Basic ecommerce web site design and development – Part 2

Pre-sales support to encourage sales

In Part 1 of this ecommerce series, we examined various pages that should be included on your site. A good ecommerce site is more than just a home page, product page and shopping cart.

This article examines other aspects you may wish to consider as part of your online sales pitch, then leads on to further information about the nuts and bolts of ecommerce – shopping carts, payment gateways and merchant accounts.

Info sheets.

Perhaps the customer is not yet ready to order? Provide them with an offline reminder by the provision of quick downloading info sheets about your product, valuable information regarding the area that your product or service addresses and contact details in PDF format. The infosheets should contain some of your site’s branding elements to assist with recall. Info sheets also have a habit of being forwarded or printed out and passed around. This is a part of viral marketing. Read ouroverview of viral marketing.

Pre-sales email support

Not every question can be answered in a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions page), so offering to answer pre-sales questions should be encouraged and promoted. Rapid response to pre-sales questions will definitely assist in securing online sales.

If I am interested in purchasing a product, submit queries and don’t receive a response within 24 hours – I usually don’t buy the product, no matter how good it appears. Delay in response time could mean poor support in the future.

When responding to customer enquiries, ensure that your messages are well thought out. Address the question asked thoroughly and offer further support. Sales are also lost through poor spelling and grammar in email messages. View our guide to email etiquette.

Always thank the prospective client for their comments and questions, even if they are being what appears to be slightly unreasonable. You’ll find that many customers will have ESL (English as a second language) and it can be quite challenging for them to submit queries. Ask for clarification if you aren’t sure of what the client is requesting.

Autoresponder software & mailing list managers Get more from your email marketing – tips, reviews & free trial software/services.

 

 

Live chat software

Another way of encouraging sales is to implement live online customer support. There are many products available now that allow you to communicate with prospective clients over the Internet in real time directly from your web site.

The way that live support operates is through special HTML/JavaScript coding embedded in your site’s pages, supplied by the company that you obtain the service from. It detects when a visitor arrives at your online destination. You are then alerted to the arrival by specialized software on your office system via a message from the company.

If you do decide to go ahead with implementing live online customer support, it doesn’t have to be an expensive process. View further information on live chat software and support services and try out a free service!

Easy access to ordering

Having convinced your prospective online client of the benefits of your product or service, it’s now time to close the deal. If it takes any more than one click to begin the ordering process, then it’s too many. Make sure every page that contains information about your products has ‘order now’ links in appropriate places.

The links or buttons should be easy to locate, but not too gaudy – it’s a balance of subtlety and promotion. The best place to implement ‘order now’ links is after paragraphs which detail some positive aspect of the product, or directly after a testimonial from one of your clients.

Learn more about processing
credit card transactions

Shopping carts

A shopping cart is a software package that showcases products (in some cases), collects customer details, assembles the order, calculates price, shipping and tax, then submits the data to you and a credit card payment gateway for further processing. The funds are then transferred into your bank or merchant account if the transaction is successful. It’s important to realize that the shopping cart, payment gateway and merchant account are three very separate components.

There are many products and services on the market, but it is imperative to find one that suits your business totally and allows scalability. The wrong package or a mismatch of components could cause you a great deal of headaches and cost you money as your business grows.

The good news is that there are a number of free shopping cart software packages on the market as well, which may fulfill your requirements.

Read more about selecting suitable shopping carts; and when you’re done with that; learn more about payment processing options.

Related learning resources.

Part 1 and Part 2 of this article really only just scrape the surface of ecommerce. Once you have your online store happening, your cart installed and your payment processing implemented; how will you promote and market it? Have you considered starting an affiliate program to help increase sales? What’s an affiliate program anyway?

We have a wide range of articles and tutorials on Taming the Beast.net covering all sorts of aspects of running an online business :

Search engine optimization tutorials section

Affiliate marketing strategies and tutorials

Ecommerce tutorials and guides

Web development tutorials and articles

Michael Bloch
Taming the Beast
http://www.tamingthebeast.net
Tutorials, web content, tools and software.
Web Marketing, Internet Development & Ecommerce Resources
____________________________

In the interests of transparency and disclosure, please note that the owner of Taming the Beast.net often receives goods and services mentioned in reviews for free, or may receive payments or affiliate commissions for advertising or referring others to merchants of products and services reviewed.

