Guest Post by Thomas Gunner
Creating your site and launching your eCommerce store might be the easiest part of becoming a successful online entrepreneur. The hardest part is actually generating sales. Online entrepreneurs find themselves faced with a number of challenges, including promoting their online store, developing their brand, reaching out to their audience and providing quality customer service. Improve your current business plan and get some results with your online store with the following tips.
Focus On Your Reputation
Shoppers understand that they need to be careful when it comes to sharing their personal information and payment details. You need to offer a safe experience for shoppers. You should partner with a trustworthy card processor and safe sales server besides offering third-party verification.
Make sure people can easily get in touch with you and do more research on your business if they want to. Share your content information and write a detailed ‘about us’ page so that people can learn more about who you are and what you do. Online shoppers will choose another site if they don’t feel they can trust you.
Get Some Help From Your Existing Customers
Give people a good reason to come back to your site to make more purchases in the future. You can create a rewards system or offer gift cards. Gift registries are another good strategy.
Look for incentives you can offer to get people to buy gift cards or to start gift registries on your site, such as small discounts or free exclusive products. Offering incentives is a good way to generate more sales and to get people to shop on your site again in the future.
Join a few social media networks. Use your Facebook and Twitter pages to share coupon codes and other valuable content for shoppers. Let people know they can find this type of content by connecting with your brand on social media and encourage them to share your posts with their own contacts.
Take A Look At Your Numbers
Go over your sales numbers and consider making a few changes to your inventory. You probably have some items that are not performing well while you can barely keep some other products stocked because of the high demand. Focus on the items that sell and consider removing a few products from your inventory.
Competitive niches are not necessarily a good strategy. Most entrepreneurs in your industry are covering the same niches because there is a strong demand and because these niches are fairly obvious. You can boost your sales by offering products that no one else has, even if you do not have the best prices. Focus on finding new niches that other entrepreneurs have overlooked and make sure you have plenty of products that cannot be easily found in regular stores.
Make Repeat Sales
People will order again from your online store if they had a great experience. You need to offer quality products as well as excellent customer service so that people will order again.
You need to quickly respond to emails and should also give people the possibility to chat or to call you. Make sure people can easily return products and don’t hesitate to issue refunds to avoid getting bad reviews.
Show Your Customers You Care
People will be more likely to shop on your online store if they feel that you appreciate their business. Do your best to offer an excellent experience, from selling high quality products to offering excellent customer service. Make sure there are no bugs on your site and that payments can be processed in a safe manner.
Customers will remember how they felt when they purchased a product on your site and when they received the item. If these feelings are positive ones, they will be more likely to visit your site again, buy more products and to recommend your business to the people they know.
Thomas Gunner is a successful entrepreneur and business owner. He operates ReviewFilter.com, which is a cloud based tool for Hotel And Restaurant operators that engages with recent customers via email or SMS and invites them to give feedback on their recent experience of your business.