1. Analyse and monitor sales

Now, more than ever, it is the perfect time to have a clearer image of your business: volumes traded in different time intervals, certain product categories that sell, numbers of orders for each product and many other indicators. There are some payment solutions that offer reporting centres for your online store, maybe you should take a look on those as well. Beyond the numbers and other insightful information you can get some valuable data related to seasonality, buyers’ patterns, purchasing habits and so on.

2. Find out what your customers want from you

Do you really know what buyers want from your online store or what satisfies/dissatisfies them most? Do you think your site needs a faster navigation or more methods of payment? You should certainly seek to improve the shopping experience of your customers and the best way of doing this is by testing, testing, testing.

3. Discover and analyse new ideas

Always keep an alert eye on your competition that is offering similar products as you are. You could find some new trends or new ideas that you did not thought of but might really improve your sales and not only. See what could work for your business, adapt to your online store, personalise and apply.

4. Offer promotions that bring the most profit

Online buyers are very sensitive to deals/coupons/sales. If you’ve decided to offer discounts on your site or think about offering discounts, do your calculations to determine the level of reduction that you can provide in order to keep your profit margins. Do not set up promotions based on figures from previous years or based on competition or you could start losing money.

5. Add a whishlist

This is the best way for finding out what products your customers wish to see in your online store. You could also reward very loyal customers with those new products at promotional prices and not only. There are literally many ways in which you could use that information for the benefit of your customers and of your online store…

What do you do with a promotion?

In most ecommerce websites, a promotion can be found 99% of the times in home page (top position – that is the banner looking good and promising discounts and so on) or in a special category if it exists.
The first variant is visually expressed, with a full “call to action” graphic but suffering from a major minus: clicking the banner takes you to a landing page which is absolutely normal – a product page or a selected listing without any graphic or text message that would undertake and sustain the curiosity of visitors.

In the second variant, a small button is located in the header or footer signaling you that there is something going one, but nothing too visible. As for the first variant as well, the click is followed by a not so optimised landing page for the promotion.

Both works, but the earnings would be noticeably higher if instead of a simple strategy like the ones above you would build up more on this theme, making use of all tools that can monetize a promotion.

Here are some ways that can help your promotion have more success:

- Use a call to action banner on homepage
- Top page positioning in category listing
- Cross selling in product pages
- Affiliate marketing campaign
- Article marketing and press release
- Article about the promotion on company blog
- Adwords campaign
- Sponsored bloggers writing about your campaign
- Email marketing campaign
- Dedicated feed sales and newsletter
- Offline advertising campaign

These will definitely increase your promotion exposure thus raising the flags when it comes to online earnings from your virtual ecommerce site.

There are many studies available online related to whether customers are more satisfied with receiving their products for free or not and among those the most interesting ones were released by PayPal, Harris Interactive and Forrester. According to those studies, free shipping is what almost any customer wants; more exactly, more than 60% of all interviewed customers are happy to receive their products for free. But what does this mean for an online store?

Indeed, “free shipping” or “discounted shipping” are phrases that one can meet on almost every online shop and when looking at numbers it seems that free shipping can be profitable. Not only that it can be profitable but it MUST be profitable, no matter its value would be…

What can free shipping bring to your business:

- Increase the numbers of orders

- Increase the average value of an order

- Increase the price per product

- Gross margin increased

- Increasing the orders volume and thus reducing transport costs

On the other hand, if the calculations are not properly done an online store risks to:

- Lose a substantial percentage of a product’s gross margin

- Subsidize the free shipping from gross profits

- “kill” the gross profit

The real problem lies in how the calculations of transport costs have been done and what is the real impact of free shipping on an online store’s daily operations. One of the easiest options can be to impose a minimum purchase level for free shipping (e.g. free shipping for over $200 orders).

In conclusion, free shipping is a great marketing strategy but it also lies on a very thin layer of ice that can break and really hurt, in terms of profits/losses.

