There has been serious boom in online sales in recent years, and if you are running a business of any kind, its time for you to push it online. Making and maintaining your own E-commerce web site might be tedious, but the results are rewarding. Once you have your web site setup, you can start off with small improvements to complex ones and gradually you will see a perfect e-commerce web site matching your business requirements. Let’s see these 10 tips which will help you optimize your e-commerce web site:

1. Design it for Every User

E-commerce Tips

There are varieties in users who will visit your web site and you may not know which stage they belong to in the whole purchasing process. While some of them might be collecting information on your web site for future purchase, some may be looking for an instant purchase. So keeping these factors in mind, you need to design it so that it acknowledges requirements of every customer.

2. Utilize Compelling Copy

The customers are on a hunt when they are looking for their product on e-commerce web site. If they do not find what they are looking for, the search for their product goes off track. If the keyword research is displaying top web sites endorsing “Headlight assembly kits”, you must ensure the similar page on your web site has this same keyword.

3. Exclamatory Headings

The heading on a web page is what attracts the user and push them to read first few lines of your web page. If it’s not likable, you are going to lose a potential customer. Use short yet revealing detailed information headings rather than long one which will make anyone sleepy.

4. Use Good Calls to Action

Give a reason to your user to click on something you would like them to. For example, “Click here to find lowest prices on health magazine” is more convincing than “Click here” or “Proceed here”.

5. Pasting Product Images from Every Angle

If you visiting a local store to buy a cell phone, you would like to take it in hand, feel and see it from every angle. Likewise, customer expects and loves to see images of their product they want to buy on your web site. Its always a good idea to upload multiple images of same product may be in different environment.

6. Give Option to Read and Write Reviews

Maximum users buy their product from the web site which allows them to go through the reviews and write one, a bad or good one. Don’t worry about a bad review, study shows that it proves to a user that the product is for sure real and the product has a little flaw. While you also have advantage to take off a product from your web site if it is getting a trail of bad reviews.

7. Giving Them an Overview of the Checkout Process

It’s satisfying for a user to see a small pictorial view of the entire checkout process when they are going to buy it. It tells them which stage they stand and how many steps they need to complete to get what they wanted. Please do not try to sell a product while they are in-between the checkout process, its distracting and you might lose a sale.

8. Be Simple on Forms

Make a form which is neat and clean rather than asking a user to input information that is not necessary at all. You can keep these points in mind while making one for you:

• Your form should ask only for required information strictly.
• Tell them that their data is in safe hands.
• Use explanatory buttons like, “Continue to Billing” instead of “Submit”.
• Display clear error messages explaining about the incomplete or incorrect fields.

9. Providing Support Options

Even before a customer purchases anything from your web site, he would look for various support options available with that product. One phone number for all will give confidence to your customer. Mentioning information about privacy, return policy, shipping details will assure they are buying a genuine product.

10. Perform Repeated Test

Gone are those days when testing used to be expensive, today tools like Google’s Web site Optimizer or SEO Analysis services can help you running a test on website in one hour. Jot down points on paper which you are concerned about and which you think need to be improved. Test your web site on those points, and according to results, repeat the cycle again.

Evolving up with link building plans could be challenging as it requires research, creativity or may be something entirely new. Here are some ideas that could boost your business outputs. I will be discussing here some of the strategies which are based on solving customer issues which is the most important and basic element in link building. It’s odd that few people still miss on this part which is the core part as I mentioned in link building ideas. Below listed are five simple techniques that you can take up to get your business on the right way.

Keyword Research

Find the right keyword research tool for you and try to locate the most common words and phrases online that customers are using to get answers to their questions. Examples could be, “how to”, Best practices” or “10 best ideas”. Use these phrases to build an excellent link plan for your web site and get access to those potential customers you always wanted. It’s simple because you need to have articles or topics covering those keywords which everyone is hunting for online. But remember to keep yourself update all the time, the keywords customer is searching would change by time and so would your strategies.

Talk to Your Customers

Stand up and walk up to your customers and find what they are looking for, try finding their challenges. You can make a phone call to achieve same, take feedback through survey, take help from online forums and even reaching up to their desk and talk one-on-one. Try to include open ended queries which will give detail information about their insight.

Meet your company personnel

Why look all around when you have information right there. Speak to your office staff, from sales people to customer service agents, they are the people who interact with customer more frequently and know them more than anyone else. You can also ask your company’s customer service help desk to keep track of customer’s voice.

