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.

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.