SETTING UP A SUCCESSFUL COMMERCE SITE

Electronic Commerce seems to be everywhere these days. It's nearly impossible to open a newspaper or magazine without coming across an article about how Electronic Commerce is going to change all our lives. Businesses of all sizes are bombarded with adverts that seem to imply that any company not investing in E-commerce will be left behind. 

The problem for many small businesses is that while they appreciate the potential of doing business on the Net, it is difficult to determine the best way to start off. That’s where you’ll come in. You’ll need to educate clients on their Internet Commerce options. Many people think that an Internet commerce site always requires back-end programming, and will therefore be very expensive. In fact, you’ll after this section of your web design course, you'll be able to handle the creation, start to finish, of most small Internet commerce sites.

Why Clients Need an Internet Commerce Site

There are a lot of reasons to open a web site to transact business on the Internet. You can use your site to reduce your marketing costs to geographically dispersed locations. You can use it to open new sales channels or to enhance customer service. You can also use it to extend your current business into an entirely different product line or to alter the first impression your company makes to its target market.

Reduce Sales and Marketing Costs
The Web makes information about a business available to anyone with access to a computer and an Internet service provider. According to the latest statistics, that's 158.5 million people. Business owners can reduce printing and mailing costs — as well as travel costs — by pointing prospective customers toward a web site for preliminary product and service information.

In these early days of the Web, having a site can even extend the value of marketing dollars already spent. For example, the Seattle Times will add a hyperlink to your site at no extra charge when it posts the electronic version of your advertisement in its online classifieds. Every person who "clicks through" that link has volunteered to receive more information about your business: The purpose of a web site is to provide that information and, if possible, make the sale.

Open New Sales Channels
A web site allows a business with local or regional sales channels to explore new ways to sell its products. There are many success stories: a small manufacturer that now sells its products retail; the local shop that now competes with established mail order houses; the retailer that now represents a disparate and unique line of international products.

In StrikingItRich.com, Jaclyn Easton's book of 23 ecommerce case studies, the International Golf Outlet discovered that Japanese businessmen would pay seemingly cost-prohibitive shipping rates to get new golf equipment as soon as it became available in the U.S. market. This sales channel would have never been available to this single retail store business had it not been for the Web.

Enhance Customer Service
Even if your site doesn't offer a direct way to purchase your products or service, it can be a useful, cost-effective tool for customer service. Most sites provide FAQs — answers to Frequently Asked Questions — which can reduce the expense of toll-free lines. In addition, most sites also provide the ability to email customer support personnel. This give-and-take between you and your customers will likely be your most cost-effective customer loyalty campaign.

You can integrate your customer service campaign with your marketing and resale campaigns as well. By engaging in correspondence with your customers, you can send them notification of sales, new product releases, or reorder forms.

Offer New Products
The Internet has proved to be a fertile ground for experimentation. Many companies have found the Web to be a place where it's safe to offer new products or move into entirely new businesses. The ease of posting pages to a web site — and the ability to gather instant information about how customers react to new product offers — lets you test-market goods and services in a way never before possible. While many companies, big and small, are sticking to their traditional products, many are using the Web to move into new areas.

Make a Stronger First Impression
By leveraging technology, small businesses can appear much larger than they are. The way your web site handles the technology of the Web — serving up pages, taking orders, incorporating dynamic and interactive features — can easily leave visitors with the impression that your small business is much larger than it really is.

Take WorldSpy. This company gives the impression of a large shopping mart, when in reality, it's staffed by only a handful of marketers and programmers. WorldSpy connects manufacturers directly to express delivery services, which drop ship products to WorldSpy customers at low prices and high profit margins.

A web site provides an opportunity to review and expand core business. It can reduce business costs while improving marketing efforts, generating new sales, and better serving customers. In addition, having a web site sets the stage for some strategic thinking about what kinds of new products and businesses a client might want to explore and how they want their company to be perceived by customers today and in the future.

Different Levels of E-commerce
There are three basic levels of Web presence. Each is more sophisticated, and expensive, than the last, but also produces more benefits.

Content Only
When building a content only site, you’ll design an electronic brochure that publishes information about your client’s company and products, but has no interactive ordering mechanism. It's an easy and low-cost way to distribute information, but customers have to log off to order, and the content becomes outdated quickly.

Online Commerce, But No Integration
Your client’s business can operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and can take orders over the Web. If web business becomes robust, clients will have to deal with the added work of manually adding clients to their database and handling the order. You will be able to create sites that accept credit cards, and notify the client of specific order details.

Complete Integration of the Web Site With the Rest the Business
This requires the most planning and resources. But it integrates your client’s Web site with all other aspects of the businesspayment systems, order fulfillment, inventory control, marketing, and all of your traditional business functionsto make your digital presence a truly cohesive extension of your company. A website in this category will almost always require outside database or programming consultants.

Make Sure Your Client Defines their Goals

To ensure that your site benefits your client’s business and its users, clearly define your site goals from the beginning. Focus on a primary function and build your site around delivering that to your visitors. Clearly defined goals will help to keep your priorities in perspective as you manage the process of building your client’s online presence. You'll need to balance your business goals, the needs of your audience, and your resources to create an effective web site. You'll also want to keep in mind your longer-term goals, so that you design your site with some room to grow.

