Whether you’re an established brick-and-mortar shop looking to build an online presence or a new business which wants to sell exclusively online, it can be difficult to compete with big established brands. There’s a level of trust and familiarity that can attract and convert customers on a different scale to small businesses.
But that’s not to say a small seller can’t make a big impact on the web, so long as the experience the customer gets is a good one. Here are five tips to making that experience as positive as possible.
1. Find an eCommerce system that works.
What kind of eCommerce system you choose will depend on a number of factors – how much control you want to have over the way your shop looks, how much infrastructure you’re willing to set up, and what your budget is. For sole traders and small businesses just starting out it can make sense to join an online marketplace like TradeMe or Etsy. The next step up is to build a site around an eCommerce platform like Shopify or WooCommerce, which allows you to customise the look of your site while taking care of the payment structure. And the last option is to build the back-end infrastructure for your site to take credit card payments and manage it yourself.
Whatever option you choose, make sure that the buying process works properly. There’s nothing worse than a customer with a cart full of purchases running into a problem at the checkout – they’ll likely dump the cart and head somewhere else.
2. Make sure your pictures and descriptions are good.
It can be tempting to skimp on your your descriptions – writing them can often be tedious and time consuming, particularly if your products have a lot of information with small changes. You can’t get around it though, and the more information you give, the better – your customers will know what they’re getting and you’ll face fewer complaints.
Particularly don’t phone it in on your photos, literally – this is one place where a phone camera is not up to the job. Make your visuals good – proper lighting and multiple angles, to not only show off your product but also make your site look more cohesive and appealing.
3. Don’t forget about security.
If you want people to trust you with their credit card details, you’ll need to prove you can look after them. The key to this is a secure socket layer (SSL) certificate. This encrypts the pats of your website which deals with sensitive information, rendering it useless to hackers. And it’s easy for consumers to see which pages are encrypted – there will be a padlock sign to the left of the URL and the URL will start with https:// rather than http://. And there’s another perk along with building trust – Google will give a little boost to your SEO ranking too.
4. Make the delivery experience a good one.
Offer multiple options for delivery at various levels of cost, and even look at offering free delivery – whether within a certain geographical area, or if the buyer spends a certain amount on your site.
Make sure you always provide estimated delivery dates, and if you can provide a way for buyers to track the location of their purchases from you to them, even better.
And don’t neglect your packaging – your packaging is another opportunity to show off your brand. At the very least, make sure your packaging is adequate for the product you are shipping – protect fragile goods and endeavour to keep the rain out.
5. Make sure to follow up.
Your interaction with your buyer doesn’t end when they get their purchases. Turn first-time customers into repeat customers by following up on the purchase with an email, asking for their feedback on the buying experience and offering an incentive if they leave a review. A good review can influence other buyers more than anything else. Whether you collect reviews on your social media pages or through a third-party review aggregator, having them provides ‘social proof’ that you are worth dealing with. And if you use Google Ads to market your site, starred reviews can appear alongside your ads, or in Google Shopping results, automatically.