Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Avoiding chargebacks and improving business
When a consumer asks his or her credit card company for a refund, a merchant can suffer a chargeback. That is, the credit card company will reach into a merchant's bank account and take the total amount of the transaction that's being charged back. Then, any one of three or more different types of organizations—issuing banks, merchant banks, and payment gateways—could charge the merchant a fee for its trouble. Throughout this process, no one bothers to inform or ask the merchant.
Read more here: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/893-Ecommerce-Know-How-Avoiding-Chargebacks-and-Improving-Business
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Thursday, November 27, 2008
Protect your online business
http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/882-Legal-Terms-and-Conditions-Protect-Your-Online-Business
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Monday, November 17, 2008
Raise your conversion rates
- Make it easy to find things
- Show all prices up front - including shipping
- Secure your site
- Have an easy to use checkout
- Provide incentives
- Present your products professionally and enticingly
- Allow community input
- Let users research the product
- Make top sellers and popular products even more accessible
- Give good and prompt service
- Comprehensive info Refund policies, guarantees and general customer assurance
- Introduce loyalty programs or free vouchers for good customers
- Keep your site fresh - work the seasons (Christmas, Easter, Back to school, special events etc) into site promotions
Getting potential customers to your site is only half of it. Once they're there - you need to convert! You've heard it said that the easiest business you'll find is from returning customers - so give them a reason to come back.
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Monday, August 25, 2008
Get customers to interact
How do we apply this to an online shopping site? Amazon has always been the leader - with ratings and relevant customer reviews, but you must not forget - each new interaction feature brings with it the overhead of impartial moderation. It can't be a free for all - because negativity could reflect badly on your site or competitors could take advantage, but it also can't be a police state where nothing but the most glowing reports get published (unless you want to come off looking like the great firewall of China). A set of rules accompanying user interaction like this is often a good idea - it's one of the best moderated forums I've used in a long time.
A great idea I saw today - allow users to post pictures or videos of them using products bought off your site. It gives that personal touch to visitors of the site, and triggers emotions in potential buyers to think - I could do that too, only better!
Many aspects of social networking not only can be applied to a shopping experience - but they should be mandatory requirements of a modern shopping system.
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Saturday, July 12, 2008
Get a web worker
In your store - of course you make sure all the products are on display appropriately, that your staff are there to help with queries in a friendly and personal manner, that the music sets the mood of the store, that the floor gets vacuumed, and that products are placed strategically through the store to catch that impulse purchase.
So why is it so hard to apply these principles in the online version of your store? The answer - it's not hard, it's just a slight change of mindset.
Get a dedicated web worker - they're no different than the checkout chick who also makes sure the shelves are packed right, except they're taking care of the online specials, the content, the emailed queries and a variation of order fulfilment. The skill set required is minimum - you're not hiring programmers here, you just need someone who can use a website with an admin system.
Your online store may be a small percentage of your bricks store - but if it's got customers and pulling in dollars it deserves ongoing attention.
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Sunday, July 6, 2008
Ship with gifts – online shopping with personality
- A hand written note in big black texta saying thanks
- A lanyard
I didn’t really care about the lanyard, but the note was a different story. On closer inspection of the note with a magnifying glass revealed of course it was a printout, but it was done so well, in a friendly and easy going manner that it compelled me to take a closer look. The details were immaculate - no standard computer fonts or fudging, not even standard A4 paper. It was even slightly scrunched up then unfurled and folded in half - just giving that human touch. It just shows that impersonal nature of online shopping can be made personal if done right.
It didn’t cost them any money – just a simple process to say “make sure this gets packed for first time customers”.
I’m sure I’ll buy from that shopping site again because it felt so good to get that first order. This time round I’ll try to make sure my hard earned cash goes to something I’ll actually use!
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Tuesday, July 1, 2008
PCI Compliance
Why is PCI compliance so important? Because it's secure.
Many shop keepers still have the opinion that they have a right to store credit card data. The bottom line is though - THERE IS NO NEED.
The main excuse is "how do I know how much to charge for shipping?", but I say - put a pricing system in for shipping so you can automate! Wouldn't you rather set it and leave it, rather than stress over the price of postage? Sure every now and then you might need to take a small loss on postage, but set it so that 95% of the time you always come off better for it. The time you save putting a proper system in will more than pay for a few discrepancies.
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Sunday, June 29, 2008
Essentials of every shopping cart
- Category list. On every page.
- Search. On every page. With relevant results.
- Cart summary. On every page.
- Call to action incentives. Specials and Features and Freebies! oh my!
- Detail pages for products. Customer research - let them do it.
- SEO tailored to detail pages. Page titles should be: product name - category - store name. that way, the product name is the first thing that shows in search engine listings. Product name should always be the only thing in H1 tags. Why? deep linking is fast becoming the way to get listed on search engines - it's not just about the home page.
- High quality photos. Obvious - but so many people get it wrong.
- More photos. Multi product views
- Info Sheets. Exploded parts diagrams. Videos. Research. Research. Research.
- Reviews. Testimonials. Recommendations. Shortcomings.
- Cross sell. Up sell. Bundles.
- Security. This deserves another blog post.
- Privacy.
- Up front terms.
- A real phone number.
- Easy checkout.
- Real time credit card processing. If it's not real time, it's not PCI compliant, which means it's not as secure as it could be.
- Upfront shipping costs.
Inversely, if your site has the following, get rid of them NOW.
- "Click here to shop". The whole point of an online store is for people to shop - they don't want to click to shop, they should already be doing it!
- Pop ups for larger image views of a product. Everyone has blockers these days. Use a modal pop up or mouse over enlargement instead.
- Non optimised thumbnails.
- Search with irrelevant results.
- Slow loading page elements.
There's much more to add here. This is just a start.
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Sunday, March 2, 2008
Drag and drop carts a good idea?
http://www.telerik.com/demos/aspnet/Dock/Examples/ShoppingCart/DefaultCS.aspx
Everyone knows what the "Add to cart" button does - why complicate it?
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Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Introduction
I'm your host - Bill Thomas. I've been building web sites for a living - and have been in the web development game for over 10 years. I've learnt a thing or two about what works, what doesn't and what's just plain wrong. My interest in online shopping systems comes from many experiences across a wide variety of retail and wholesale systems. From that experience - I've found shop keepers to be a challenging customer type, many of whom cut corners whereever possible. When it comes to security or any other pressing technical issues though, the customer is not always right.
I hope you find it informative, don't hesitate to give me feedback!
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