Explore Online Forums and Media Web Sites

Take time out and read those blogs and your industry related news web site. This will keep you posted on the current concerns and will help you building link strategy for your business. People read and sometimes do leave comment on such forums which might be important for you. And if you feel same, don’t hesitate to even contact the user, he may help you explaining the same in detail which in turn will be a great help. At the same time, other users leaving their concerns and feedback reveal almost everything you needed. So keep a check on these web sites regularly.

Go Through Customer Review Sites

The customer review sites give useful information about chronic concerns consumers face plus other information which you might need to keep at the back of your mind while preparing link building ways. Once you have the data with you, try brainstorming with your office staff, include personnel you may never thought would help, who knows one can come up with an idea you never imagined before. An excellent link building idea is all about applying your research, thoughts, creativity into customer problems with all possible permutation and combinations.

Any kind of web site you are going to set up, its layout and the design should be made by keeping end user in mind. Though optimizing it for search engines is important at any point of time, but you need to focus more on the user experience part, obviously, the web site exists for the user and to make their experience enjoyable, so it’s crucial you design it for them and not for you.

You might be visiting few web sites when you go online and some of them just simply do not make you feel good about it. It may be a layout of the whole web page which is uninteresting or the flow may be crisscross. So in order to keep them neat, informative and serving the purpose, there is not much you need to do instead some simple things you need to take care of which are easily ignored.

User Friendly Web Design

Clicking a Logo Would Take Me to Homepage

Everyone expects this whenever you are visiting any new web site. You tend to click on the logo of the web site and hope that it would take you back to the homepage of the website, but no! In such cases, you are going to opt one of these options:

• Try clicking on the logo again thinking first time your mice had some problem
• Look for a “Home” option on the page and click on it.
• Close down that web site.

I think this is an essential part and you must associate the web site logo to the homepage and it does not take much time to do so. And its worth when we know users will like it and appreciate the web site for being user friendly.

Designing and Placing the Navigation Bar

There is lot when Navigation Bar needs to be designed, however, there could be one answer to it. We are used to and try to locate the nav bar at the top of the page just below the logo. However, there is no rule that you must have look-alike nav bar on your web site too. From designing the tab to type of menu options, you have complete independence on these choices but don’t over do things making overall customer experience a failure.

Another small useful tip is you must ensure that the tab the user is on must be highlighted in different theme or color. This is an indication to the user which page of the nav bar he is on.

Where is the Search Bar?

It makes me so amaze to find that many web sites do not have a search bar on them. Trust me your users will “Thank you” if you are going to put this option in your web site. There are others ways too which can help locating content on your site. One can add a list of contents and categorize them making it easier for user to click on their interest of help area.

Carving Links So That They Appear Link

You can easily make out a link on a web page but you may not easily on some web sites. A link is normally identifiable with a different color than the normal text of a page or it may be underlined denoting easily that it is clickable. Again, it’s going to be an excellent user experience when they find clickable items easily on the web page.

Splashing Welcome Notes and Feedback

Whenever I logon to any web site I have registered to, I feel good about my name displayed at the top with a welcome message. It gives personalized look and brings you and website closer to each other. Off course, this may not be of any use if the web site does not require you to register.

Next thing I am going to highlight is about the error you may see while filling up an online form for registration. And it’s really bugging when it does not tell you the reason for error you made inadvertently. You must help user explaining the whole registration process and give hints and suggestion box to rectify errors they might come across.

It’s always going to be the kind of user who will decide your site’s overall design. After all, there is a lot of difference between a real-estate site and teen’s site.

This system, called as Content Management System is extremely helpful when you want to be able to manage content on your web site and let user’s manager their own without much expertise. Off course, you need to know what content of the web site you would like to see there but apart from that, this online application takes care of all your web site’s needs. There are some constraints to it like what type of web site you are looking for and the number of pages you wish, but except this, overall it is considered to be an important tool in these times. It has reduced the cost to build the web site drastically unlike in past where the owner has to spend a lot in creating one.

Content Management Systems

There can different ways to narrow down your search for best CMS. And the best approach is to ask yourself, what is that thing you want to build website for? It can be an online forum, e-commerce site, a blog or web site with important content related to your business. And in case it’s about managing and to present a content, then CMS is your cup of tea. Other considerations are the investment you are going to make, the size of the web site and how you want to manage it. Plus, looking at the growth of these systems and popularity, some are available at cost while some are offered for even free.