Copyright information…. This article is free for reproduction but must be reproduced in its entirety & this copyright statement must be included. Visit http://www.tamingthebeast.net for free Internet marketing and web development articles, tutorials and tools! Subscribe for free to our popular ecommerce/web design ezine!

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Basic ecommerce web site design and development – Part 1

Introduction

Welcome to Taming the Beast.net and the world of online business!

This 2 part series assumes you have a basic web presence and briefly outlines preparing your web site for online sales and credit card transactions. The articles linked to will then assist you in making a more educated decision before implementing ecommerce software and marketing tools.

Online sales processing using credit card based transactions may not be quite as straightforward as you may think. Many web site owners new to ecommerce are under the impression that they just plug a shopping cart into their site; but a cart is only a part of the whole ecommerce process.

“I don’t want to support online payments”

In case you were thinking about avoiding online credit card transactions to sell your product, think again. The days of ‘send me a check or money order’ are long gone. In the vast majority of cases, customers will want your product, and want it now.

Even if the product or service you are offering is totally unique, you will miss many sales if you don’t implement some form of online credit card processing. But implementing a processing service doesn’t necessarily mean shelling out big dollars up front.

Shopping cart software Learn more about shopping carts or read our reviews of some the best shopping cart software around! Need to learn more about merchant accounts or payment processors? Read our reviews & guides

 

The web site

OK, I’m sure you know this one! The web site acts as the store front for the products and services you wish to sell online. Your site visitors are, for the most part, window shoppers and browsers. A commercial web site’s aim is to convert these browsers into buyers.

The web site should be designed to gently lead the client through the learning and sales process. Your sales text must be grammatically sound and spelled correctly. Poor spelling loses credibility points straight away.

Ensure that there is plenty of well laid out textual content on the site to attract search engines as well as to inform prospective clients. Use keyword and keyphrase rich text; that is, utilize copy that includes common phrases that people would enter into search engines when performing a query. The copy you use shouldn’t just be informational, it needs to actively sell to the site visitor. Learn more about crafting marketing copy and creating effective landing pages.

What search terms are commonly used?

A useful tool in understanding how people are searching is freely available from Google. With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames on particular keywords, finding the most popular terms for a given topic or industry sector.

Attracting search engines and targeted site traffic is a huge ongoing learning curve, and there are plenty of other articles and tools on our site to assist you with this. View our search engine marketing resources or our general promotion archives.

Cross Browser Compatibility

Internet Explorer isn’t the only browser on the market. There are currently over 100 different brands of Internet browser currently available. IE’s major competitor is Firefox and what looks good in Internet Explorer may look terrible or even crash other browsers! Make sure that you design your site to be viewable in at least:

Internet Explorer 5.0+
Firefox 1.0 +

Between these two browsers, you’ll have well over 90% of market covered. By paying attention to even simple things like browser compatibility issues, you will increase your sales.

The use of images

All images used should clearly depict the product/service and where possible, don’t use stock images that come with products such as Photoshop. Seasoned Internet surfers will recognize these as they appear on thousands of sites around the world. Use original photography or scanned images wherever you can, or make use of the many stock photo archives where you can purchase high quality images for as little as a couple of dollars each.

Ensure that you optimize your images for rapid download. Much of the world still does not utilize broadband, and no-one is going to wait around for 2 minutes to see a photo of a “happy customer” or “successful businessperson who uses our product”. All popular graphics packages support compression for web based graphics, usually through easy to use wizards. Try your graphics software program’s help file and search for “optimization” or “compression”.

Images are a wonderful medium to assist in the online sale of your products/services, especially useful to those clients with poor literacy levels or who are in a rush, as we all seem to be these days. But remember, while a picture may be worth a thousand words in the offline world, it’s worth next to nothing when it comes to search engines as spiders do not ‘see’ pictures.

Image HTML coding should also contain ‘alt’ tags. This is a textual representation of the image which is useful for the situations where the image doesn’t load for some reason. Search engines spiders also latch on to this content, especially if the image is linked to another page. ‘alt’ text will also pop up when a visitor moves their mouse over the image. Here’s a sample of html code for an image which also contains ‘alt’ text:

<img border=”0″ src=”../images/iconarticle1.gif” alt=”Article section – Web development, eCommerce and site promotion tutorials and comments – free for reproduction!” width=”50″ height=”50″>

Site Navigation.

