Sell Your Products Online

In many cases the mechanics of an online shop can be simple, but crafting a pleasing and engaging online customer experience takes some thought. A well structured online store can be source of profit for years, but simple mistakes can unknowingly retard sales, handicapping your online venture.

Some of the key questions to consider are:

  • Do I need a 'Shopping Cart'?

    If you're only selling one product, or if your products are such that customers only buy one at a time, then asking your customers to use traditional shopping cart software will be cumbersome and result in lower sales. You're better to use single page ordering.

  • How will I handle freight?

    If what you're selling is a physical product and if you're in a competitive market (e.g. online wine or furniture) you need to carefully consider how you charge for freight. Is freight a flat fee? Is it split by post code or country? Does freight vary depending on an product weight or size?

    Also, consider offering free freight as an incentive for customers to make multiple purchases. Amazon.com reportedly saw a significant increase in sales simply by making freight free in this way as buyers ordered more to avoid the freight charges.

  • What forms of payment will I take?

    Obviously taking credit cards online is the norm. If you're doing this, you should be aware of the following:

    • Many customers are still wary about using credit cards online. As such, consider the use of security messages on your order pages to reassure customers that their data is being protected.
    • Be aware that in any dispute about a credit card payment, banks will generally take the side of buyers. In general this will result in refunds to customers being processed against your account when a dispute occurs. As such, consider the use of 'anti-fraud' messages to help fend off would be fraudsters
    • Offline payments - allow customers to print off your order form and fax it in, or call you with their credit card details. This provides a payment option to those nervous about online payments.
    • PayPal - particularly for those selling into the US markets, consider using PayPal. Their fees are high - but if your customers have money in their PayPal account to spend and you don't offer to take it, you'll often loose the sale. Paypal merchant accounts are easy to setup and so can be a great tool for quickly taking payments online while you test a market or get more other payment methods in place. 
    • Amex / Diners Card - These credit cards are often used by wealthier customers and often have higher credit limits. We've seen accepting Amex and Diners help when selling high value items online.
    • Finally, be aware that when setting up an online store, the job that takes the longest is setting up an Internet enabled Merchant Account. We can help you with the forms but the banks often take four weeks to process them, so make sure you have allowed for the time required.

    • In addition to just taking credit cards online, consider the following alternative payment methods to increase sales.

  • What shopping system will I use?

    It's important to understand your requirements. We've sold hundreds of copies of our Bazooka Shopping Cart, but also understand that each project is different, and so will happily deploy open source software or a specialist third party package. It's all about finding the right tool for the job.

  • Will the pages of my shopping cart appear in the search engines?

    If you're building a large catalogue of products, each of those product listings should themselves be a page that has been optimised for the search engines and particularly Google. This will assist the search engines to recognise and use the contents of that page to send people to your website. Take care here though, as not all shopping carts are equal. Some create well optimised pages as a standard feature, while others generate pages in a format the search engines do not index well and in some cases will ignore the page.

Are you interested in establishing an online shopping system? Contact us for a quote or free consultation.