Now when we come back to the question of choosing the right CMS it’s again going to be the product in question a deciding factor for CMS.  The system comes as an application/software so you need to look at the features of this software carefully to ensure using it would be hassle free.  The main purpose of CMS is allowing users to access change and publish content from a remote location in an easiest way. It must also keep a record of the contents published and modified by users in the most confinement way. Most preferred editor is WYSIWYG and to establish its usability you must test it first or else you can use HTML in case you decide not to use the earlier one. Be whatever you CMS select, you must make certain that working on that web site is comfortable for an end-user.

The templates on your web site should also be customizable like banners, animations with all required plug-ins. Plus, RSS feeds have become popular these days and are accessible on web sites with huge traffic and is a good option for your web site too. Since CMS comes as software, you must check if the one you have decided upon is compatible with your operating system and browser or not, if not, you will have to change your decision. And if you are going to make an e-commerce web site, you must choose a CRM tool that comes with CMS. It helps you record all users’ information easily. You might want to ask yourself the type of users visiting your web site in terms of language also. If it’s going to be multilingual customers, you get CMS that support languages you want. But then you might need to compromise on the features it is offering in all languages so decide what is more important to you. Also you should consider search engine optimization friendliness of the CMS you are going to choose.

Once you have taken down all considerations, there still going to be the actual size of web site which will determine the CMS you need. With so many CMS available in the market, there is still a probability that you may not get the right one for your web site and compromise with other. But if you find one, it’s really going to be a good experience for your users who would be able to manage their contents on your web site and so would you.

Internet Marketing

The fact is many entrepreneurs have used the Internet market to gain more in their business and the fact is many of them have failed in doing so. In reality, there are many of them who did not even manage to keep their business running. Fortunately, you can use this information to avoid such failure and touch customers of your domain by far than anyone else. Here I am going to cite five critical errors pertaining to Online Marketing.

A product without a customer

It sounds so dumb when you have developed a product for someone but eventually you don’t know that “someone”. It can bring disaster to business which is still on your drawing board. You may have a product which you think is interesting but have you done an online market research to find if you have a customer for same?

You can easily perform an advertisement testing before you harden your plans to make one product. A novice would not have enough funds to resist, so he must do a product based keyword testing before investing time and money to begin. Advantage for such systematic approach is that you will have a queue of customers waiting outside for your product which is yet to be launched.

Hunt for Opportunity and Not Passion

In online marketing, the success does not knock at your door that easily. No matter how much homework you have done, you ought to see difficulties in getting the results. And this is a time when your patience will be tested and it’s only when your passion will keep you going. There is a stiff competition in Internet marketing so you need to keep yourself up to date on customers’ requirement, research strategy, changing product line. So in order to keep your commitment always high you must ensure that you are into the business you really love. So if you have decided to go with online marketing business you know which things you need to consider and provide yourself with the finest opportunity to excel.

Missing on Advertisement Costs

The most crucial expenditure you are going to have in an online marketing is that of advertisement. Unless you have advertised your product online, your customer will never get to know that it even exists irrespective of how good your product is. The concern is the high cost involved in advertisement methods like SEO, article marketing, pay-per-click and e-mail marketing. The only way you can ensure your marketing is cost effective is by strategic testing and consistently practice for your Internet marketing. There are tools available like Google analytics, Google Optimizer and others which tracks/test the browsing habits of customers you are aiming at.

Anticipating Sale on Day One

Once you have rolled out product in the market, forget you are going to make customer immediately.  To see a potential customer turning into purchasing customer you will need to have a list building approach also called as list building strategy which is considered to be a very crucial part in making an online business winning. Even if your web site has a good traffic, the probability is you are going to lose half of your customers in case you do not have a good e-mail marketing strategy which will connect them back to you after their visit at your web site. This creates necessity of having a marketing funnel which includes a plan for relationship building and viral marketing with your forecast.

Losing Focus

It’s the main factor in most failures seen by online entrepreneurs. If you are not focused you won’t be able to spend time and funds the right way. You will also miss on tracking your progress and improvement graph. If you are changing your method of marketing from e-mail marketing to PPC then this inconsistency is going to take your business down. If you feel you are too tried and do not have much interest in online marketing part, its time you seek assistance of online marketing company. This will give you time to work on other parts for your online business which are of your interests.

I will summarize by saying that you may be half way down setting up your online business or may be almost ready to hit the market, but it’s still a right time for an improvement. You will surely find these five common errors made by people like you and me, just try to find what area you need to work on and start fixing them.