Long are the days where having a website through which you could sell your products was a competitive advantage. Today, you either have one, or you lose out on the biggest market there has ever been: the Internet.
Whether you handle your own e-commerce store development or you hire someone else to do it for you, it’s important that you have a website that offers something different to your clients that makes it worth for them to buy from you, instead of buying from others. And in the brief world of Internet marketing, you have a couple of seconds to capture a client before you lose him or her.
In fact, e-commerce store development is now more about the commercial and promotional aspect of a website than its technical aspect. With so many advanced shopping cart software programs, anyone can create their own website with the basic features with little training.
E-commerce store development now focuses on two objectives. The first one is getting more visitors to the company’s website. The second one is increasing the percentage of visitors that actually purchase one or more products. This percentage is called the conversion rate and is one of the most important factors in Internet marketing.
If you are going to hire someone to do your e-commerce store development, ask him or her to explain to you the specific actions that his or her plan includes. A common error that many customers make is forgetting how those actions reflect on their target market, so you should ask for it. If you sell comics, it won’t do you much good to have a website that looks traditional and conservative. On the other hand, if you sell wooden furniture, then a flashy website will not appeal to your clients.
Finally, a good e-commerce store development plan should include an analysis of the purchasing process. Many times, developers focus on the image, look, and technical aspects from a website. However, getting into the mind of the customer and analyzing the necessary steps for getting an item helps improving the conversion rate. The number of clicks that are necessary to look for an item should be reduced to a minimum, specially if the target market is young, as teens have much less patience than adults. And the information has to be adequate as well. Too little, and the customer will hesitate to buy, too much and the customer will get bored and go elsewhere.
