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e-Commerce Site
Launching an e-business is no easy feat. From developing your business plan to
selecting the hardware and software behind your operations, each step requires
hard work, due diligence, and copious amounts of research. Give something away
and reward visitors from coming to your e-Commerce Site. Offer free information,
articles, contests, industry news or personalized services. Research indicates
that surfers are willing to provide online information if personalization is the
result. In your e-Commerce Site keep sentences short and no more than 3-4
sentences per paragraph. Make use of hyperlinks and interactivity unless doing
so would take visitors away from your sales area. Remember also that your
visitors may be situated in other parts of the world as well, so take care of
their individual preferences and cultural differences.
Implementing your e-Commerce transaction system on your e-Commerce Site is a vital
first step to conducting online sales, but as always, the difficult part is
convincing the customer to buy. Here are some tips for building a good
e-Commerce
Site - a site that encourages rather than discourages your buying public.
Design for your target market: Find out who your potential customers are and why
they come to your e-Commerce Site. Focus groups or usability studies to discover
their preferences, patterns and requirements. Your e-Commerce Site should be easy
to find by a customer who does not know your web address. Typing one of your
products into Google get your site gets listed on the first page. Your shop has
been found by the search engines.
You have to register to buy or you can only ship to your credit card address.
Remember that real customers are complex, often change their minds and make
mistakes. A well-designed store will cope with their behaviour and not break. A
poorly designed store will break and the customer will never come back. Be
cautious about using offline marketing material on the Web. Print material often
does not lend itself to Web content and usually needs to be modified. Just
because you can scan it in and use your word processor to convert to HTML
doesn't make it a good idea to do so on your e-Commerce Site.
Engage the viewer with dynamic environments: Allow the customer to experience
the e-Commerce Site - not just view it. Chat features, forums, solicited
feedback, and database delivery of custom content go a long way. Amazon.com's
Book Filtering technology is an excellent example of customer personalization.
An e-Commerce Site interface should enhance the user's goals, not distract from
them. Strive to meld site components (i.e. graphics, text, sound, etc.) to
create a unique atmosphere and identity.
Provide good navigational structure, including search capabilities for larger
sites: Viewers enter your site at various web pages - they should be able to
navigate easily no matter where the place of entry. Your sales area should be
free of links to other Internet sites. Why encourage customers to leave when
you've worked so hard to attract them?
Design with usability in mind and abide by basic design principles for your
e-Commerce Site. Utilize white space (less is more), fonts that are easily read,
pleasing color schemes, universally understood symbols, and backgrounds that
don't distract from the message. If you consider a margin of 10% on e-Commerce
sales to cover the setup/running costs, it means that money spent on e-Commerce
Site must generate thousands of new business just to cover the cost of running
the system, before it generates any additional profit for your business.
e-Commerce Site is all about trust and customers get confused and suspicious when
they are transferred from one site to another in the middle of a transaction.
That is why all the major and successful online stores tightly integrate secure
payment steps into the buying process. There is no change of design, popup
windows or break in the flow as you enter your credit card information and have
it processed. So these are some basic rules for successful e-Commerce Site
success on the net.
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