When it first came by, people saw opportunity. Now, they are dismayed. Competition thrives online and e-commerce isn’t an eBay story for everyone. For every Amazon or eBay, there are scores of commercial websites beating brows to figure out ways to make it to the top or in some cases, make enough to survive. Merchandising online needs to be reinstated and done with a few points to bear in mind – just what needs to be done to heat up the cash registers?

1. Guide your user to buy using enhanced site usability, navigation and sorting the clutter: The facts first – the web surfers are notoriously impatient,; have no or little loyalty to any one e-commerce site and they feed on information. Now that you have them, what can be done? Simple. Provide simple access to what they need by focusing more on getting the relevant products or service right up, within 3 clicks from the word go. If you can manage with lesser number of clicks, it’s all the more better. You can achieve maximum focus by leveraging technologies like Search engine Optimization and Marketing, Pay for Click campaigns which are much targeted and can help you ascertain Return on Investment.

2. Adopt a structure because business can’t thrive in chaos: The world has a structure. Our biological systems have a structure and there are reasons for it. If your website has no structure and if the products and services are not laid out in a logical and precise manner, it would be chaos and people don’t like to deal with it. Even chaos sometimes has structure but your website might never have it if you don’t take steps to incorporate it. All the products or services with the associated content must be adequately categorized and segmented. That’s structure for you and it affects your sales conversion.

3. What have you got that they haven’t got? : Online sales are driven by content. You must choose to employ content that is top-notch. Your content must set you apart from the scores of similar sites offering the same products but aided with shoddy, repeated and duplicated content. Either that or the content is just not enough to justify a “buy” decision.

4. Employ visual content such as video and virtual modeling: A real person talking through audio or video can be very re-assuring and if you can keep this kind of content along with some expertly rendered text content for relevant products, you are hitting on the nerve center of your customers and making it easy for them to trust you, like you and what’s more, buy from you.

5. User generated content is a real value driver: Well-moderated user generated content can take your site to the next level simply because it is the users themselves who are helping generate the content and this is supposed to come with the priceless attribute of real experiences which bring about dollops of trust. Product sales just become a habit then notwithstanding the brand identity that is developed, thanks to the ever powerful force of user generated content.

E-commerce is here to stay and is indeed the future of world’s shopping. What’s likely to fade away in an ephemeral state of euphoria is your business’s profits. A few small tenets is all that you need to pay heed to and you shall see your business soaring like an unfettered spirit after a 100 years of binding.

Related posts:

1. E-Commerce Basics: Customer Retention Methods
2. Administrative Panel (Beta)

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.