E-Commerce is the buying and selling of goods and services over the electronic medium like Internet. This is not just all but it has involved so many other major tasks like supply chain management, electronic fund transfer, Internet marketing etc. Having an e commerce web site is not enough these days, but a good, comfortable and amazingly functional website is required. It should appeal to the potential customers only then they would come to the website and make purchases. If even once you fail to provide them good user experience, you will lose the business. As there are hundred of websites available on Internet. There are plenty of choices available to the customers to select the best suitable for themselves. Following are few tips so that you can make your e commerce website a success:
Let the users to explore and do not ask for registration first: Asking the readers to register first and then providing them with the facility of adding items in their cart is probably the major step where you can lose your customers. Allow the readers to explore all the information which he wants to have. Like by adding items, he might be checking the total amount or the transportation fee etc.
Informing the readers where they are: There should be proper headings, sub headings so that if the readers is exploring in the store in more than one sub level of navigation, he can easily come back to his previous position through some kinds of indication like (Home> one category> another category> product etc. )
Do not show unnecessary details unless asked: Simple things are always easy to perceive in the human mind where as we confuse ourselves and even others by giving out unnecessary long details about the product So, the tip is to keep the short basic information about the product as the standard feature of the product and there should always be an option for “looking into more details” if users want to go into.
Give the best visual experience of the product to the readers: The Audio visual aids work many times more than the simple text about the product. Since the readers are not able to touch the product or experience its functionality. So, keeping this in mind provide them with the best of images or any video (if required) so that the readers can have a prior idea about the product before he actually makes a purchase. The images shown should be of high quality and the videos should be clear and audible.
Search options and refinement benefits: When the search has been performed, keep the search bar in front having query in it with the search results so that users can modify their query. Also give your readers the advanced options like to select prices, colors, models etc. facilitating them to make a purchase on the spot.
Customer support: The customers buying online need instant support. The provision of live chat support on every page is a great help that you can provide them with.
Use a prior tested software: You have to check the functionality at every level like browsing, payment options, cart functions etc. so as to give your customers an enjoyable and comfortable experience.
All the very successful e commerce websites like eBay, Amazon.com, are not by chance, but they have provided their users with all the options that makes the shopping experience just superb.!!!
How about building e-commerce sites, how can IMeye help?
Let’s say you want to build an e-commerce site and drive traffic through SEO. We know and we have seen a ton of profitable e-commerce sites because of NichBlueprintand the one thing they all have in common is the fact that none of them sold things that have never been sold online before the sites were developed, they just had an in, a way to get traffic to something that we already knew was profitable online, so can imeye find those, the answer is yes.
The way you would do that using imeye is by starting with the monthly searches, set this to a minimum of fifteen thousand, which is about five hundred a day.
When looking for an ecommerce opportunity you need to be able to compete quickly so you need to set the competing pages to a maximum of two hundred and fifty thousand. Also in addition to the competing pages you need to make sure the in title completion is reasonable so you need to set this at twenty five thousand.
Now tell imeye to search for ecommerce keyword only, the ones that people are selling commercial goods on because it is pretty rare that you will build an profitable ecommerce site around a product that has never been sold online before, so let’s just take the guess work out of it and only look at keywords that people are already successfully selling stuff online.
Next is the keyword length, let’s go long tail. This is not absolute but typically the longer the keyword phrase the more targeted it is, so you only want to look at keyword phrases with at least four words.
Imeye will return pages and pages of opportunities; the next thing to do is sort the results by the highest volumes first. If you have watched the video that accompanies this article you will know that we blacked out the actual results because it would not be fair on the people who are paying to use imeye but I will reveal one of the keyword phrases for you now, it is “finding toys battery powered” the monthly searches for this very targeted keyword phrase is 165 thousand, that’s about 5 thousand searches a day, the competing pages is only 17 thousand 9 hundred and the in title competition results are shockingly low. People are already selling products online for this keyword phrase and what is even better is the fact that Amazon are not involved so you don’t have to compete with them.
