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.

Shopping carts help you reach out to new customers when economic times are tougher and the business expenses of running a physical shop put a squeeze on your margins.  A shopping cart website that is well promoted can lower your cost of product distribution and widen your reach of customers.

If you want to get a shopping cart up and running quickly to complement your physical shop, here are five tips to get you started:

1. Promote your website, heavily. One of the biggest mistakes made by customers new to ecommerce is that they expect instant traffic. But selling online in your own store is not like selling on an auction site. A standalone online store has the benefits of not having to pay listing and success fees, but you have to build your own traffic through a combination of advertising, offline promotion and optimising your website to be more relevant to certain (popular) search terms (this is called sarch engine optimisation).
2. Use your physical store to promote your website. Run a referral program to encourage visitors to your physical store to refer others to your site or come back and shop out of hours with you again. Have a 'Have you seen our website?' poster, giveaway card or promotion in-store. Don't forget to promote your physical store in your online store too - if customers know you have a physical presence this can help them feel more comfortable buying from you.
3. Focus on product photography. In a physical store a customer can look, smell, touch or try the product you are selling. Online your product descriptions and photography have to work hard to ensure that they give the customer the experience they desire. Great photography and well written descriptions (not just the manufacturer's provided description) will help ensure your site is unique, inviting and delivers you the best possible value for money for your online store.
4. Guide customers through your site. In your physical store you may have signs to tell customers where to find the things they are looking for and any promotional items such as specials. Use carefully placed banners to achieve this same effect online. Highlight specials and provide useful additional information. For example, if you are a jewellery store, tell your customers how they can work out their ring size.
5. Use consistent branding.  Your store will be more familiar to your existing customers if they feel like they are shopping in your physical store. And for new customers, they will be able to make the linkages between your physical and online store.