Building a succesful e-commerce site
Selling online can bring great benefits to your business, but requires considerable effort in several key areas including;
- Website Creation
- Populating the website with your products
- Attracting visitors to your online shop
- Converting visitors to customers
The good news is that we can help you with all of them....
Website Creation
Magento is our preferred platform for building e-commerce sites. Magento is used worldwide by over 240,000 merchants, including many blue-chip organisations such as Nike, Olympus and Mothercare.
It provides the flexibility to map onto your exact business needs, and the scalability to grow as your business expands. Out of the box Magento provides much of the core functionality that your business needs to sell online.
With hundreds of third-party extensions available and our capability to develop custom modules you can be confident that the end result will meet and exceed your aspirations.
Populating the website with your products
Dependent on how many products you wish to sell on line, variations and relationships between the products, whether they are configurable, availability of images or video, weights and a host of other factors - populating your website can involve significant time and effort.
We will advise you on the structure of your product setup and help with importing any existing product information.
We can also perform the product population on your behalf.
Attracting visitors to your online shop
There are two principal ways of attracting visitors to your shop.
- Organic search engine results
- Paid advertising
Organic search engine results depend on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO is a very broad topic and has attracted large numbers of companies who offer guaranteed placements on Page 1 of Google. The caveat "Buyer Beware" very much applies here. We would caution against paying for any SEO before the fundamentals of applying page titles and descriptions have been carried out correctly and consistently. Magento makes it relatively simple to apply the SEO basics. We will also index your site with Google and show you how to monitor the traffic to your site via Google Analytics. Analytics will show you how people are engaging with your store, where they are located and a host of other useful information.
Drving visitors to your site through advertising may also be a viable method of generating traffic. We would recommend using Google AdWords to do this.
You can set a daily, weekly or monthly budget to place a sponsored link on Page 1 of Google. You only pay when a visitor clicks through to your site from the sponsored link.
We can setup and show you how to manage your AdWords account, or we can manage it on your behalf.
Converting visitors to customers
Product presentation - your visitors cannot touch, smell or feel your products as they might otherwise do. It is crucial that your product images are high quality and high resolution. If your product comes in different colours , show the different colours using colour swatches.
Landing pages must immediately let the visitor know what you are selling, and why they should be buying from you. This is the place to position your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). You must try to get your customer to stay on the landing page for a sufficient time to read your USP and then click through to look at your product.
Make it easy to buy from you - ensure your checkout process is simple and fast. A one-page checkout is best. Allow guests to checkout.
How Much? How soon? How sure? - this about confidence in your products, and your ability to deliver. Use customer testimonials to back your site up.
E-commerce links
