Improving Your e-Commerce Revenue

What Are Your Customers Saying? – You should frequently do a web search on the name of your business and your specific domain name (or even set up automated news alerts for the name of your business). If someone has criticized your business on an online message board or blog, you need to know about it so that you can strategize on a response. A quick reply to explain the situation and offer a solution could solve the problem before it snowballs – or even turn a bad situation into a good one.

How many visitors to your site are buying? – It can be hard to update, tweak, and improve your existing website, if you don’t know how well your website is working to convert new customers. For an automated way to track the traffic to your site including when people are visiting, how they found your site and how often they came back, you should set up analytics software for your site. Currently, there are many free online analytics services that will answer all of those questions about your site’s visitors. Statcounter (www.statcounter.com) offers a well-reviewed, free analytics solution for you. In addition, Google has its own free analytics software available at http://www.google.com/analytics/. Once you start tracking your site name via analytics, you’ll know where your customers are coming from and what pages they’re visiting on your site.

How much time are you spending on your e-commerce software? – If you were an early convert to selling on the web, you may be selling your products via an e-commerce site that you built – with software operating on your server. And, if that’s the case, you’re probably already aware of the many issues involved with running an e-commerce site from your owner server – security issues, possible server outages, constantly checking the software to make sure it’s running properly.

With the rise in hosted e-commerce solutions, you don’t need to spend a huge amount of time building and maintaining your own e-commerce site anymore. There’s a wide variety of ways to easily sell your products online.

Are you sharing the good things your customers say? – When it comes to purchases, no one likes to be a pioneer. Customers like to shop where other people shop, and they like to do business with people that others in their situation have done business with. Regardless of what your business is, you can benefit from testimonials – people talking about why they like your business and the positive experiences that they’ve had doing business with you.

No matter how small your business is, if you have a happy customer, ask them to give you a testimonial and add that information to your site. And, remember, the web is interactive. Sure, you can add the text of someone praising your business to your site, but don’t forget the interactive features of the web – get an audio or video of your customer’s endorsement and add that to your site too.

Are you providing excellent service? – A critical part of your success selling online will be your ability to provide excellent customer service. If a person emails a question about the product you’re selling, you need to have a system in place to respond to customer questions and complaints promptly. The internet offers small business owners an unprecedented ability to sell to people literally all over the world, but the internet also offers your dissatisfied customers a wide-reaching platform to air their complaints. And, the best way to reduce customer complaints, is to offer customers a great experience.