5 practical tips to enhance your ecommerce site
Spanking new website? Check. Shopping cart? Check. Marketable product? Check. Merchant account? Free or otherwise, Check. Webhost? Check. Security measures? Check.
So what else can you do to attract more customers to your site? Check out the following tips and see how you can improve the money stream coming from your ecommerce site.
1. When in Rome, speak like the Romans.
Your merchant account (free or otherwise) should allow you to run international transactions. However in some parts of the world, the English language is all blah blah, yaddah yaddah . Do what the ecommerce bigwigs do - offer localized versions of your site (if you don't have enough budget, then translations on your site will do), and see your revenue grow. Added bonus: learn a new language!
2. Offer credit card processing or check processing
This is self explanatory, but anyway... We've all seen how credit card processing has affected the way people have shopped. Whether it's in a retail outlet or online, the power of the plastic card can be felt from all directions of the world. Any additional payment variety such as money order, check, or ewallet processing can only add to your good business standing - not to mention revenue.
3. Make way for the online community
The world is getting smaller each day and this can be attributed to the online communities scattered on the world wide web. These online communities don't have a "commercial" purpose but to share information. Information shared can be reviews or rants about products and services. If you're lucky, they may already be talking about your product - or bashing it. Online communities can give you information on what you need to tweak on your site, what products needs improvement, plus a bit of marketing - best of all, you don't even have to spend anything for these online communities.
4. cut costs - get a free merchant account!
No. It's not free - let's get that straight. However, it still has a lot of freebies(such as free set up, monthly fee, application fee, etc.) so you can cut costs. For start up merchants, every dollar counts - and wouldn't you know, even the big merchants are trying to find ways to cut costs - ergo, the popular choice that is the Free Merchant Account.
5. make sure your site is up 24/7
Unlike physical stores, your ecommerce site runs even while you catch some zzZzs. This makes online stores a more profitable choice for merchants. All the same, you have to make sure that your site is indeed up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Picture this: a customer visits your site with the intent to shop but all they see is a 404 error and the customer has to wait - do you think that customer will wait even a minute for your site to resume? I can just imagine the merchant running after the webhosting provider. With a fork. Most ecommerce sites are hosted on web host providers that collects logs of site activities such as visitors, site errors, etc. Request for a daily/weekly/monthly report for monitoring as every lost opportunity is a gain for your competitor.
There's no magic formula for a million dollar ecommerce site, these tips are here for you to follow - or not. When you want to follow them determines how much improvement your site can have at the soonest possible time, and when you'll be seeing several digits on your merchant account statements.