- Let visitors track their purchases.
- Remember that many shoppers, especially in Canada, use ecommerce sites to find products, but prefer to buy at a bricks and mortar store.