July 07, 2009
By the ZippyCart Shopping Carts Content Team
1. Design your online store and shopping cart experience with the customer viewpoint in mind:
The customer experience of your online storefront is critical to the success of your business. You want to make sure it is safe, secure, and easy to navigate. Just because you can put a lot of high end technology into your ecommerce store doesn’t mean you should. The ultimate goal should be to give customers the right tools that will enable them to find the product they need and checkout quickly.
2. Experiment with A/B split testing
Google Website Optimizer is a free tool that is easy to use and will help you to have a more successful online store. When it comes to ecommerce one of the best ways to use this is to test out different landing pages for your products. A different layout or combination of text and pictures may convert better and result in more sells. There is a Japanese philosophy called Kaizen that focuses on continues improvement. This is the attitude you want to have because the more you test out landing pages the more you will improve your online sales.
3. Sell Products That Can Utilize Upsell Items
Upselling products has been critical to many online businesses succeeding. Amazon is the best example as they continually try and offer you as many accessories or complimentary items as possible. In fact you should always try and have some products to upsell your customers. Doing the work and research upfront will pay off in the long run wth increased sales.
4. Promote Your Business in Related Blogs and Forums
With so many people selling online it is important to stand out and set yourself apart from your competitors. A great way to do this is network with popular Blogs and Forums in your industry which will not only gain you more traffic to your site it will sometimes build your SEO efforts when you leave your online store link. Once you build a loyal following you will get others talking about you and get a ton of free word of mouth advertising.
Nick was born and raised in California, but has been working the dot com scene in Seattle for many years. He co-founded ZippyCart back in 2009, and now works here full-time. Nick wears many hats at ZippyCart, including producing content for our Ecommerce News blog. Nick loves photography and the outdoors, so when not working on ZippyCart you can find him out and about in Seattle.
