25 February 2013

Top Tips

4 Tips For Running An eCommerce Business

Build your brand ID

As you don’t need a physical store to sell online, the online market is heavily saturated with companies trying to sell their products and/or services. Whilst this is great news for the business owners, the bad news is that, as a result, it is extremely hard to build your brand ID and get ahead of your competitors unless you are an already established company.

To build brand ID, you need to get your brand names out there at any given opportunity! Try this, for every blog you write for an external site, put your brand name in your bio. Any article you post, include a link back to your site. Get a company Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and start interacting with your potential customers. Post about things that are relevant to your business or latest updates for your company.

Be SEO and user friendly

Pay close attention to the structure of your site - make sure it is easy for customers to navigate their way through the pages easily and access the information they are looking for with ease. Think about it, if you were in a shop that had no structure or strategic layout, you wouldn’t spend all day searching for the products you want – you’d go elsewhere. The same theory applies for online stores. If a customer has to search for what they want, chances are, they’ll lose interest and take their business elsewhere.  

Similarly, Google has specifically said that they take the structure of a website into consideration when ranking a page in their search results. With this in mind, make sure that Google’s spiders can crawl your pages easily in order to deem the quality of your page and rank it accordingly.

Be more than just a website

Customers are more likely to buy from you if you look like a real shop, ran by real people. Whilst some customers will never use them, having a phone number, fax number, email address, postal address or contact form on your website makes you and your business look less robotic and more trustworthy.

Interact with your customers 

With social media constantly growing in popularity, why not use this to your advantage?  Your customers want you to notice them, acknowledge them and interact with them. Whether it be re-tweeting something they have said, favouring a tweet, replying to a comment or liking a post, your customers want you to take notice of them and see that they are interested in your brand or product.

Although it may only seem like a small thing, it’s important not to let things slide – if a customer sends you a tweet which you don’t acknowledge, after time, this can affect their choice to shop with you and potentially result in lost custom.

By Sarah-Jayne Culver

Image by Fosforix