If you are selling goods and services that can be marketed through Internet, then you definitely need an ecommerce website. Your competition probably already has an online store so it would be a great move forward for your business as well.

Ecommerce website development

Building and online store from scratch can literally be a difficult task, it may take a long time and can prove to be quite expensive. From implementing payment gateways to billing software, all these are quite difficult to accomplish, however this is where ecommerce platforms come into the spotlights. They are very flexible and can definitely help your online store behave exactly how you want it, with all the features needed already implemented.

Ecommerce platforms

An already built standard ecommerce platform could be the best response to the problems above. An ecommerce software might already contain all the modules you might need, from payment gateways, billing software, databases and so on. Such platforms can be found in dozens on the Internet, from paid ones to free ones, but some can be very difficult to work with, others very easy to be changed, it all depends on choosing the right ecommerce shopping cart to work with. Let’s talk a little about the free ones.

There are plenty of free online shopping cart available online, most well known and popular are ZenCart and osCommerce, but again, these are just a small piece of what can be found online. osCommerce for example is very easy to install and customise – just download the files and upload them on your hosting account. Customising can be done by using templates, again, some being free some asking for a small fee, but you should carefully choose the right template while it can definitely be the difference between a great looking ecommerce online store and a not so attractive one (in terms of visitors/customers).

Whatever ecommerce shopping cart you might choose, the most important thing to keep in mind is the security level it offers to your website. When you have an online store you deal with massive customers’ data, thus the importance of higher levels of security like SSL certificate and not only. Also, as for all other software available online, free does not necessarily means good and this is also available for paid ones as well. Analyse more platforms, read reviews, think about what features you will need and make the right choice.

How many of you have not heard the phrase:”don’t you want a dessert for your dinner?” or something like that? If you did not know until now, the process in question is called cross-selling, an online selling process that can definitely provide a sales boost. Cross-selling is quite close with up-selling, however one big difference can be noticed: first one offers supplementary products strictly related to the principal product like accessories or updates while up-selling offers similar products but with higher costs.

There are many places on your website where you can implement these 2 instruments however most popular ones are the product’s page and the shopping cart page, but what can an instrument like cross-selling offer to your ecommerce site?

- It increases the average value of your order
- It increases the conversion rate: let’s say the product searched by the prospect is unavailable; by displaying products with similar properties at similar costs customer can turn to something else and make the purchase
- It increases awareness – additional exposure of your products notifies the user about your business’ dimensions
- Increases customer satisfaction if the cross-selling displays related accessories that might concern the visitor

Tips for good cross-selling:

1. Always display relevant products, don’t ever go with random products.
2. Use personalisation like “You might be interested in…”
3. Use emotional words like “You might need…”, “Other people needed” and so on
4. Promote your special offers through cross-selling
5. When necessary, use emergency words like “very limited offer”
6. Provide sufficient details about your cross-selling products

What not to do in cross-selling:

1. Do not display random products
2. Do not overcrowd the product’s page with multiple products
3. Do not suggest competitive products like HP vs Asus
4. Never display products that are not in your stock

Cross-selling, if used correctly works, however it mostly depends on the niche your online store is in, but the best thing a store owner can do is to try and see whether this works or not for his business.

Good communication with your online shop customers is an essential component for developing a successful business. Written communication (mostly through emails nowadays) is one of the first things that help you create a great store reputation, it is therefore very important to keep in mind some basic aspects for a successful email communication strategy.

We prepared a series of tips that will definitely help you improve your communication with current and also potential customers.

1. Fast feedback

One of the first issues that need to be taken into consideration when communicating through email is to provide a fast feedback ; you cannot afford not to respond to customer emails on time because on late reply could translate into one lost customer. Golden tip : always have an email address like info@yourshopname.com instead of a general Yahoo/Gmail one, it’s not professional at all and you will not inspire confidence.

2. Always stay “on topic”

Always answer the question/suggestion that has been addressed to you. If you do not have a solution at that very precise moment mention to your customer that you will return with an email as soon as possible and do it that way.