Making sure that your client defines their goals will give you a good base from which to work. It will also save you countless hours in re-direction from the client when they come up with a new idea. Usually, if you sit down with your client and ask them to think about what they want, you’ll get good direction.

Make Sure Your Site is Reputable

There are a number of things you should educate your client about to make sure they understand the importance of hiring a good web designer.

High Production Values

In a print catalog, "production values" refers to the quality of the paper and printing processes used, the number and quality of images, and the care taken with graphic design. High production values are critically important in catalogs, which have to convince consumers to buy based on a few sheets of paper.

Production values are even more important on the Web. Consumers will not buy from an amateurish Web site.

Most of the people who visit your site will still find the idea of ordering online unusual. I have been buying online for three years, and I still find it a little unusual. So your site needs to inspire visitors with confidence. It should say that yours is the kind of company that does things right, and that if I order something from you, it will be a good experience.

Of course there is no direct connection between the quality of your site and the quality of your company. A company could have a brilliant graphic designer and lousy products. But usually there is a connection, and that is what visitors to your site will assume.

Spelling and Grammar

A few spelling or grammatical mistakes will undo all the other work you've done to make your site look professional. Don’t assume that a client has checked the text. Run a spell checker (MS Word’s is the best) on any text given to you by the client. If the site is very large, at least check the front page…

 

Thumbnails

Customers will come to your client’s site to see products. But don't throw full-size product images at your visitors until they ask for them. Sophisticated sites begin with a page of smaller thumbnail images, which visitors can click on when they want to see more.

Use a Good Hosting Service

The traditional way of hosting up a Web-site is to buy a Web server and a permanent Internet connection. This is rarely done these days except by larger companies. The cost of building an adequate infrastructure and the technical skills required put this option beyond most small and medium-sized business. A third-part company hosts most sites these days. These companies take care of all the drudgery of 24 by 7 operations backups, technical support, and gathering usage stats. All the stuff you really don’t want to get involved in. Costs vary from completely free to hundreds of dollars per month depending on your requirements and the size of site.

Choosing a good host is very important. Aside from host speed, which of course matters, situations can pop up where the host server is down for extended periods of time, email is inaccessible for days or even weeks, FTP access is unavailable, domain name fees aren't paid, and on and on. These problems can cause irreparable damage to an online enterprise.

Include Brick and Mortar Information

People like to think about the “real” business behind a website. Make sure you include a phone number, and street address. Include images of your client’s print catalog or building, customer testimonials, or even a brief company history.

Toll-free numbers are especially helpful, and lend creditability to your business. Remind a client that they will now have access to non-local customers, and they may want to invest in a toll free number, even if they did not have one previously.

Design Tips for Higher Sales

There are a number of things that you, the designer, can do to make a site more successful.

Make the Site Easy

The average visitor to a Web site looks at only three or four pages before going somewhere else. Visitors will leave at the slightest obstacle. So if you want people to visit and order from your site, don't put any obstacles in their way. Ask yourself, “Could a really stupid person easily use this site?”. If your answer is “no” you might want to reconsider your design.

Whatever you do, don't force visitors to register when first visiting the site.

 

Consider that Many People Will Land on a Back Page

Most of your visitors will not start at your front page. Most of your hits will come from search engines, and when someone searches for a phrase in a search engine, they are often sent directly to the page in your site that contains that phrase. So most of your visitors will drop right into the middle of your site, like paratroopers. The design of your site has to tell them immediately where they are, and what their choices are.

Most major sites solve this problem by putting a row of buttons at the top or down the side of each page. Somewhere, usually at the top of the page, they include a small version of their logo. The logo serves two purposes: it brands the site, and it serves as a link back to the homepage.

Make sure that you pay attention to the “searchability” of each page. Remember that every page needs Meta Tags, a title, and a first paragraph.

Have a Unique Selling Point

Try to make sure your client has at least one unique point that makes his or her site stand out from the others. A unique selling point could be free shipping, or extra information on the site benefiting the user. One site I saw offered free return shipping if you had to return the product. Create “Sticky” SitesWhen selling on the Web, it's only possible to sell to customers when they visit your site. It follows that the longer you can keep potential customer on your site, the more chance you will have of making a sale, and of course more page views can lead to increased advertising revenueSo how do you turn casual visitors into dedicated fans of your Web store, who will not only spend time on-site, but will return time and time again? There are a variety of well-proven techniques you can develop to increase "stickiness" and the articles and resources on his page should help you to refine these techniques for your client’s business. 

Communities are one of the most powerful features of the Internet. Far from being remote and impersonal, the Internet is being used to develop new ways of bringing people together and it is phenomenally popular. People love to interact on the Net and if you can facilitate this on your site, you will keep users on site. The longer you can keep them on your site the more chance of making that sale. 

The “theme” of the community you are aiming to build need not necessarily be an exact match to the products or services you are trying to sell. You are trying to create a place for people to go who are interested in the type of service or product you offer.

