With so many ecommerce sites on the Net today, how to choose the best?
You can always look for recommendations, but you actually can also assess the site yourself. Along with the recommendations, this will ultimately help you deal with online businesses most suited to your need and want.
Or, if you plan to start an ecommerce site, what things to consider?
What Builds an Ecommerce site
I’m thinking of the ability for an ecommerce site to close sale as follow:
(website design + content + product quality) x perceived brand value = sales
Website design
Website design, nevertheless, is your part of online business identity. Design yours bad, lose your potential customer.
Visual hooks help site owner to attract prospects and help prospects to asses your online business reputation.
To me, if I visited an ecommerce site that has a superb design, I trust the online business more, because I assume that if an ecommerce company invests resources on the website design, it got to have above average quality.
How to know how much to invest in design? You can always look for free web design quote from the Internet.
Content
By content, I am thinking of things beyond product description – blog posts, articles, product reviews, testimonials, podcasts, video, and any other kind of contents.
Why is it important? Content attracts visitors and prolong visitors’ visit to the ecommerce site, in such a way that during their stay, you can promote or cross-sell products in-content, thus improving closing rates.
Product quality
This is the first thing an ecommerce company has to guarantee. Poor quality equals failure.
Perceived brand value
Perceived brand value is essentially a multiplier – it amplifies the combination of website design, content and product quality.
Marketing campaigns, promotional efforts and affiliate programs build brand awareness, thus enhancing perceived brand value by prospects.
How to look for the right online store or start online store right
You can always start by looking to the ecommerce shopping cart design and function.
Consider addressing the following questions:
- Does the online store offer security measures, such as SSL or Hacker Safe to protect customers’ information, mainly credit card numbers?
- Does the shopping cart requires a lengthy registration just to buy an item?
- Does the site display customer reviews and testimonials?
- Does the site offer terms and conditions that are favourable to the product buyers?
- Does the site has a physical company address or any contact information on-site?
Hopefully, those will help you finding or starting an ecommerce site.
If you are experienced in running an ecommerce site, please share your story by commenting on this blog post :)
Ivan Widjaya
On ecommerce
Image by supervillain.