July 20, 2008

9 Simple and Effective E-Commerce Sales Booster Ideas

Enabling sales online is easy. Very easy. You can use PayPal or any one of hundreds of ecommerce solutions from Yahoo, Amazon.com, eBay or your web host. These solutions are relatively easy (did I say this three times?) to implement and if you can't do it yourself you can hire someone to put an ecommerce solution together for you. Of course depending on the size of your inventory, traffic expected, features needed and other variables - your budget will vary.

The hard part of selling online, however, is not JUST selling the product but boosting sales, getting customers to come back and buy again. Remember, if customers don't find what they want on your web site, the product they want is only a click away.

In an awesome online presentation, Jason Billingsley, VP of innovation, at ecommerce software maker Elastic Pathgives 9 ecommerce innovations.

The 9 innovations are

Video
Customer Service
Real World guided selling
Multi-store retailing
User inter-face design
Navigation
Merchandising
Social Shopping
Loyalty

If you're a smaller ecommerce company, competing against larger vendors (isn't that the case with most small businesses? There's always someone bigger than you), you don't have to invest a lot of money to boost and make better your ecommerce web site. There are some simple things you can do to boost your online sales. Elastic's presentation gives you some insight into what they are.

Don't be afraid to break the "standard" model. Don't just do things because you think you have to do things. Just because everyone's "doing it" doesn't mean you have to do it. Feel free to experiment and break the mold and do what's best for your customers. On the other hand, there's no need to reinvent the wheel and it IS ok to follow ecommerce leaders who spend millions of dollars testing what works best. It's just that you don't have to be STUCK doing things one way.

There are many things that you can do that are very low cost. It just takes a bit of creativity and thinking outside of the box. You might think that just because Amazon.com spends millions on their web site, means you'll have to spend a comparable amount on your web site. Not so. Just being smart and being CREATIVE can be worth a huge percentage of a boost of your sales.

Processes can also count toward innovation. You don't have to change a physical product or even your web site. But just changing your business processes count. Think about Zappos (the famous show company). They have no scripts for their customer service agents. This is simply management wondering what is best for their customers.

View the full presentation here. If you sell online - it's a must.

tags: ecommerce , sales | 0 comments