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.

When creating a web design for yourself or briefing your web design professional on the site you would like to have, it is very tempting to request to include swishy coloured boxes, an old logo that your brother designed in WordArt 3 years ago that you've used on all your promotional material since and your favourite pictures, colours and images. Unless you are an exact match for the types of customers you are targeting, you may need to think twice about this strategy. You may love it but your customers may not.

Creating an inviting web experience is absolutely critical in showcasing your business or selling online. An easy-to-use, secure and fully functional shopping cart will only get you part of the way. To get your customers over the line and buying from you, you also need to create the most professional and appealing buying environment you can. 

This means you need to put yourself in your customers shoes every time you create a design. It's very similar to designing a storefront that is inviting and makes your customers walk through the door. Always ask yourself:

• What do my customers expect to see?
• What would my customers consider inviting?
• Does my design look as professional as possible?
• Are my product and header images clear and crisp?
  
• Just like in interior design you need to think about the colours used. Ask does my colour palette work well together?
  
• Is my web design too cluttered?
  
• Is my web design too bland?
• Would your most fussy and frustrating customer find your site appealing and buy from you?
  

If you are unsure, let your web designers guide you. After all, it's their job to understand your customers and make your site look as appealing as possible. But they can only work with what you give them and within your instructions.