What with the internet getting so big and popular and all, it has reached the point where having a business and having a website is basically synonymous. If you don’t have a website, unless you are a market stall, you don’t have a business…or at least, you are not making the most of it.
So to get your business online, you obviously need a website. This is just the beginning though. Too many businesses phone up the first website company they come across, give them some colour scheme and accept what they are given. They then throw their products in and hit ‘Go Live’. Then they sit back and wait for the orders to start piling up in their inbox.
Unfortunately for them there is so much more to it. They may as well not have bothered if they are not willing to spend a lot more time and energy making it the best it can be. There is just so much competition out there that websites need to be of a high calibre to make any impact or provide any return on investment.
Worthwhile Content
The first and most essential element of all is worthwhile content. You can spend £10,000 on your website design and development but if you don’t invest in providing useful, user friendly, valuable information then it will all have been a waste. Ecommerce sites for example need to not only provide pictures and prices; they need high quality images, good solid descriptions and detailed price breakdowns.
A Unique Online Selling Point
Another essential element is a unique selling point. This is something that makes your business stand out online ahead of your competitors. While your existing business may have one in place, this may not do so well online. Good online selling points are things like ‘Free Shipping’ and ‘Free Returns’.
Security
People are very aware of their vulnerability online. This means that anything that seems unsafe, especially when their credit card details are concerned will make them run a mile. You need your site to look professional, be free of adverts (where possible) or any pop-ups and offer reassuring information like your physical address and a phone number. Furthermore, how are you processing payments? This certainly has to be secure and brings about the issue of payment gateways and which payment service provider is right for you and your customers.
On Page Credit Card Gateway
Sticking with reassuring customers and payments; sending them to an external site to take their card details is a major turn off, so it is essential that you nip this in the bud now by immediately applying an online credit card gateway that can be used from the checkout seamlessly.
SEO Services
Finally, search engine optimisation is not technically essential, but you won’t get much traffic quickly without a professional casting their eye over your site and explaining what you need to do to be as attractive as possible to search engines and your customers.
The problem with blogs is that so many companies that have them do not know what they have them for.
One thing is for sure, ecommerce store owners want their users to buy their products. They will go to great lengths to find ways in which people can be convinced that a certain product is the one that will change their life for the better. This might include altering the product, changing an advertising campaign, re-designing their website and fiddling around with their pricing. But one thing many ecommerce sites are unwilling to change is their registration process.
With every person and their dog now owning and using a smartphone or tablet PC to access the internet, and with apps (downloadable applications) rapidly becoming the normal way with which people interact with these devices, you must be interested to hear what having one will do for your business…and what not having one will do to your business.
Other than during the initial cyber bubble in the 90’s, no.
‘Inflation’ is basically the rise in prices of general goods and services over a set period of time. When inflation is said to be high, it means that everything you buy is generally more expensive than it was before. So let’s say you could buy a chocolate bar for £1 and then the price goes up to £1.10: that is when inflation has gone up, and your pound is still worth the same amount and no longer stretches to the price of a tasty snack.
When a visitor or potential customer arrives at your website for the first time, they form an opinion of your site and your company as a whole in a few seconds. This means that you need to make sure that every element of your homepage (primarily) and all the deeper sections of your site are completely tailored to give your visitor the best emotional response and first impression. Think about the last time you arrived at a site that looked odd, was unappealing, and made you feel awkward in some way…did you stick around? I doubt it. You don’t want to be in their shoes.
Times are tough for small businesses. Technically the economy has not literally shrunk, but the fact it stayed the same as it did for the previous quarter, a flat graph if you will, means that there was zero growth, which is as good as shrinkage. This has raised fears that despite some sectors showing signs of growth, overall we may be heading back for another round of recession.
Every online business, if they are at all serious about making their website profitable, needs to be thinking about their visitors when they create landing pages. Landing pages are where your users arrive at your website – depending on where individual pages appear in search results, it could be one of a number of pages and not just your homepage. You can more accurately direct your visitors to particular landing pages by using search engine optimisation techniques.
So you have built and launched your ecommerce store. You have perfected your product range and created an excellent website that gives them all the information they could want to know about each product with great pictures. You have spent money on search engine optimisation and pay per click campaigns and have a steady flow of motivated traffic arriving at your site every day. But, your sales from your website are still low and through analytics you can see that all but a few of your customers leave the site as soon as they get to the payment stage. What gives? Your prices are highly competitive.
