6 Tips to Improve Your Online Store

If you're running an online store, and sales just aren't improving here are some tips that will help you make your online store better.

#1: Polish your web design

Your web design is important in making your visitors feel good about your business and your products, so that they can easily convince themselves to buy from you. You need to convey a sense of professionalism and credibility with your web design. So no flashy animations, funny pictures or ALL CAPITALIZATION. If you use these gimmicks, people will not take you seriously, and will not buy from your store.

#2: Use online marketing

If you only have your online store, you probably won't get many visitors. You have to do online marketing to attract potential customers. One option is to put ads on Google for the keywords under which you want people to find you when they search. A second option is to place ads on websites that have many visitors in your target group of customers, for instance, discussion forums or product review sites.

#3: Learn from the best

Look at some professional ecommerce companies in your field, or professional ecommerce companies in general. What can you learn from them? Try to apply some of their methods to your business and to your online store. One thing that almost all top ecommerce companies excel in is their customer service:

#4: Provide great customer service

This can be an area in which you can separate your business from other ecommerce businesses. The reason is that many online stores have bad customer service. So your online store can stand out if you make it your goal to provide quick and helpful customer service that is generally considerate and respectful to your customers.

#5: Offer more payment options

This is another area in which many online stores fail. They only offer one or two payment options and then wonder why no one buys from their store. Learn from that and offer several payment options for your customers, so that everyone who wants to buy from you will actually be able to buy.

#6: Get consulting

If none of the above helps, or if you really want to invest in your online store, consider hiring an  ecommerce consulting company. These usually have a lot of experience in ecommerce and can help you identify issues with your business very quickly. You can then apply their feedback and often see improved results in just a few weeks that easily make up for the initial investment for consulting services. With or without consulting, you should see considerable improvements in your sales if you follow all these tips. Good luck!

Common Mistakes Businesses Make in e-commerce

A lot of money can be made by selling goods on the Internet so many companies set up an online store thinking they can get a share of the pie. But many find out that they cannot; their online presence simply does not work. There are many reasons for this, but some of them are relatively easy to fix. They involve better storage provisions, more effective ecommerce marketing, and a more user-friendly web design.

The first mistake businesses make in e-commerce is that they do not coordinate their storage and their online store. This is deadly. If you have more items sold than you actually have available in your storage room, you will not be able to deliver on time; in the worst case, you will have to buy the necessary items from another supplier and due to the urgency you will have to pay a premium. If, on the other hand, you have fewer items sold in your online store than you have in your storage room, you waste money by paying too much unnecessary storage costs. So your goal has to be to keep enough items physically stored, but not too many.

The second mistake businesses make in e-commerce is that they ignore ecommerce marketing. Many companies, especially smaller ones, think setting up their website and their online store is enough, and customers will come rolling in. This could not be further from the truth. There is so much competition for the attention of buyers online that it is very unlikely that your online store will be noticed just by being there. So you need to promote it, for instance, by buying ads for specific Google searches, or by placing direct ads on other websites.

The third mistake businesses make in e-commerce is with their web design, in particular the design of their online store. Businesses that do not succeed online often do not have a professional ecommerce design; instead, they plaster something together quickly and hope for the best. But in order to look professional to potential customers, you absolutely need to have a professional ecommerce design. This usually involves offering several payment options, providing secure transactions, presenting your items in a visually appealing way, and many other aspects.

If you have covered these design aspects, and if you take your storage and ecommerce marketing into account, chances are that your online store will be much more successful.

How to Make Your Online Store More Professional

Today, creating an online store for your business is not as hard as it used to be. So a lot of businesses include an online store on their website. The problem is that most of these are of poor quality and don't attract many customers. In fact, often it is the online store which makes the whole business look cheap and unprofessional. To change that, you need to really know your competitors and focus on being better than they are in key areas.

First of all, you have to do research on your competitors. What are they doing, how does their website look, how are their products presented in their online store, which payment options do they offer, and what are their online marketing strategies? If you don't know the answer to these questions, you might not appeal to your market in the way your competitors do. When you research your competitors, it is essential to look for the right competitors. If you have a small niche shop that sells a very specific type of high-quality goods, then you are probably not competing with the top ecommerce companies, such as eBay. You rather need to focus on other businesses in your particular niche.

