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.

One of the biggest factors that people don't take into account when buying shopping cart software is the cost of support . There are many 'free' ecommerce solutions in the marketplace, but when something goes wrong with them, what do you do? You could post in the forums relevant to the free shopping cart you are using, but if you don't get a reply or the solution posted doesn't work, where do you turn?What if you are getting a unique error message?

Unless the problem you are having is to do with the server's configuration, in many cases they will also be unable to help. You will then be left on your own and with the expensive problem of trying to hire paid support from the original  developers of the cart or a third-party developer. Depending on your problem, either option could be very expensive.

Some shopping cart software products charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars per month in addition to the cost of their hosting environment just to give you the right to submit a very limited number of problems to them per year. 

If you are choosing a shopping cart for your business, support matters. Our advice is that you should choose carefully.

If you are choosing a hosted ecommerce solution like ozCart (where you are renting the shopping cart software but own your domain name and products), then support is often included in your monthly payment. It's good to check however what support you get for your monthly payments. For example, ask your shopping cart provider:

• Can you get support after 5pm? If you're working a full time job, you will often be working on your store between 5-8pm so look for a provider who has support during these hours.
  
• Can you get support at weekends?
• What support options do you get? Is there an extensive knowledgebase covering the key problems you may face? Is there an email ticket system to ask questions if you can't get what you want from the knowledgebase? Is there phone support or support live chat?
  
• How many support enquiries do you get for your monthly payment?
• Is proactive website performance management support provided behind-the-scenes?
• Is there a willingness of your provider to maintain a secure environment for your store?

Although ozCart from Osc Works does not offer phone or online chat support, our customers are not disadvantaged by this at all. We are proud to offer oustanding ecommerce support 7 days a week, 365 day email support via our ticket system (with unlimited tickets on all our ecommerce packages), plus a members knowledgebase with answers to questions based on past customer enquiries.  Our support team also provides proactive support where critical bug fixes and security patches can be implemented on stores without a ticket submission even being required if we become aware of them.

Choose an ecommerce software provider who includes support as part of their monthly fee and either provides a generous or unlimited number of ticket support enquiries and reasonable rates for extra work if required.