HOW MUCH BUSINESS ARE YOU LOSING.....THE E-COMMERCE FACTOR

Have you been thinking about selling your products online?  Online shopping has become one of the fastest growing sectors for retail sales for the last several years.  Nearly 30% of small business in the U.S. are projecting that their eCommerce sales will increase over the next 12 to 24 months, according to the latest Small Business Research Board (SBRB) study released on September 2007. Online retail sales grew from $47.8 billion in 2002 to $130.3 billion in 2006 in the US alone! Don't be the one to miss out on the billions of dollars of e-commerce revenue!

So you've  realized the potential of the e-commerce market, and have decided that you want a share of that 130.3 billion. You've invested a great deal of time and money on a state-of-the-art e-commerce site, and have achieved your high rankings on the search engines. Then why aren't the customers shopping madly and making you the next dot.com millionaire?

It isn't enough to just have a site - if you want visitors to your e-commerce web site to shop online and actually buy something from you, you have to entice them. Just as you would in a "traditional" store.

According to Resource E-Commerce Watch, potential online shoppers want the same things that bricks-and-mortar shoppers want: a convenient shopping experience, having their questions or concerns addressed, in-stock merchandise, and a timely and accurate order confirmation process. Online retailers who execute these retail basics well will win loyal customers.

Addressing the following factors in your site will increase your e-commerce success:

1. Consistent Access: You must have consistent, 24/7 hosting if you want to operate a successful e-commerce site. You must present a fully functional, complete store to entice the e-commerce visitor and get them to shop online. No big “Under Construction” or “Coming Soon” banners.

2. Navigation: E-Commerce web site design is critical; besides being professional looking and attractive, you must make your e-commerce site easy for the customer to use. If potential customers can’t navigate your site easily, they won’t bother. Your competition is always only a click away! You must also maintain your e-commerce web site regularly and often. An e-commerce site that’s littered with dead links will drive online shoppers away. An e-commerce web site that never offers any new content will bore visitors. If you can’t afford to maintain your e-commerce site, you can’t afford to have one.

3. Credibility: Just as in the bricks-and-mortar store, you must win your customers' trust before they'll shop online. You need to let your customers get to know you and your company as well as let them know about your product before they'll shop online.

4. Displaying Your Product to Best Advantage: Online shoppers need to see the product before they’ll purchase it; they use elements of e-commerce web site design such as online catalogues to accomplish this. Amateur e-commerce sites often make the mistake of loading many pictures onto too few pages and calling it an online catalogue, resulting in a page which loads too slowly and doesn’t provide enough information.

   A good online catalogue will use a lot of web pages; it will be organized into categories, searchable, use thumbnails to give faster load times, and provide detailed information on each product. An excellent catalogue also provides “in stock” information and makes it easy for the online shopper to purchase the product.

5. Customer Communication: Too many e-commerce web sites are anonymous and provide very limited contact opportunities for the potential online shopper. If I’m thinking of buying your product, I want to know who you are. Successful e-commerce sites provide real names as contacts, not pseudonyms such as “webmaster” or worse, names that look like passwords, such as “Queen2458”. They supply information about their staff and their company that the online shopper can access easily if he or she wants to. Put a picture of yourself and/or your staff on your e-commerce site. Customers need to have the feeling that they know you, or at least that they know something about you, before they’ll do any online shopping and entrust you with their money.

   Successful e-commerce web sites also provide information about customer service and contact information that is clear and accessible. Having to drill down through 30 pages to find an e-mail address printed in a tiny font on the bottom of a page somewhere will give your potential online shopper uneasy feelings, not good feelings. Most won’t even bother to search. They’ll just assume that you’re not the sort of person they want to do business with.

   Make your customer service information a prominent feature of your site. Put an “About Us” and a “Contact Us” or “Customer Service” link on your e-commerce web site’s navigation menu and make sure it’s on every page. Put some content on those pages; if someone bothers to click on “Customer Service” and all they see is a single email address, they’re not going to be impressed. Online shoppers need to see a fully developed customer service policy to feel comfortable about online shopping. Many e-commerce sites use a FAQ which provides answers to common questions, such as how to order, shipping charges, and return policies.

   And no matter how small your e-commerce web site is, you can now provide customer service in real time. HumanClick, and LiveHelper, for example, are both Internet based, customer-service applications, that let your e-commerce web site visitors get immediate, on-demand help. Now there’s a way to entice e-commerce customers!

6. Payment Methods: If you want to convert visitors to your e-commerce web site into online shoppers, you have to offer online payment processing. You need to make it easy and safe for them to pay for their purchases online, which means accepting credit card payments on your e-commerce site. If you don't, you're throwing away sales. Many of the potential customers visiting your site are people who can't be bothered to print out forms, or mail in their order. Why should they when so many of your competitors make it easier for them to buy online?

   Site security is a prime concern of potential online shoppers. You have to work especially hard at this, because you have to deal with two factors: the reality and the perception of online credit card processing. The reality is that on a “secured” site, transmitting personal information such as credit card numbers is less dangerous than using a credit card in a “realworld” retail situation, where someone might look over someone else’s shoulder and steal the number, or pick the credit card slip out of the trash afterwards.

   During an interview with Eric Olafson, Tomax CEO, said, “there is more risk in handing your credit card to a stranger serving your dinner than in shopping online.”

   But the perception of credit card processing is that transmitting personal information such as credit card numbers online is much more dangerous, and that hackers lurk everywhere. You must have SSL (Secure Socket Layering) on your online payment pages, so you have the ability to handle encrypted transactions. You must visibly show your potential online shopper that your site is secure and that your online payment systems, such as credit card processing, are safe to use.

7. The traditional retailer closes the sale with a “Thank You; please come again.” This also needs to be done on an e-commerce site. Whether it’s a simple screen that comes up after the transaction thanking your customer, a follow-up thank-you email, or a thank-you card that you ship with the completed order (or all three!), you need to let your e-commerce customer know that you appreciate their business. Blank screens, screens that automatically return to the home page, or screens that just repeat the order form after the transaction do nothing to give your online shopper that warm, fuzzy feeling.

Want e-commerce customers? Having a quality product is only one small piece of the e-commerce web site puzzle. Once you’ve gotten potential online shoppers to your e-commerce site, you have to entice them to shop online by treating them as well as or better than they’d be treated in a bricks-and-mortar store. The above will help you focus on the retail basics that potential online shoppers must have before they’ll consider the click that matters.