You then need to apply what you have learned from your competitors. Try to offer similar or even more payment options for your customers. The reason is that it is a big problem for your business if a customer wants to buy something, but can't do so because you only accept a specific type of credit card, for example. Furthermore, if your online marketing doesn't reach your potential customers, they won't even get so far as seeing your products. In this area, you might learn a lesson or two from the top ecommerce companies and how they attract customers.

Another aspect that makes a professional ecommerce firm is its customer service. Far too many web businesses have a terrible customer service that has long response times, is impolite and generally not very helpful to customers. This is your chance to turn your small web business into a professional ecommerce company. Aim to provide quick and useful feedback to your customers' inquiries, and do it in a nice and polite way.

If you put your attention to these areas – knowing your competition, and being better than them especially in your online marketing and in your customer service – you will make a great leap towards being a professional ecommerce company.

Why You Should Hire a Consulting Company for Your Online Shop

If your business has an online shop, but you do not sell many items, perhaps hiring an ecommerce consulting company may be advisable to you. The market of ecommerce solutions has become very competitive, so your business needs expert advice on how to improve sales and leverage online marketing activities. A truly professional consulting company will provide that.

A good ecommerce consulting company will first of all take a look at your current online presence. This will include a detailed analysis of your landing page, your website in general, and your online shop in particular. The firm will research your keywords, take a look at how your products are described and presented, and will refocus your online marketing so that it actually drives visitors and customers to your online shop.

The major advantage of an ecommerce consulting company is that you get real advice which you can immediately act on. It is not necessary for you to learn all the information yourself and to invest in costly and lengthy trial and error. Ideally, a consultant will give you the specific advice that you need in order to improve your sales in a short period of time. Consulting companies are especially helpful if you are dealing with highly technical matter of ecommerce solutions, including security measures and legal aspects.

It is recommended to hire an ecommerce consulting company in the beginning of a project, so that mistakes can be identified early on, and not much later when the online shop has already been running for a while. Even a single session with a consultant can often prevent the most common mistakes from happening to your ecommerce project. Afterwards, your business is ready to implement all the advice and get its online shop running. If the sales numbers then drop at some point in the future, or are not as good as you had planned, another session with a consultant can be helpful to find problem areas and to eliminate them.

To sum up, hiring an ecommerce consulting company can speed up the implementation of your project and help you prevent common mistakes businesses make in their ecommerce activities. Due to their expertise and experience, consultants will know exactly what to look for in your existing online shop, and provide you with strategies to fix these issues. The one aim of all this is to increase the sales of your business, so that you can make a higher profit.

What You Need to Know when You Start Your First Web Business

The Internet offers almost unlimited opportunities to make money. It is so easy nowadays to create your own website that you don't even need to know web design to pull it off. You can just use a custom template or even sign up on a blogging platform. It is also easy to use online marketing to promote your business, much easier than going the old-fashioned way of print advertising. Today, you can advertise on Google with just a few clicks. So if you want to get serious about starting you own online business, here are three tips for starters:

First of all, start low and set yourself small goals. Don't go for perfect in the beginning. Set up a basic website (no need for fancy web design), and create a simple email address for your business and show it on your site. If you sell any services, you might need a way to receive online payments. But don't go looking around for some advanced ecommerce solutions just yet. There's more important things than ecommerce solutions for the moment. Just focus on getting your basic setup ready.

Then put your attention to your product. If you sell goods, write up interesting product descriptions that speak to your readers (and potential buyers). If you can't write well, perhaps hire a freelancer. Those can be quite cheap on the Internet. If you sell content or creative work, on the other hand, you might want to put up some samples of your work. Write some blog posts if you want to sell e-books or how-to programs. Upload some sample tracks if you are a musician and want to sell your music. Remember: Focus on the quality of your product first; the marketing, or in this case online marketing, comes later.

Lastly, if you've done all that, you need the two most important ingredients for being successful online, or successful at anything basically: patience and hard work. It sounds boring and trite, but it's true. If you don't persist in tough times (and those will come), you're not going to get far with your online business. And if you think you can make a quick buck online, you're wrong, too. It takes work, work, work. And work. But if you are willing to put that work in and be patient, then you can succeed and make decent money online, by being your own man or woman!