Selling Online: 8 Rules To Live By

With the great Internet boom there has been a complete revolution in the way businesses are selling their goods to customers. Creating a successful ecommerce site is the new mantra for every entrepreneur who wants to sell for a profit. The benefits of selling online are enormous but so are the pitfalls. Launching and managing successful ecommerce sites is not child's play and requires hard work and dedication. Often people are misled into thinking that anyone can open up an ecommerce website and start selling online. While this may be true, the fact remains that to set up an online shop and make it profitable requires time, effort and money. Here are 8 rules to live by if you want your online shop to be a success story and not a dotcom failure. Selling Online Rule 1: Choose The Right Product To Sell If you try selling ice cream to an Eskimo chances are the best efforts will be in vain. The first rule when selling online is to choose the product carefully. Products or goods that are too large to be shipped, fragile or easily damaged, perishables, inflammable or in general restrictive in any way cause nightmares for their vendors. The best products to sell online are those that can be packaged and shipped easily and without damage. In addition goods that can be bought without the need to touch or taste them generally sell well online. Customers hesitate to buy perishables without being able to hold them and check for quality. The same is not true for things like music CDs or books. So if you are looking to set up a successful ecommerce web site then choose your products carefully. Selling Online Rule 2: Web design and Usability The ease with which a customer can navigate your online shop and perform tasks that he or she intends to refers to the usability of your website. Selling online requires you to draw out customers who are novice web users. The hesitation to buy online often stems from a lack of knowledge about how to use websites. If your ecommerce website is difficult to use you can bet that customers will be clicking away to competitor sites. So pay great attention to the design and usability of your online shop. Selling Online Rule 3: Secure credit cards A secure server certificate from an authorized organization like Verisign is the basic requirement to set up an online shop. Most customers use their credit cards for online shopping. In fact 95% of all ecommerce transactions are carried out using credit cards. Ensuring the security of a customer's credit card information and protecting it from fraud is an absolute must for all successful ecommerce sites. Selling Online Rule 4: Automate Your Online Shop Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of thinking that they need to automate their site only when it becomes big and successful. However, the best thing to do is that you should automate your entire ecommerce website before launch. It is perfectly acceptable to automate the ecommerce website in phases but you must have a detailed plan about how you intend to do it. Successful ecommerce sites automate as many tasks as they can to allow them to streamline the order processing system. Selling Online Rule 5: Provide Good Customer Support The customer is definitely king and if you want to build a successful ecommerce website then 24/7 customer support is a must. One of the greatest advantages of an online shop is that it never shuts. To build customer loyalty and trust it is imperative to answer customer queries immediately. An email must be replied to within 24 hours at most. Selling Online Rule 6: Have A Great Marketing Campaign Nobody is going to visit your ecommerce website if they don't know about it. There are lots of ways to promote your online shop. Free marketing strategies includes marketing to search engines, exchanging links with other ecommerce websites, posting to various mailing lists and news groups and banner exchanges. Paid for marketing strategies include Google adsense, press releases, advertisements on other websites and pay per click campaigns. Selling Online Rule 7: Encourage Repeat Customers It is far cheaper to retain an old customer than to acquire a new one. Keeping the store regularly updates, publishing a newsletter or ezine, having a rewards program and an affiliate program are some of the best ways to encourage repeat customers. Another great way of course is to offer repeat buyers a discount on future purchases. Selling Online Rule 8: Innovate and Update The most vital thing to do to ensure the success of your ecommerce website is to continuously evaluate what your customers want. So you need to gather information and data about customer behavior, analyze the data, make changes and implement them and observe customer responses to the changes. The continuous innovation will reflect the fact that you care about your customers. Thus, setting up an ecommerce website and selling online requires research, planning and execution.