Ecommerce Web Design Blog

You have done all the hard work promoting your website to get traffic. How do you make sure that once you get traffic it turns into sales?

There are two key parts to the answer to this question:

1. Make sure you are receiving the right traffic
2. Ensure that you maximise your chances to get sales once you have the right people on your site
   

Getting the right people to your website
It is easy to add content pages to your website about very popular topics or write ads that generate considerable numbers of clicks to your site. But if they are not from target customers looking to buy your products, then they are wasted traffic.

Ensuring your website is optimised for the search terms that your customers will search for, and that you have relevant links from websites in your industry is therefore an absolutely essential part of sales conversion.

Here are some things you can be doing:

• ensuring you have set the meta tags and descriptions for your products and services in your shopping cart software or information website. This tells the search engines what your pages are about and gives you a better chance of your pages coming up for the right things.
• think about your customers: where do they go online? When they come on search engines what do they search for? Those are the places you should be advertising. Those are the key words you should make sure your product descriptions and content pages are relevant to
• building links on sites and directories relevant to your industry. For example, if you are a scrapbooking site make sure you are listed on the top scrapbooking directories as that's where people looking for scrapbooking supplies will often go to
• use price comparison/data feed websites to drive people directly to the product pages for your products. Examples in Australia are myshopping.com.au and Getprice.com.au. ozCart stores offer add-ons you can purchase for your store to produce compatible xml data-feeds for these services
• collect email addresses from customers and potential customers and write newsletters that contain special offers. This will help drive positive sales leads to your site.

Making the right people buy

Once they are on your website, you need to ensure you maximise the chancesthat they will buy. Use things like featuring highly popular products to get them looking at them, use side banners to promote offers and specials and write appealing category and product descriptions. Make a big deal about your site security as it will help your customers feel reassured about purchasing from you.

When customers check out and buy something from you, make their experience so appealing that they want to come back and buy again. That includes keeping them informed about their order and delivering it well packaged and on-time.

Marketing your website takes a lot of hard work on top of all the built-in help that ecommerce features like search-engine-friendly (SEF) URLs can give you. As with most marketing, the results you get out of it depend on your determination and the speed you can gain results often depends on your budget. If you're running a small business you don't need to be too demoralised yet because there are a lot of things you can do to promote your site for free.

Here is a collection of ten top tips for free website marketing.

1. Offer something for free. People just love things for free and there are whole websites devoted to listing free offers and giveaways. Give away some really useful information that costs you nothing that is relevant to your customers (e.g. cake icing recipes, colour co-ordination consultation, photography tips) as an ebook or special download in return for just giving them your email address. Email addresses can be gold if used in well-thought out newsletter or email offer campaigns.
   
2. Write about your products. Your product descriptions will help, but whatever you are selling,  content can really improve your chances of selling your products. Especially if your product is hard to understand, helping people out with what to buy can help you sell those things in your store.
   
3. Create a viral marketing campaign. A viral marketing campaign is some unusual message or statement that people find so interesting, fun or unusual that they spread it to others or encourage others to visit your website to find out more.  The challenge is thinking up something so innovative it really captures the interest of your potential buyers. Get your creative thinking caps on!
4. Link, Link, Link.  The content on your page is one thing, but you need to have relevant websites linking to you if you want the search engines to consider your website important on the search terms your customers search for. Start building links through directory submissions, link exchange programmes, your business contacts, suppliers and whoever.
   
5. Promote your website on everything. Use your wbsite's address on everything you do: letterhead, forum posts, emails, newspaper advertising, t shirts, invoices, business cards etc. 

Remember to combine these starter ideas with doing the important things right: answer questions efficiently and in a friendly way, deliver your orders promptly, keep in contact with your customers (email addresses really can be worth their weight in gold) and keep your ecommerce website up to date.

Make your site the best it can be with ozCart shopping cart add-ons
ozCart is already an ecommerce shopping cart packed with many powerful features relevant to the Australian market. Many of our customers are not aware that we also have an add-ons shop which allows you to purchase additional ecommerce features for your ozCart website. Some are installable components, others are web design and ecommerce services.

Our ozCart add-ons shop includes features that are requested by users but often specialised and may not appeal to everyone.  Some of them allow feature upgrades for older versions of our carts, where they are compatible and we have chosen to offer them (e.g. additonal payment options).

