6 Steps to Boost Your Ecommerce Business

In today’s economy, you want to give your ecommerce site all the advantages possible to rake in sales. You’ve designed a great site, have a mix of quality products, and offer reasonable shipping. What more can you do? Plenty. By using these suggestions, you can turn your Web site into a selling machine.

1. Bump up your rank.
   Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for getting search engines–and customers–to find you. By writing your copy with specific words and phrases that people naturally search (“best bakery in East Hampton” instead of “cupcakes,” for example), cultivating links from other reputable sites, and updating your content regularly, you can increase where your site appears in search results. The closer to the top, the more traffic you will draw.
2. Make navigation easy.
   Your site should be simple to use. That means clean, easy-to-read fonts and uncluttered design. Your products should be featured in clear photographs with even clearer descriptions. Most of all, your shopping cart and checkout function need to be seamless. Glitches in checkout can lose customers quickly. A great tool for managing payment is PayPal.com, which allows you to accept credit cards–an essential for any ecommerce business–and offers an easy check-out interface.
3. Promote to your list.
   Every ecommerce business needs to focus on building a database of email addresses of customers and prospects. Don’t just assume that these people are checking your site periodically for the latest offerings. Out of sight is out of mind, so be sure to stay in touch with an opt-in email campaign. (Opt-in means that you asked them if you could add them to the list and they agreed.) There are some excellent and inexpensive email blast programs out there, including ConstantContact, JangoMail and MyEmma that allow you to create great-looking HTML email with color and photographs.
4. Track customer sales.
   As you build your back-end database for the site, look into adjustments that will allow you to track customers’ buying habits and volume. This is an important tool for ecommerce merchants. By tracking customer sales, you can create specialized email promotions to your list. For example, you could send a coupon to everyone who has bought a specific brand or product over the past six months. In addition, tracking buying habits can give you the opportunity to make special offers at checkout. You might have your site programmed to make a special price promotion on an item that customer has bought in the past. When done right before checkout, that instantaneous offer can have the same impact as counter displays do in a retail setting, inspiring last-minute impulse purchases.
5. Use shopping comparison sites.
   If you think that being on sites like, BizRate.com, PriceGrabber.com, Shopping.com and the like means that you have to cut your prices to the bone, think again. Yes, customers who shop on these sites are price-sensitive. However, they also look for the ranking of the merchant. That includes aspects like shipping, reliability, quality and presentation. Plus, the sheer numbers of people who visit these sites makes them an important form of promotion. So, be yourself in terms of prices and promotions, but be there.
6. Take advantage of the “bounce.”
   Once you’ve fulfilled a customer’s order, you have an important opportunity to sell them again. Make sure that your product is packed well and makes a nice presentation when the customer opens the package. You might even include a small gift or sample as a surprise. Then, make an offer–a coupon with an expiration date, a special gift if they make an additional purchase within a certain period of time, or the like–to that customer to get him or her to order again soon.

When you make your online business visible and easy to find while offering excellent products, customer service and presentation, customers will find you through search and word-of-mouth. And they will keep coming back because you delivered.