Internet Marketing Commerce

Depending on the type of e-commerce website have an 800-Number, but make sure it’s displayed in an eye-catching spot on every page of your site. Every e-commerce website should at least have an email for customer service contact. Making either one of these very visible makes a big difference. That way your customer does not have to go on a hunt for your number or email address. It’s also a good idea to show it throughout your checkout process in case there’s an error with your customers order. Also make sure you have an FAQ page to help eliminate the amount of customer service inquiries. This is also a good page to deliver a live chat option. If your checkout has multiple steps make sure it shows the customer how far along they are in the checkout process. The most effective way is to make your checkout process only two steps, your shopping cart page and one page to enter all of their other information. This will improve your conversion rate and eliminate the chances of more errors occurring during the checkout process.

Whenever you are doing tests on your website to increase your conversion rate always make sure you change one thing at a time. You could also do split testing but that is a little more complicated and it’s suggested that you start out with standard conversion rate testing. There are several things you need to look at before coming to the conclusion that a change worked or didn’t work to improve your conversion rate.

One of the most important things anyone should remember when testing their conversion rate is to look at the amount of traffic converting based on unique visitors. It’s not a good idea to do this over a day but rather a week or multiple weeks. This can make all the difference for one main reason; typically a lot of visitors require multiple visits to convert. The reason for this is because a lot of visitors want to compare, price shop, get budget approval etc. So, if you record your conversion rate based on a day or a few days it may not be accurate due to these kinds of customers.

You will also want to be careful and make sure that you aren’t running your change too long if it’s consistently posting a negative conversion rate. If you don’t watch your changes carefully it could end up costing your business thousands of dollars in just a week. So as I said before stick to single changes and test. If you make more than one change you won’t know exactly which one worked and you could end up loosing thousands of dollars. Test! Test! Test!

The shopping cart is one of the most important parts to a customer checkout process. In order to receive the best possible conversion rate you need to be sure that you make your customers checkout process as smooth as possible. Besides price, your customers want to make sure that they are purchasing the products with the attributes they wanted. Attributes like size, color, shape, voltage and many others. The reason these are so important to display in the shopping cart is because a customer may need to add or delete and you want to make sure they are adding and deleting the correct products. One of the best things you can do to help eliminate this confusion is to make sure there is an image next to each product in the shopping cart. An excellent shopping cart will display the sku color, a thumbnail image, quantity and a shipping calculator.

There are a number of things that create customer hesitation to purchase a product or products. For instance, is it the best price, is the site secure, quality of the product, is your customer service quality, when will the item arrive, is the product as described and can I return the product? The e-tailing group conducted a consumer survey and found that product descriptions were the most important to help make a purchase decision, followed by the merchant’s guarantee, stock availability and quality of images.

A good way to create great product descriptions is to see what your competitors have and write a better description. For example you may be selling the same t-shirt as a competitor and they only have the color and different sizes. Your description could have that plus the brand of the t-shirt if there is one, the type like 100% cotton and where it’s made. The more information you can give your visitors the better. They are more likely to buy and less likely to contact customer service before purchasing.

Customer reviews can also be very important to a product description. Even if they are bad customer reviews, they are proven to help improve your conversion rate. One of the best ways to get customers to review products is to offer them a discount or something free if they write a review. As long as you give them some type of incentive you will see reviews start to appear or increase.

There are many incentives you can use in e-commerce but which ones work the best? Some of the incentives you can use are dollar discounts, % discounts, free shipping, free gift with purchase, no tax, buy one get one free and so on. Some people would say that the worst incentive you can use is a dollar discount. The truth is there really isn’t a specific answer for every website. Your answer will depend on your niche, customers and economic conditions.

To figure out what works the best you must test every method with your store and your existing customer list. You can test these methods several different ways. You can apply each of them to your store one at a time and see which method receives a better conversion rate. You could also take your existing customer list and divide it up equally with the amount of incentives you are testing and send each one out to the specific groups in your list. You should send these offers out by both email and direct mail. Then which ever group has the best conversion rate will be the most successful incentive for your niche and customers.

1. Easy Concept to Understand

Out of all the ways to make money on the Internet the concept of e-commerce is the most understood. Customers come to your store, purchase one or some of your products, and you make money. Easy enough to understand isn’t it? It’s a lot less complicated than affiliate marketing and trying to find advertisers to consistently purchase advertisements from you.

2. A Market Already Exists

Existing products you know already have a market otherwise they wouldn’t exist or at least exist for very long. For instance if you are selling Nike shoes there is already a market. Nike has been in business long enough and already created a market for you.

3. Easily Expanded

An e-commerce store gets easier to run as it grows. You don’t have to worry about creating new products because they already exist for you to keep adding. As you acquire more sales you will eventually be able to hire someone or multiple people to fulfill them. So all you really have to worry about is regularly adding new products or content beneficial to your existing products.

4. Opportunity to Learn Internet Marketing Principles

As your e-commerce store grows and gains consistent traffic you will be able to “test” things like discounts and sales to see how it affects your business. Once you have found what Internet marketing principles best fit your niche you will be able to take your revenue to its fullest potential.

5. Small Content Requirements

One of the best things about e-commerce is the fact that your main content is your products. So all you have to do is add the details of your product and an image to complete a page. However it is beneficial to your customers and search engines if your create guides or comparison pages for the types of products you offer. The more information you can provide to the customer the better. This will help improve revenue and minimize on customer service inquiries.

Electronic commerce is known as e-commerce or ecommerce which is the method of buying or selling products or services electronically such as the Internet. The form most commonly known is the Internet with websites like Amazon.com, eBay.com and Ticketmaster.com. Internet retailers like these may also be called e-tailers and Internet retail may also be called e-tail. One of the best sources for news and information about Internet retail is InternetRetailer.com.

Today’s electronic commerce normally uses the World Wide Web in transactions. These transactions are normally done with credit cards such as Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover. The acceptances of credit cards and ATM in the 1980s were some of the first forms of electronic commerce that are still widely used and known today. Now when you hear the word ecommerce it is most likely being referred to as the buying or selling products or services on the Internet.