There are four sections of add ons: markting add-ons, admin section add-ons to make your shopping cart easier to manage and more powerful, sideboxes and services (like batch image resizing or Some of the great ecommere features available through the add-ons shop include the following:

• Cross Sell Booster - allowing you to specify other products to be displayed to customers when they view your products. This is not driven based on sales, you define it. This means you can manage the products that are displayed to customers to suit your own business requirements.
• Gift wrapping on checkout options
• Offer a Return Authorisation Form on your stie instead of just asking customers to contact you if they want to return a faulty product
• Lost Sales Manager - if customers come to your site, register with you, put items in their cart and then do not buy from you, how frustrating is that! This add on reports on these situations and allows you to contact these customers to find out why they didn't buy and what you can do to make them buy
• Non customer newsletter subscribers - you can send any of your customers emails directly from your site, but if you want to sign up non customers you need this add-on too. 
• Free clip on capability for the Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics applications
• Size chart creation services
• Live Help for your customers
• Product Data feeds for services like myshopping.com.au and getprice.com.au
  
• Bulk image framing and watermarking 
• Tracking stock by product variation (e.g. keeping separate stock levels for the numbers of green, red and blue t shirts instead of just the total number of t shirts)
  
• And more! For a full list visit our ozCart Add-ons pages.
  

 

How to compete against larger competition
When you are in a market competing against much larger competition it can be easy to get demoralised and feel like you are in a David v Goliath battle. Sometimes the larger competitors will be very afraid of smaller competitors entering and taking their margins and resort to 'competition bashing' instead of trying to compete on what they can offer.

Competitive environment: Are your competitors using "FUD" to frighten your potential customers?

If your competitors are using FUD ("Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt") to try to knock smaller competitors out of the market then it's usually safe to assume that those larger competitors have noticed the smaller players like you and they are probably having an impact on their bottom lines. You should always take FUD as a complement.

How do you recognise FUD?  When larger competitors have promotional statments on their website like "Don't buy from small competition - you don't know who you are buying from", "Unlike others in the marketplace we are not a small backyard business", "Who knows what you will get from a home based business", "Buy from an established business like us not a one man band", then you know that you and other smaller competitors in the market have been noticed and are probably having an impact on those businesses' bottom lines.

Even if your competitors are using FUD techniques (it's not common nowadays fortunately but still happens) you can still compete effectively with some lateral thinking and good business instinct.

So how do you compete with larger competitors? Some ideas...

1. Find niches. If you compete head to head with larger competitors who are well established you may struggle with margins and their established product range. But they are probably not covering every corner of the market. Find a profitable segment that is not well represented by your competition and focus on that.
2. Build loyalty. When your customers do buy from you keep them coming back. Make their buying experience excellent and deliver outstanding customer service.
3. Personalised service. Larger businesses find it hard to deliver personalised service especially online. Keep your customers informed of their order and go beyond what they expect if you can. How many times will the owner of a large online business be able to respond directly to customer enquiries for example? This will help you build loyalty (see above point)
4. Use promotional tactics to gain market share. Offer a popular product at a loss for a special promotional period to get customers to your store for example
5. Ensure you are using the best shopping cart possible for your business, that it has an appealing design and have loaded it up with all the marketing add-ons you can afford.

Remember larger competitors were smaller once. How did they grow? Chances are they faced similar challenges as they grew but overcame them by staying focussed. Take a leaf out of their book and stay focussed.

Our final words: As far as we are concerned, it is absolute rubbish to say that a small business can't compete as well as a larger one - especially online.  Online business levels the playing field in terms of competition - a great shopping cart combined with a great offer can help you be just as successful as the offerings of larger competitors if you market your product innovatively to the right market and build traffic. 

Also don't forget that some very large businesses are still owned by just one person - so if you're not registered as a company it doesn't mean that you're not a big player in the market. Customers buy on a number of things so do it better than your competitors and people will keep coming back.  Prove those who doubt you wrong!

Whether you are selling online or offline, pricing your products is a key part of doing business.  What methods can you use to price your online products? Here are a few tips you may wish to consider.

Some common methods to price products include:

• Cost-based pricing (also called cost-plus pricing. this is the price that you paid for an item plus a mark-up)
• Market-based pricing (what your competition is selling items at)
• Value-based pricing (what your customers value your products at. You may apply a premium to reflect your brand, to depict quality or the value of your product in the marketplace)

In practice, the price you place on your products will often depend on a combination of the techniques above.  There are also many different strategies that you can use to price products depending on your objectives in the market.

For example, if you are a new business online you might run an introductory sale, you may have some products of popular items priced equal or below the competition to get people to your store and other products priced using value or cost-based pricing. 

Some  online businesses also use a technique called a loss leader of pricing one product below cost to match or better competition, to get people into your online store and looking around. If they buy that item and you can cross-sell it with others, you could build up a sizeable cart and make a profit overall, even if one item is sold at a loss. 

Whatever you do, make sure you look at the prices of your products as a whole and not only individually, as it will depend on your competitors, your products, your shopping cart website, your advertising and your brand as to whether customers will be prepared to pay your prices.