Ideas for E-Commerce Product Sales Sites
Customer Expectations
- If you have all of the inventory physically in-stock, designate it as such. Backed up by a garuntee that the item(s) will be in the hands of the shipping carrier within one business day or less, and your visitors a lot about how you run your business. You don’t stock less popular or potentially lower quality product, and only sell what you have. This assures the customer that they will receive their order quickly with no processing delays. To be more specific, if they order early enough one day, they literally could have it the next. I see many online shops take weeks to deliver, but generally they are upfront about, and thus manage expectations.
- Some businesses can extend their reach where delivery times are longer by managing expectations at a finer level. NewEgg’s new feature that allows you to be notified when an item is back in-stock could take conversions to a new level for several reasons: another excuse for customer contact; less thinking involved to get back to the shopping cart; and it’s completely automated which means you can acheive 100% exposure.
- Using PayPal for addressing an international market: chances are that getting your credit card processing system setup for accepting Visa or MasterCard world-wide is fraught with problems: higher rates and potentially more fraud. Adding PayPal to your site bypasses the fraud through international banks (which can take 60 days to find out about). It can cost more that your regular processor, but the additional revenue and growth make this a good bet. You also offer another way domestic customers can pay as well.
Get product into other sites and indexes
- The ultimate use of web logs and metrics: growth.