Site navigation should be simple and all the questions a consumer may ask should be answered along the way. Where possible, adhere to the “three click rule” – that is, a visitor should be able to access any information regarding your product or service within 3 clicks of any other area of your web site. Pay close attention to cross-browser compatibility issues as many complex menu systems play havoc with browsers.

Recommended pages.

Along with the home page, your sales pages and the shopping cart, I recommend implementing the following web pages as part of your ecommerce site:

About Us Page.

The “About Us” page is crucial to boosting consumer confidence. It provides a summary of the business, your commitments and direction.

While we are all protective of our privacy, online business is no different to traditional business in that we all like to ‘put a face to the name’ – we need to reassure our site visitors. When purchasing goods online, I always go to the ‘About Us’ or company profile pages before parting with my money (especially after one bad experience – another story for another time). The page should also provide other contact details for your business and your various registrations, associations and affiliations. View further information relating to “about us” or company profile pages.

Autoresponder software & mailing list managers Get more from your email marketing – tips, reviews & free trial software/services.

 

Privacy policy.

What are you going to do with my information? – a question asked by many online shoppers. Putting together a privacy policy doesn’t necessarily require a legal team! Learn more about developing Privacy statements.

FAQ’s (Frequently asked questions)

No doubt you’ll be asked many questions about your product. Many of these questions will be repetitive. It’s these questions and answers that you’ll want to add to your FAQ page. This promotes customer confidence and saves your valuable time. A prospective client may be somewhat hesitant in asking questions and this hesitancy may translate into a lost sale. A well constructed FAQ will help coax these online customers into purchasing.

You don’t need to spend a lot of money on a basic FAQ system. Simply list the questions at the beginning of the FAQ in dot-point format, perhaps broken down into various categories to make searching easier. Each of these questions should be directly linked to the answer further down the page with the use of bookmarks. This basic design also allows for scalability.

You can link to the FAQ not only through the main menu system, but after every “buy me” type statement. The FAQ should be accessible within one click of any other area of your web site that is dedicated to selling the product or service.

Testimonials page

A dollar value can not be placed upon positive client testimonials; this is some of the best promotional copy around. Elicit feedback from your current customers and ask their permission to publish their comments on your site.

Testimonials can be implemented on a page of their own, or interspersed between your own statements regarding the product. If you do implement a Testimonials page, ensure that it can be accessed with one click from any other page on the site.

Ideally the link or button should be placed on your web site navigational menu, preferable at the top.

If you don’t have any testimonials or referees, it may be worthwhile considering supplying a select group of people with the product free of charge for testing and feedback purposes. Learn more about usingtestimonials and reviews in marketing.

Guide to accepting
credit card transactions

In our second part of this series, we’ll cover other pre-sales services worth considering as part of your online sales pitch. Also included is some introductory information about ordering processes and ecommerce components. View part 2 of Basic ecommerce web site design and development..

Related learning resources:

Payment Gateways, Internet Merchant Accounts and third party credit card processors

Shopping Carts – hints and tips in choosing the right ecommerce solution for you

Over 130 ecommerce solutions reviewed – the results

Michael Bloch
Taming the Beast
http://www.tamingthebeast.net
Tutorials, web content, tools and software.
Web Marketing, Internet Development & Ecommerce Resources
____________________________

In the interests of transparency and disclosure, please note that the owner of Taming the Beast.net often receives goods and services mentioned in reviews for free, or may receive payments or affiliate commissions for advertising or referring others to merchants of products and services reviewed.

Copyright information…. This article is free for reproduction but must be reproduced in its entirety, along with live links & this copyright statement must be included. Visit http://www.tamingthebeast.net for free Internet marketing and web development articles, tutorials and tools! Subscribe for free to our popular ecommerce/web design ezine!

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Wondering what pages to include on your website and why? Here is a list of important information that should be included on your site.

Before you start thinking about what to write, it is important that you create a plan, which outlines what each page will contain. That way you won’t repeat yourself or forget vital information. The most common pages on successful websites include:

1. Home Page (First Page)

This is your “sales” page and should provide information about what you can do for your customers. It should also give your visitors a brief overview of what they can find on your site.

