Web Observatory

o many hosting providers today offer site-building tools and ready to install e-commerce softwares. An added arsenal for you is to heed the following tips when delving in the world of e-commerce.

Preparation

1. Compare Costs. Monthly hosting fees and Annual Domain fees are just the tip of the iceberg. You might also need a Merchant Account if you intend to process credit cards and receive payments online. This would add another monthly fee, or most merchants add a percentage commission or processing fee to purchases or a fixed per-transaction fee. Most merchant accounts also withholds a reserve against charge-backs (disputed or reversed transactions).

2. Do the Paper Work. Once securing a domain name, setup your merchant account. Even if your business has a retail location, you may need a different one to accept card-not-present transactions. Consider a consultation with your accountant and attorney to find out if expanding your sales to new regions will have a tax or legal implications.

The Design

3. Planning. Know your niche. Learn as much as you can about your customers, develop a clear vision of how your site will meet their needs.

Put together some mock-ups even on paper, and decide on your sites needed pages and sections before actually getting too excited designing or preparing how it looks or uploading your catalog. This is not the time for it yet.

Different people use your site differently, some prefer browsing based on manufacturers or brand, some on product categories, and some simply use your sites search feature.

4. Apply best practices in design. Common principles of an effective web site and e-commerce sites design are well documented at these times. A plethora of examples and books including web sites like www.alertbox.com have expert advice for you. Find your competitors site to see what they do well - and not so well.

5. Cover the Basics. As a perennial tip I give to budding designers is the KISS principle, (Keep It Simple Stupid). Don’t make visitors work hard. Make sure your site is easy to use. Remember that other sites are a one-click away.

This is a commonly ignored fact when people hire a professional web designer. Designers should not only make things pleasing to the users eyes, but also tackle the usability issues and user psychology with colors and placement of page elements and navigation.

Make sure your pages are fast-loading, and easily readable, but don’t skimp also on important product information that will help customers make an informed purchase. Use simple principles like thumbnails of products which keeps the page size down. It presents products and options all at once but lets the customer see more details by clicking on the thumbnail of the item if they are interested with it.

6. Include Critical Information. Every site not only e-commerce sites need to provide a contact information, payment options, and a Privacy Policy. If you also have a physical store or business location, be sure to provide addresses, business hours, maps and directions. Don’t forget to include an About Us page describing the company and providing bios of key personnel. You can also add pages for customer testimonials, news, announcements, and order status.

7. An Informal Usability Testing. A quick sanity, usability and accessibility test on your site and its design and organization is a must. Show it to friends, family, or business partners who hasn’t seen it before and is willing to give an honest opinion.

Ask them to figure out how to find interesting products or pages, and let them try to place an order. Repeat the process with a different set of people or hire a focus group and you can quickly do away with your sites short comings and oversights.

8. Check Before Launch. Nothing says unprofessional like broken links, spelling errors, missing graphics and other small but obvious glitches. Make sure you catch them before going live. Recheck after launching to make sure nothing changed or was left out before preview to a Live Site.

The easiest way to do this is to either get a consultant to help and guide you along the way, or hire a competent web designer.

Time for Launch

9. Gain Visibility. You don’t actually really need to hire a Marketing Firm or purchase Search-Engine submission tools. It’s not hard to submit your site manually to the big SE’s (Search Engines) like Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search. You can also get directory listings whether free or paid. Driving traffic to yours site can be the most daunting and time-consuming task. A good tip is to consider cross-listing your products in high-traffic sites and marketplaces like eBay or Amazon.

10. Keep everything Fresh. Take advantage of seasonal opportunities, refresh your content regularly, consider running some promotions and specials so that visitors get a habit of returning to see what’s new. Remove dated materials when sales or special offers end.

11. Build Customer Relations. It’s often much easier and efficient to service repeat customers than acquiring new ones. That’s why getting visitors to sign-up for e-mail notification or get your feeds help in these cases. They can receive offers, promotions and discounts being valued customers. Find ways to go beyond just fulfilling individual transactions.

12. Monitor. Always monitor your site statistics. Check pages often visited, how many bought something on these pages, or how many just leave. Check products that sell well.

These are just some of the ways to get you started. Now use if for better results. Good Luck!