Promoting a small e-commerce website can be tricky and challenging, making it difficult for the webshop owners to drive traffic and users to it. However, you can follow some tips to have an effective e-commerce store which will help you bring return visitors.
Keep the design simple
A simple and user friendly design always works best. Complicated websites and navigation is not user friendly and can lead the user to abandon your site. So keep a simple site design, which is easy to navigate and browse.
Highlight important sections
Product names and prices should be highlighted prominently on the website, along with important sections like checkout process, shipping information, return policy, FAQs etc. Giving your contact details on the website is also beneficial.
Use photos for products
Photos of products are worth a thousand words and tell the users exactly what they will get. Provide a small description of the product and keep the sentences short so it is easy for the reader to read through. Adding sub-headings and bullet points also makes the product description compelling and easy to read.
Choose a good domain name
A keyword rich domain name is important for an e-commerce store as it can help with the search engine rankings. Most e-commerce stores do not have a lot of content rich pages, so choosing a keyword rich domain is beneficial.
Content creation
Even though you may not have enough pages on your site, try and add content to the existing pages. E-commerce stores usually do not have a lot of content rich pages, but you can improve this by adding more content to your product pages. Another tip is to use keywords to your content to attract users from the search engines.
Make your online store Search Engine Friendly
Making your online store search engine friendly is very important if you want to drive serious traffic to it from the search engines. If you are using an open source shopping cart system like osCommerce or Zen Cart, then you will find a number of plugins which allow you to make your store Search Engine Friendly. These plugins and add-ons include addition of Meta Tags and Search Engine Friendly URL structure.
Add a Blog
Adding a blog to your ecommerce site allows you to add content and provide information about your products to your customers. Blogs can also be used for marketing your ecommerce store, so make sure you add one to your site, as a sub-domain
Use Social Media
Social Media Marketing techniques can be used to get more visitors to your website. Promote your online store on websites like Twitter and other social media sites to drive traffic to it.
Use Email Marketing
Email marketing is a very effective marketing method and as your customer base increases over time, you can get return visitors by sending them newsletters regularly. You can have an opt-in list of your customers, to prevent unsolicited emails.
Get Links
Start a link building campaign for your online store, and get quality incoming links to your site. Links not only help in getting traffic and users to the site but they also help in improving your rankings on the search engines.
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
Great tips on eCommerce stores.
Regarding blogs, you could also use it for search engine optimisation. And use your blog to drive traffic to your ecommerce site.
Kindest,
Nabeel
This is a very nice post and i think most of the techniques you mention would work well on any kind of website or blog really. Good advise
Hey Anil
For me the key point is having a very user friendly designed website. What I mean by that is to keep it simple, professional and clean is the way I approach building websites. The moment I have to struggle to find information on a website, I usually just leave.
Having our own store to make money online is a great idea. We need to do proper marketing for our store and then it will start generating money for us. Try some search engine optimization for some keywords so that our website can be ranked higher in a search engine and we can get more traffic.
The one tip here I think should be emphasized is using pictures. When you’re trying to sell someone something, they want to be able to see the actual product they will be receiving. Many ebay bids don’t get sold simply because they don’t have a picture, even if they do have a money back guarantee. People feel more confident buying with the assurance that a picture provides.
Some other things you can do to increase the exposure of not only your ecommerce store, but your products is to submit your product feeds to shopping portals like Shopping.com, ShopZilla, or even Google Base.
In regards to choosing the domain, think very long and very hard about that, because at the end of the day you will likely be stuck with domain name. I know in the beginning of my newbie days I made the mistake of creating a domain name with a dash in it. I first learned about the troubles of having a dashed domain when I went to tell people what my website was in person. I told them and they got confused of the dashed in the middle! So think about all the options and weight them careful when choosing a domain name, because it really does make a difference in the long run.
Till then,
Jean
Those are great tips mate! Thank you for sharing such great advices. Cheers!
E-commerce is a process, which like any other business processes follow and maintain certain procedures in order to meet the objectives of e-commerce. In most e-commerce activities, buyers place order for buying products via websites.
you can do to increase the exposure of not only your ecommerce store, but your products is to submit your product feeds to shopping portals like Shopping.com, ShopZilla, or even Google Base.
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