2. Products / Services

It is useful to have a separate page for each product/service and write as much detail about each as possible. Start each page with a brief summary of the product/service, then provide whatever information you can. If the page appears too long, you can always break it into more pages. When people are searching for information on the internet, they want to know it NOW. They don’t want to wait until tomorrow when they can speak to you on the phone. The more information you can provide about your products/services, the better.

3. Contact Us

Place contact details in as many places as possible. Make it easy for your customers to contact you. Create a special “Contact Us” page, include your details in “About Us” page and also at the bottom of each page. Information to include: business name, physical address, mailing address, telephone, fax, email, emergency number, website address.

4. Pricing

Whenever possible include the price of your products/services. Even if you can’t be specific. It is helpful to put at least a range of prices, eg. Carpet cleaning ranges between $40 – $60 per room.

5. Testimonials / Product Reviews / Before & After

Include testimonials from your current customer to show your potential clients that you are trustworthy, reliable and that you offer great service and/or products. Make sure the testimonials are real and if possible provide contact details of the person who supplied you with the testimonial. If you don’t have any right now, get them! Simply email your customers and ask for their feedback on your business and service. Most happy customers will gladly provide this.

You could also include before and after photos. Show the problem picture and beside it show the picture of resolution, with an explanation of your product’s benefits.

6. Frequently Asked Questions

This has proven to be a great time saver for many companies. Instead of having to answer the same questions over and over again, place them on your website and keep adding to them. The more information you have on your website, the less time you will need to spend answering questions by email or phone.

Frequently Asked Questions should address your customer’s concerns that may otherwise be an obstacle to making a sale.

7. Response form such as “Subscribe” or “Enquiry” form

An absolute must if you want to build a mailing list. Most people don’t like giving out too much information, so ask only the basics, such as Name and Email Address. Then keep in touch with your customers on a regular basis by sending out information that may be of interest to them. You may even wish to develop your own on-line magazine (ezine). There are many fantastic free or inexpensive programs that can handle this for you. We will discuss these in more detail in future articles.

8. On-line Magazine or Newsletter

This is a great marketing tool. Not only does it help you keep in touch with your customers, but provides your website with fresh content. You can set up your Ezine in 2 different ways:

1. Email subscribers on a regular basis or 2. Publish it on your website. Or both. Include information about your business, industry or anything that may be of interest to your customers.

9. Resources/Articles

Add value to your business. Provide information that is complementary to what you do. For example, if you sell wedding dresses include information about reception venues, wedding planners, wedding cakes, flowers. By adding extra information you encourage more hits.

10. About Us

This is a very important page as it tells your customer about who you are and why they should buy your products, services and/or trust your organization. It can also feature your business hours (if you have a bricks and mortar store) or when they can speak to someone live. Many companies also include their mission or purpose on this page, details of their staff (photos, biographies, qualifications), recently completed projects. Other information to include: ACN or ABN, logo, directions to your store/office.

11. Guarantee

Offer a money back guarantee. The longer the guarantee, the more effective it will be. It could be 30 days, 60 days, 1 year or lifetime.

12. Survey

Find out what customers think about your website, business or product.

13. Events Calendar

This can relate to your business or industry. If you are an artist, you can feature dates where and when your art will be displayed or if you are a singer, where you will be performing.

14. Search My Website Feature

Some visitors to your side may not know exactly what they want but if you include a search function on your site, they can look for it very easily. Like search engines, this feature will allow your visitors to type in a word or phrase and then search for it on your site. It’s like having your own mini search engines, only instead of it searching the world wide web, it just searches your website.

15. Return/Refund Policy

To make your customers feel more comfortable when making a transaction at your website, you should provide then with your return/refund policy. Ensure it is easy to understand and spelt out step by step.

16. Privacy Policy

Privacy continues to be a major issue for customers shopping online. Concerns about how their information is going to be used is a major barrier when making a sale. Internet shopping experience is built on trust and privacy is the number one ingredient in trust.

17. Site Map

A site map is similar to a contents. It shows visitors how the site is laid out and which sections are where.

18. Copyright Information

Your website should carry a copyright notice to protect its intellectual property. It is generally in the form of “Copyright

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