3. When you initiate communication

When you are the one contacting a customer by email summarize as best as possible the email content in the subject in order to stimulate your customer’s interest and read your message; message should be short and straight to the point.

4. Punctuation marks and capitalisation

Remember to use correct punctuation, this will make your message to be clearer and better understood. Do not ever abuse of exclamation points, it is not appropriate. Furthermore, uppercase should be used carefully in the email subject and in the body; even if you might be tempted to use punctuation marks and capitalised letters to attract attention, do not do it while it may be perceived by the client in a negative way.

5. Pay attention to details

Always check twice your emails for grammar error or even worse, client’s name spelling errors. Before you click “send” button you must be sure that your email is as clean as possible.

Apply these tips when communicating with your clients and you will have only positive things to gain.

Whether we are talking about Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter or any other holiday, these are probably the best times for your sales volume, for both online and online stores. While in theory we should definitely not rely only on holidays sales, in practice it happens many times that holidays sales can balance your financial situation with a blink of an eye, which is perfect natural.

With careful planning and smart marketing your online store can have a significant increase in sales during these periods, so here are some ideas to get maximum results with minimum resources invested :

1. Store “decoration”

If all offline stores are decorated for Christmas/Easter etc, you should definitely decorate your online store as well. Add thematic banners on your site and use them to direct your customers to promotional offers for example.

2. Social media “decoration”

Change your background theme on Twitter/Facebook with a seasonal one (this in case you already have an account on social media sites, if not, you should definitely get some social media channels accounts and use them).

3. Sketch your discounts strategy

There are two ways you can do this: targeting for a high volume of sales for products that have proven to be best sellers throughout the year or trying to sell products that face poor sales levels and generate smaller profit margins. Whatever direction you would head for, first of all you should check your inventory and decide whether you have enough products or not. Tip: you could try to achieve both goals in the same time by offering a substantial discount on a poor-seller when a customer buys a best-seller product. Keep in mind that you are going for profit maximization so do not overdo it!

4. Offer complementary seasonal services

A lot of products brought from your online store will be offered as a gift so why not considering including gifts packages and accessories like decorated boxes, wrapping paper, greeting cards and so on, for free?

5. Reward your loyal customers

Holidays are the best time to reward your loyal customers and give offer them special attention and special prices. Create especially for them a series of discount coupons and distribute those to your most loyal customers, thus getting new sales and developing a special relationship with them.

6. Greeting cards with every order

With every delivery of your products send your clients a greeting card to thank them for their purchase. Want to create a more special approach ? Include their names on the cards and also try at least to sign by hand the greeting card. The costs involved are not at such high levels but the effects will be visible on a long-run.

There are of course many other ways to increase your sales during holidays but these steps should be a great start when creating your online store’s strategy.

Create and maintaining a virtual relationship with your customers could be very useful both for your image and reputation and also for your online store’s popularity. Of course, the online store is still a must, however becoming a member of most popular social networking sites can be a great step forward when trying to develop a “friends” network, friends that can drive sales/more customers to your store by sharing with their network information about your store, posting feedbacks, sharing discounts etc.

Here are some tips that will definitely improve the way you use social networking for your ecommerce website :

1. Customise your store as much as possible on social networks

Add pictures and screenshots of your website and create a custom background for your profile. Fill out your contact details with as many details as possible to make it easier for your network connection to contact you, whether through offline methods or through different online methods like email, live support or even private message.

2. Constantly updates

Once you have created these accounts, one of the most important aspects of social networking is to be active and post updates as often as you can. Interact with your “friends” and benefits will come. Have no time for this? Hire someone that will manage your presence on social networking sites and you can take care of your business as before.

3. Socialise!

So you have created your accounts, you have made some friends, now is time to be active. Follow what they are sharing, use the “Like” and “Retweet” buttons, see if they are saying something about your store.

