Although an ecommerce website owner technically works for his or herself, you may often feel that you work for your customers. Like a boss, they make demands that you must comply with and have a huge effect on your day-to-day life as well as the success of your business. However, your customers should also be working for you—helping you build your brand and your ecommerce business. Like any job, this requires training in order to perform effectively.  Here are a few tips for turning your customers into the most effective sales force you have ever experienced: Read the rest

When you think about your interactions with visitors to your ecommerce website, you usually think in terms of profit. However, educating your customers can be just as important. Search engines are more and more content-oriented, and so are customers. You can make search engine bots and website visitors both happy by offering an education in addition to a line of products and services. Here are a few tips for adding an educational component to your ecommerce website: Read the rest

There are so many issues in the ecommerce website world that you might be tempted to ignore those that don’t seem to apply to you. Unfortunately, order fraud is not an issue that you can sweep under the carpet. More and more people are shopping online, and some are doing this without the best of intentions. You need to understand how order fraud can happen as well as how you can protect your ecommerce website and your customers.  Read the rest

If you are not using Google Products to drive sales to your ecommerce website, you are missing out on an opportunity. This program, formerly known as Froogle, allows you to list products and services that will then come up when a user searches Google Products for them. Because more and more people are using Google Products to look for specific items, it is a great way to drive potential and very relevant customers to your website. It was a very straightforward program… that is, until recently. Read the rest

It happens to many ecommerce website owners: you begin a pay per click campaign and see almost immediate results. Your profits and sales increase. A few months (or even years) later, your numbers decline just as quickly and dramatically.  Read the rest

The facts are clear: keeping customers is easier and cheaper than finding new ones. However, this is easier said than done. Many ecommerce website owners find that many customers will buy a product and then simply forget about them. There are several ways to prevent this, and today we will talk about one that is the easiest and most effective: following up on orders with an email. Here are a few things that should be included in your follow up emails. Read the rest

There are certain ecommerce website practices and policies that ruin the customer experience. They send many visitors running away at full speed, and make the online shopping process as unpleasant as possible for the rest. These are things that you should avoid like the plague if you are trying to build a business. Read the rest

Shipping is not something you arrange and then forget. Every single customer that buys from your ecommerce website will be dealing with shipping, and you can bet that they care about it. In many cases, shipping policies are both a deal breaker and a deal maker. In fact, shipping provider costs and times are one of the biggest sources of customer complaints and indeed the single greatest issue in the online consumer’s mind. You cannot be too vigilant in this area. Here are a few things you can do to make shipping a non-issue in your ecommerce website. Read the rest

There are so many saying and clichés about home: it is where the heart is and so much more. Your homepage may not be where you live, but it is the place where your ecommerce website lives. All other pages are simply extensions of this page—the rooms that are attached to it. It is important that your homepage be as good as it can possibly be, because it is not just your visitors’ first impression; it is the home and heart of your website. Read the rest