Using Custom Shopping Habits for Online Store Success
In addition to offering top-quality products and services that customers are shopping for, you should pay careful attention to how online customers shop - and leverage your ecommerce website accordingly in order to increase your online store success.
Online customers look before they buy and they're likely to be looking at multiple online stores, in addition to yours. For the most online store success, you should:
- Design your ecommerce website for easy navigation. Help your customers find what they are looking for by presenting web pages with only a few products and providing prominent navigation buttons and inquiry tools such as email launchers.
- Give shoppers a reason to come back. Highlight new website features or updates, prominently display new product announcements/specials, offer seasonal and time-critical specials to help motivate online shoppers to return to your web-based store.
- Online customers look for ease-of-purchase, your business website should be ready to easily and efficiently process orders every time a customer is ready to buy.
Be sure you:
- Accept the top three credit cards
- Offer Paypal® or bank draft payment for customer who prefer not to use credit cards
- Select an ecommerce shopping cart package that lets customers easily add, remove and calculate purchases before checkout
- Display security certificates and assurances prominently
Let online customers "talk" to you - customers may have questions; you should be ready to answer them in a timely manner, especially since your answers may influence their purchase decision:
- Every sales/product page in your web-based business should have an email launcher
- Consider adding a "Frequently Asked Questions" section (FAQs) to your website to let customers get answers at-a-glance; place a link to the Customer FAQ on every sales and product web page within your ecommerce website.
- Offer several shipping options, deliver your products to your customers via the carrier, and timing, they prefer.
- Describe each of the shipping options and its price, as well as discount possibilities, clearly, with check-boxes for the preferred shipping method
- Shipping methods and prices/discounts should be seamlessly integrated with your web-based business's shopping cart and checkout/transaction-processing software
Be sure to include shipping/tracking information so that customers can follow the progress of their purchase from your store to their hands. Online customers should be able to easily follow links from your business website to the tracking web pages of the major carriers and delivery services.
Discounts work! Online shoppers appreciate bargains, perhaps even more than shoppers in brick-and-mortar stores because they are able to check prices for the same products at multiple sites. Consider:
- Give discounts for volume purchases
- Shipping discounts or even "free" shipping for orders of a certain size. Note: If discounts or free shipping is offered, there should be an appropriate disclaimer about discounts and "free" shipping.
- Time-sensitive discounts for repeat purchases made from your web-based business within a certain timeframe, for example, a week.
Follow-up communications could mean follow-up sales - in addition to giving your online customers the chance to communicate with you, make sure you communicate with them:
- Send a "customer satisfaction" letter after the product or service is delivered in order to find out whether the customer was satisfied with the product. The ecommerce experience? The ease-of-use of your Web-based business? Were there any areas of dissatisfaction?
- Ask if the customer's email address can be added to your emailing list. Would the customer like to be added to an e-newsletter or other aspects of your online marketing campaign?
- Would the customer care to offer a testimonial - perhaps receiving a discount on future website purchases in return?
Knowing how your customers shop can help you make sure that your own online business is where they'll want to shop.
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