4. Do not turn this only into self-promotion

When traditional holidays like Easter, Christmas etc occur, you can advertise special offers from your online store with no worries. Do not overdo it! It is OK to advertise your products in the rest of the time as well but show them that you are a person as well, not only a online business self-promoting its services/products.

5. Search for related groups

If your online store is specialised on dogs food for example, you should include in your strategy finding user-created groups related to pets, dogs, animal rights, animal lovers and so on. As well, become an active member of these groups and you will definitely gain some loyal customers.

As you see, it is not difficult to create and maintain virtual relationships on social networks, but the whole idea is to start this as soon as possible while every second you waste might become a lost customer as well.

More ecommerce shops owners usually complain that even if they have over 10,000 products listed on their shop they seem more can be done, and the first think that crosses through their minds is investing in SEO. This is a right approach and a good strategy for optimising your content (products pages) for search engines thus giving you the boost that you need. However, one thing is completely forgotten when it comes to increasing sales – the “internal search engine” of an ecommerce site, more exactly, the “search” function.

You can have 100,000 products listed on your website but if a potential buyer cannot reach the product he is looking for when landing on your website, you probably have one client in minus. This article will showcase a perfect example of how to properly use the “search” function to drive more sales, and it comes from one of the most popular online stores from U.S. and not only – Zappos.com.

When first landing on their homepage, you will notice how the search function is centrally located within the area of maximum visibility, right near their logo, already populated with their most searched keywords. Under the search box where usually other shop owners place the advanced search link, Zappos offers different suggestions for refining the search by size, popular searches and so on. It is a certain thing that those values positioned below the search are listed following a large study on user behaviour, no doubt about this.

The refined search was created on a logical route – the customer will buy shoes or clothes based on size and width; the clients come from four major categories – women, men, girls and boys; the clients will be interested most in – brand, style, size, color etc.

The next point of interest in “Popular Searches” – each suggestion is accompanied by pictures and some minimal explanation that can attract attention. Popular Searches area is also build as a result of customers’ behaviour observation. You will see that they mix brands with types of sandals and running clothes, it is all about what people could find of most interest.

Finally, the simple search is for those maybe without a brand affinity, for those coming to search for shoes and than narrowing down to shape, color, size, brand and so on. The major idea is that Zappos is prepared to offer to its clients whatever they are looking for without too much hassle, and this is exactly what every online store should be doing with the “internal search engine”.

First things first, there are many bad things that can occur when someone is trying to buy from your online shop : from delivery problems to warranty, placing orders or paying the products, all these can definitely make your prospect leave the website and never come back. A lost client does not mean only one folk but also could mean tens of prospects that will never order from your website (word of mouth). Make sure your online store is 100% usable and all its functions do not face errors/bugs etc.

Customer satisfaction should definitely one of your main concerns. Do not hesitate to use instant-messaging support, people that are looking for answers want them fast, faster than ever ; email is just not enough anymore. As for email, it would be great if you could offer 24/7 support, it is not so difficult to check email once at 3-4 hours, even in weekends ; you are doing this anyway, right ? If all things work out great from the first buy, you might have just earned a happy and maybe returning customers.

Try to offer different benefits to customers returning to your website ; a returning customer does not 100% mean that he will also buy again a product from your store. Remind him what he searched in the past, send him different promotional emails, offer discount coupons on his second purchase and even create and maintain a relationship with him through Facebook/Twitter. Loyalty bonuses also work great, create a bonus strategy that increases gradually in value with any purchase he will do on your website ; everyone love discounts !

This is related yet again to customer service but we put an emphasis on this while it is the most important thing when it comes to satisfy your customers. If you need to hire people responding to emails/phone be sure they know what they are doing, do some training before and always tell them to be polite and respectful with the customers. Any online store team should know that returning customers worth more than a new customers so this should definitely become a priority while it can bring new customers as well and it can increase sales/profit, and in the end, this is what we are all going for, right ?