Ecommerce

Getting Started In Ecommerce – Part Two
By Heidi Richards

In Part One we talked a little bit about what Ecommerce is,
getting a domain name and setting up a merchant account.
Ecommerce is more than that, much more. To have a really good
online presence that gets people to stop and shop you need a
strategy for success. Your strategy must include your USP or
Unique Selling Position in the marketplace. What makes you
stand out from all the other online entrepreneurs looking for
the same type of customers as you? Can you stand out from the
competition based on quality, price or benefits? Once you know
your USP, you can begin the monumental task of telling the world
about your site. A really unique selling position will give you
an advantage over all the competition – well that and a lot of
planning and investing of your time and money.

FOCUS

Emphasize the benefits and the results the customer will get
from purchasing from you and using your product or service. You
can discover the benefits by listing all the features and then
converting them to benefits. List everything your product or
service offers. For each feature list a relative advantage from
the customer’s perspective. You can discover the customer’s
perspectives when they buy. Simply ask them, “ Why did you
place an order today or use our service?” BE very specific when
creating your benefit statements. An example of this is, “You
will save $100.00 sells better than “you will save money.” “You
will loose 20 pounds in 10 days” sounds better than “you will
loose weight.” Rank your benefits in order of importance to the
customer. If you have enough of them, use bullet points for
emphasis.

Emotion sells. People make most buying decisions with their
heart and not their head. Paint a picture of the results the
customer will get when they purchase from you. “ You will look
20 years younger.” “You will be $100 richer.”

Make sure you include a call to action. Want them to make a
buying decision today? Give them a reason to do so. Offer a
bribe (discount, bonus, something for nothing).

Your website must load quickly and function easily. If your
site loads slowly people will get impatient and go elsewhere. Do
all your links work? Have you tested your order page by
running sample orders? Have you tested load time using
different connection speeds? You can get a fr*ee analysis by
visiting Submitplus.com.

Make your website easy to look at and read. I find dark
background tend to be more difficult to read than do pale
backgrounds. The overall look of your site should be clean and
professional. When we were first creating the Women’s ECommerce
Association, International we did everything in-house. Not
being truly adept at HTML coding we thought we could just use a
simple program to create a professional site. It was okay, but
the one we now have is so much better. Why? Because we hired a
professional. You can create a website with a good template
program. We are using ECommerce Templates to create our new
look for WUN Publications. It is simple to use and relatively
inexpensive.

When it comes to graphics, be conservative. Sites that are
laden with graphics and flash tend to take longer to load. If
your site takes more than 3 seconds to do so, you will loose
many visitors and potential buyers. If you must use graphics,
make sure the files sizes used have been reduced as much as your
image editing/compression software will allow.

View your site using as many different browsers as possible.
In addition to Internet Explorer and Netscape, there is Opera,
Mozilla, Lynx and those are just the ones that run on Microsoft
Windows. WebMonkey has a chart of those supported by Macintosh,
Unix/Linux and others. Also, many people will surf with their
browser’s graphics switched off. Make sure you know what your
site looks like without the graphics and that it is still easy
for visitors to surf.

One last thought Make sure all your important information is
above the fold. If you know that visitors are looking for
something specific and you make them scroll down to find it,
chances are they won’t.

Excerpted from The PMS Principles - Powerful Marketing
Strategies to Grow Your Business - www.pmsprinciples.com - ©
2005 - Heidi Richards

About the Author: Heidi Richards is the author of The PMS
Principles, Powerful Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business
and 7 other books. She is also the Founder & CEO of the Women’s
ECommerce Association, International www.WECAI.org – an Internet
organization that “Helps Women Do Business on the WEB.” Basic
Membership is FREE. Ms. Richards can be reached at
www.HeidiRichards.com or heidi@wecai.org.

Source: http://www.isnare.com