10 E-Commerce Web Sites Sales-Boosters.
by Ed Rivis.

The following 10 critical tips will ensure a higher number of e-commerce web site visitors actually make a decision to buy while they’re there.

1) Create and use your E-Commerce sites primarily for back-end sales.

If you’ve created powerful customer acquisition and lead generation sites then you can drive those acquired people onto your backend sites.

But driving new people—strangers—onto your e-commerce sites you may not be achieving optimum acquisition or conversion.

2) Usability is critical.

If your site is designed arbitrarily—based on the designers own perceptions of ‘what looks good’ — then you may find the majority of customers are turned off by how it works and is structured.

The worst case scenario is when the site is so ‘creative’ that visitors are simply unable to figure out how to use it.

(A full chapter of my book is devoted to the topic of usability. It’s that important.)

3) The most successful E-Commerce sites are the most trusted E-Commerce sites.

As Frederick Reichheld states in his book ‘Loyalty Rules’ (ISBN: 1-59139-324-8), "Price does not rule the web, trust does."

What he means by this (and what his research uncovered) is that customers who have bought from—and had a good experience with—a web site will very likely make one or more repeat purchases from that same site in future. And in many cases that’s even if they see the same product cheaper elsewhere.

In a nutshell, people prefer doing business with sites they trust and with which they have already bothered to register their details with.

If you can make your site first appear trustworthy, through design and also by how and what and it says, and then allow the user to actually experience a high level of trust, they’ll buy from you again and again.

4) Loyalty and customer retention are things you can’t ‘build into your site’.

You have to support your E-Commerce web site with additional activities (such as regular direct communications by E-Mail and also possibly direct mail) in order to nurture and retain your existing client base.

Trust will keep your existing customers coming back for more - but only if they remember you. Keep in touch and don’t let them forget about you.

5) Test E-Bay and other auction sites, and shopping comparison sites like Froogle.

EBay is the world’s biggest auction web site. For many online  could present an enormous opportunity for you.

And once a customer buys from you through Ebay you’ll be able to start encouraging them to your own E-Commerce web site (and/or real-world retail stores.)

6) Profile Your Target Audience.

Avoid creating E-Commerce sites that sell products that appeal to too wide a spread of interests.

Unless your brand is as well recognised and stands on it’s own feet in the way that the Sony and Virgin brands do - then I recommend you have separate and specific web sites for each category of customer.

7) Yes, Search Engines are important, but don’t forget about other methods to promote your e-commerce sites.

Direct mail, (letters, postcards and the like) can be very effective and much faster to get a result from in the early days after launching your site than waiting for your site to appear in the top rankings on the search engines.

Copy is King.

Design is important. Usability is critical. But no matter how great your site looks or how easy it is to use… if you don’t describe your products and services in a compelling, persuasive manner then it’s unlikely you’ll ever achieve the greatest number of sales and revenues that would be otherwise possible.

Learn how to write powerful copy about your products services or treatments and put that text on your web site.

9) It can always be improved.

Don’t just build your site and forget about it. Even if it appears to be selling very effectively, there may still be ways of tweaking and optimising the site to get ever higher volume sales.

Find out how to track the number of sales versus total number of visitors. Make changes that you believe will improve conversion… then track how those changes affect results.

If they’re positive then keep the changes. If not, revert and try something else. But always keep testing.
Implement a strategy to continually analyse and use data to optimise your sales.

Take a look at Google Analytics. At the time of writing that’s a free online service offered by Google that gives you just about every statistic you could ask of your web site.

And for e-commerce web sites, continually monitoring performance is critical for ongoing and increasing success.

10) Less considered aspects that still greatly affect sales…

Shipping/delivery policies, Money-Back guarantees (or the absence of), pricing and comparison with other sites, customer feedback and transparency, privacy policies and the amount and type of personal data requested during checkout all play their part in effective online sales and optimisation of revenues generated through e-commerce web sites.

Get these 10 elements right and you’ll find your e-commerce web site significantly out-performs your competitors.

Ed Rivis is author of The Ultimate Web Marketing Strategy. It reveals how to optimise online business for more sales, increased customer acquisition and higher profitability.
Download it here => http://www.ultimatewebstrategy.com