       Bulletin Board/Forum
The classic community-building tool. A successful bulletin board or forum can pull in huge member of visitors but it does need continual promotion to be successful. 

Newsletters
Newsletters are extremely effective and valuable. If you can add some interesting content (make it a real newsletter rather than just an advertising mail shot) they work even better. You can take it a step further and develop it into a moderated mailing list, all emails carrying promotion for your site of course. 


Email
Giving users free email accounts on your site not only ensure they will be regular visitors but has the added attraction that if your domain name is part of email address it will be circulated all over the Net as the email accounts are used. 

Polls
Polls are everywhere on the net. Some people find them irritating (me included) but there’s no doubt that they can encourage users to return, particularly if the poll concerns a controversial or topical subject.

Quizzes
If you can create regular, interesting quizzes on your site this will lead to return visits. It goes without saying that this is even more effective if you offer a prize….

Greetings cards.
Electronic greetings cards are surprisingly popular. If you can offer a series of themed cards which would appeal to visitors to your site then this too can generate return visits

There are a huge variety of “community” based sticky tools available. For complete customization, you will have to hire a programmer, but many tools are available free with the inevitable downside that they carry some advertising.

Everyone.net offers free, easy to set up tools that you can offer your small business clients:

http://www.everyone.net/

Marketing The Site

Even if you do everything else right, without successful promotion your client’s on-line business will. It doesn’t matter how great the product or web site is, if people don't know about it you are wasting your time.

As the web designer, you’re not solely responsible for marketing efforts, but it’s a good idea to educate clients whenever you can. If their business is successful, you’ll get referrals.

Integrate the Internet Address (URL) Into Other Marketing Efforts

If a company is already advertising in print, radio, or television, why not add their web address to the promotion?

Search Engine Listing

The NUMBER ONE, most important thing you can do for your client is effectively list their page with search engines, discussed earlier in the Search Engine Submission section.

Let your client know that you have special skills that other web designers don’t have. Explain how search engines work, and why it’s so hard to figure out how to effectively list on them.

Remember to cater to Yahoo, which is easily the most important search site on the web. The Academy of Web Design SF gets more students from Yahoo than from all of the other search sites combined.

Banner Ads

It seems that the secret to successful banner ad placement is not if you place ads, but where you place them. You’ll want to advise you client that if they decide to buy banner ad space, they should buy it on a high traffic site that specializes in the business they’re in.

If a client asks you to design a banner ad, here are some tips you should know.

*         Bigger Is Better
Wider ad banners, typically either 468 x 60, are clicked on significantly more than smaller ones.

*         Refresh Ad Banners Often
Several studies have been conducted that show ad banners drop off in click-throughs after several days, but when a new banner appears, the click-through rate jumps. Yahoo claims that banners burn out after two weeks.

*         Feature a Call To Action
Yahoo, and I/Pro both claim you should have a call to action in the banner. The phrase "Click Here!" is a good example and can dramatically boost response.

*         Create Urgency
"Last chance" or other time dependent phrases will prompt users to click now or forever hold their peace.

*         Use the Word "FREE!"
Any promotional incentive that offers value or using words like "Free!" will induce users to click on the banner. Of course only use such terms if you actually offer free incentive and if you do not, you may consider adding an information section or offering some kind of free services related to your target demographic. This way, when you market your site, you will have something more to market than just your products.

*         Animated Banners Are Noticed More
Motion naturally attracts attention; however, if it is located on a page that a user would dwell on for an extended period of time, the animation can be more annoying than beneficial. Have the animation cycle only a couple of times.

*         If Possible, Link the Banner To a Specific Page, Not the Homepage
Nobody wants to plow through a corporate home page to get to what they want to see. Link them directly to the advertising offer or create a transition Web page that will lead them down the sales cycle.

Issue a Press Release

If the new site is newsworthy, or if you’re offering a newsworthy product or service, you can issue a press release and hope that one of the major news agencies picks it up. Instant Exposure.

You can advise your client to hire a PR firm, or you can issue a press release yourself for free with PR Web:

www.prweb.com

Newsletter Advertising

Your client can write articles for newsletters that cater to their target market. After a reader reads the helpful article, the chances that they’ll view the author’s site goes way up. You don't have to be a world-class writer to get articles published on the Internet. Developing website traffic by submitting articles to email newsletters on the Internet is fairly simple. Once a month just send a new article to a list of newsletters that target your industry.

Write a “how to” article that solves a problem. You can't write a big advertisement for your website and expect a publisher to run your article. It won't happen. Think about the problems your customers want solved. Let's say your website is about Landscaping. You could write an article about how to choose a good Landscaping company. Or an article about how to do a particular Landscaping task, like establishing a garden.

At the bottom of the article, include a 4-5 line description of your business. Here's where you can direct the readers of your article to your website. You can view your "signature" file as a FREE classified ad.

Example:

David Lieberman loves teaching inquiring students about web design. If you live in the San Francisco area and are interested in developing web design skills visit the Academy of Web Design SF at www.awdsf.com

  Continue to Taking Orders Over the Internet | Back to Courseware