Before you open your own ecommerce site it is important to understand a few basic principles. These principles will help you make your store a success, with a minimal amount of effort on your part. These are the secrets that the biggest stores use to attract new customers and keep good relationships with their existing customers. Let’s get started.
1. Incentives are the key to success. Anytime a customer can get something for free, they are going to be more interested in doing business with you. Your incentives don’t have to be large or extravagant. A 15% off coupon for their first purchase is enough to swing many customers in your direction. Many sites work this to their advantage by only offering the coupon to those who sign up for their mailing list. You then have the added benefit of not only a sale, but a way to keep in touch with this customer for future purchases. At the end of the day, 15% less on a sale is better than no sale at all.
2. Avoiding the “sale all the time” trap. When you set up your first sale, you’ll probably see a lot of results. However, you are training your customers to expect lower than normal prices. When they make their next purchase, they will be much more likely to wait for a sale to occur. If you don’t have one planned, this may mean that they will forget about you in the meantime. On the flip side, if you are always running sales, it can give a bad impression about your prices. To avoid this trap, stick with offering incentive coupons instead of slashing prices. If you do have to run a sale, make it a special bi-annual event.
3. Staying in contact is key. If you don’t want your customers to forget about you, then you will need to stay in touch with them. When they checkout, make sure that your cart has a feature that will ask them if they want to be added to your newsletter. This way you can ensure that they really do want to hear from you. Send out periodic newsletters containing coupons to your customers, but make sure that you always include an unsubscribe method to avoid spam complaints. You shouldn’t send out a newsletter more than once a week, and most companies stick to a monthly mailing to avoid this.
4. Good design and good SEO leads to sales. The easier it is for customers to find things in your store, the more likely they are to complete their sale. If you have a very complicated store, try setting up a live help feature to help customers who may get a little lost. In addition, good SEO practices will help increase your discoverability. Make sure that your cart will assign titles to each page in your store with the name of the product on that page. That will help improve your page ranking, which in turn leads to more customers and more sales.
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February 26th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
These are all more to do with basic common sense than basic ecommerce principles. Article is ok but it would be nice to see more details with real substance.
February 27th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Number 2 was pretty helpful in my opinion. Honestly that’s a mistake I myself problably would have made- keeping some form of a sale up for too long. Nice tip.
February 27th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Auto responders like Aweber is a good tool to keep in touch with custumers
April 25th, 2008 at 1:56 am
I thought e-mail subscriptions via RSS feeds is enough for a site, well at least this are tips for me to consider when I start including products to sell on my site. Some of the content of this article sounds like common sense but I think this article serves like a reminder for those who would like to start an e-commerce site.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Staying in contact is an excellent tip. I have not thought of this. This way you can sell new products to previous customers because you have been keeping a good relation with them and are in their good graces. Also, word of mouth can help you a lot, and can also hurt you a lot, so make sure your customers are satisfied.
June 22nd, 2008 at 10:09 pm
Ok, so there was a great deal of information in this article, but in all actuality the title did not fit the content. The only problem with some of the things mentioned such as staying in touch with customers, is often hard because when you are a small e-commerce site and you are handling many aspects of the business, you may not have the time necessary. And some sites do not yet have the money to warrant hiring someone early on in the business.
June 24th, 2008 at 12:19 am
Avoiding the “sale all the time” trap. When you set up your first sale, you’ll probably see a lot of results. However, you are training your customers to expect lower than normal prices. When they make their next purchase, they will be much more likely to wait for a sale to occur. If you don’t have one planned, this may mean that they will forget about you in the meantime. On the flip side, if you are always running sales, it can give a bad impression about your prices. To avoid this trap, stick with offering incentive coupons instead of slashing prices. If you do have to run a sale, make it a special bi-annual event.
I think that is the BEST paragraph I’ve read in a LONG time! Seriously this is so very important and I can’ stress this enough! Have a huge sale here and a huge sale there and then no one buys until you have that huge sale again. If you MUST offer a sale, choose a select item and offer ONLY it. I can’t stand these companies who are just having sales left and right! Great GREAT information here. Keep up the great work!