E-Commerce Tips for Small Businesses – Top 5

Make it easy to check-out
Having a complicated checkout process is the downfall of many e-commerce sites. People generally don’t like waiting to pay online just as they don’t like standing in long queues at supermarket tills.
Don’t use your checkout process as a method of gathering as much customer data as you can, give people an option to pay and leave without having to register their details.
Try to sell other items
When you’ve got a customer ready to pay for their items, it’s easier to sell to them than a completely cold prospect. With this in mind, it’s a good idea to try and up-sell or cross-sell other items that are related to what they’re already buying.
For example, if you’re an online florist you may want to offer balloons, Champagne and chocolates at the checkout stage to maximise your online profits.
Utilise email marketing
People who have bought from your online shop previously should never be ignored or forgotten about.
Don’t focus all your efforts on finding new customers for your e-commerce site. Your previous clients already know your products and level of service so are usually much easier to sell to.
Repeat business is of critical important to the survival of any shop, whether online or offline. Make sure you send out regular email newsletters with exclusive offers to encourage people to buy from you again.
Use your product descriptions to sell
Many e-commerce sites sell other people’s products. It’s quicker and easier to just use the standard descriptions for your products than writing your own but it has disadvantages when it comes to sales and SEO.
For example, let’s say a manufacturer’s description of a mobile phone said “VPX-10 Model, Available in Black, Lightweight”. That doesn’t really convey any benefits to the consumer and if lots of other sites have the same description, it will have no impact on SEO either.
Well written and unique product descriptions whether they’re for yours or someone else’s products will make your site stand out, get more sales and boost your search engine results.
Optimise, optimise, optimise
Optimising your e-commerce site shouldn’t stop at your product descriptions. If you’re able to write keyword rich URLs, meta titles, meta descriptions and headings for each product you’re much more likely to get them found online.
For example, if you’re an online jewellers, all your products should have a unique page (using the attributed listed above) selling exactly what they are rather than just all being labelled something general such as “jewellery”.…