I would like to add that on a scale of 1 to 10 on as far as how easy these are to compete with, these keywords are way down there in the lower scale, these are your 0 to 4 on how hard they are to compete for, maybe even 0 to 2, especially when you see competing pages at less than 250 thousand and in title results less than 25 thousand, these are some of the easiest keywords to compete with on an SEO perspective.
Now you can imagine how addictive and fun it is to have IMeye continuously spit out these great e-commerce opportunities and as you can imagine I have spent many hours doing exactly that.
Many companies are turning to website design that incorporates ecommerce functionality. It seems like it should be fairly simple. All they need to do is decide which products to sell and put up a few pictures and then they can sit back and watch the revenues come in. Unfortunately, this has led to the failure of many ecommerce sites. Here are some of the top mistakes that companies make when it comes to ecommerce website design.
They do not make their site easy to navigate
Many companies make it very difficult for customers to find their products. They either do not have a functioning menu that allows customers to find specific products or they make that menu very difficult to find. If customers do not have a clear path to the items that they are looking for they are unlikely to spend a lot of time looking for them. This means that you will end up losing potential customers to your competition and this can lead to the failure of an ecommerce site much more rapidly than you may think possible.
One possible fix for this problem is to include a search feature in your website design. By providing a way for customers to get directly to specific items you will make your website design much more efficient and this can help you get the kind of revenue you have been hoping for.
They do not have a fully functioning shopping cart or payment solution
When trying to entice customers to purchase goods online your website design has to include a fully functional shopping cart and payment solution. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to select products and finding it impossible to do so. It can cause you to lose customers very quickly and again, this can cause an ecommerce website to fail. You also need to make sure that once the customers have found the products they are looking for that they can check out and pay as quickly as possible.
If you ensure that your shopping cart and payment areas are easy to find, simple to use and functioning properly you can quickly increase the amount of revenue that your site is bringing in.
Customers cannot get a clear idea of what the items look like
Customers want to be able to tell what they are purchasing before they are willing to pay for it. You need to make sure that you are using a combination of clear, crisp photographs and descriptions that give your customers a clear idea of what they will be paying for. Be sure to include measurements and any options that a customer can choose from. Consider grouping like items together to make them easy for customers to compare.
In the past, when digital photography was just getting established it was more acceptable for the images to look grainy or unclear. This has changed. Digital photography has progressed so far that there is no reason why an ecommerce website design cannot include high quality photographs.
By addressing these three top mistakes relating to ecommerce website design it becomes much more likely that your site will be a success and generate the kind of revenue you have been looking for.
Black Friday and the holiday shopping season are fast approaching, and customers know this just as well as retailers. Based on last year, between Labor Day and mid-November we can expect online customers to change their behavior by deferring purchases. As an industry, we have conditioned our customers to expect exceptional offers in the run up to Black Friday.
At SeeWhy, we track both conversions and shopping cart abandonment rates, and you can see this change in behavior in the data. Shopping cart abandonment rates normally average 70 percent, i.e. 7 out of every 10 people that place items in the shopping cart do not complete the transaction. But last year from Labor Day through November 15, the number of online sales fell by almost 56 percent compared with the volume for the previous month, and the shopping cart abandonment rate shot up, peaking at 83 percent.
But once holiday promotional offers were rolled out, the transaction volumes rose sharply, and the abandonment rate fell dramatically. You can see this in the graphs below.
Note also how the day of the week is very significant: During the weekends, customers were researching, not buying. The pattern of high shopping cart abandonment rates during the weekend is normal throughout the year as customers research online before potentially making a purchase during the week. However, this pattern was much more pronounced from mid-September through mid-November, reflected in a peak abandonment rate for the year.
What happened in mid-November, of course, was that Black Friday-specific promotions were being rolled out across the board, triggering seasonal buyingnot browsingbehavior and the ramp up to the peak on Cyber Monday.
Based on last years pattern, we should expect that, until the big Thanksgiving promotions get rolled out in mid-November, many customers will defer purchases, having become conditioned not to purchase online but to wait.
This reinforces what we have known for decades; promotions shift the timing of revenues and may not provide significant lift overall.
Well be monitoring both the discounting trends and the shopping cart abandonment rates through the rest of the holiday season, and it will be interesting to see whether the Holiday 2010 will be a rerun of 2009.