Basic ecommerce web site design and development
- Part 2
Pre-sales support to encourage sales
In Part 1 of this ecommerce series, we examined various pages
that should be included on your site. A good ecommerce site is
more than just a home page, product page and shopping cart.
This article examines other pre-sale services you may wish to
consider as part of your online sales pitch.
Info-sheets.
Perhaps the online customer is not yet ready to order? Provide
them with an offline reminder by the provision of quick
downloading info sheets about your product, valuable information
regarding the area that your product or service addresses and
contact details in Word or PDF format. The infosheets should
contain some of your site's branding elements to assist with
recall. This is a part of viral marketing. Read our
overview of viral marketing:
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles/viralmarketing.htm
Pre-sales email support
Not every question can be answered in a FAQ (Frequently Asked
Questions page), so offering to answer pre-sales questions should
be encouraged and clearly labeled. Rapid response to pre-sales
questions will definitely assist in securing online sales.
If I am interested in purchasing a product, submit queries and
don't receive a response within 24 hours - I don't buy the
product, no matter how good it appears. Delay in response time
could mean poor online support in the future.
When responding to customer enquiries, ensure that your messages
are well thought out. Address the question asked thoroughly and
offer further support. Sales are also lost through poor spelling
and grammar in email messages. View our
guide to
email etiquette.
Always thank the prospective client for their comments and
questions, even if they are being what appears to be slightly
unreasonable. You'll find that many customers will have ESL
(English as a second language) and it can be quite challenging for
them to submit queries. Ask for clarification if you aren't sure
of what the client is requesting.
Live chat software
Another way of encouraging sales is to implement live
online customer support. There are many products available now
that allow you to communicate with prospective clients over the
Internet in real time directly from your web site.
The way that live support operates is through special
HTML/JavaScript coding embedded in your site's pages, supplied by
the company that you obtain the service from. It detects when a
visitor arrives at your online destination. You are then alerted
to the arrival by specialized software on your office system via a
message from the company.
If you do decide to go ahead with implementing live online
customer support, it doesn't have to be an expensive process. View
further information on live chat
software and support services and try out a free service!
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/tools/live-chat.htm
Access to ordering
Having convinced your prospective online client of the benefits
of your product or service, it's now time to close the deal. If it
takes any more than one click to begin the ordering process, then
it's too many. Make sure every page that contains information
about your products has 'order now' links in appropriate places.
The links or buttons should be easy to locate, but not too gaudy -
it's a balance of subtlety and promotion. The best place to
implement 'order now' links is after paragraphs which detail some
positive aspect of the product, or directly after a testimonial
from one of your clients.
Shopping carts
In the next installment of "Basic ecommerce web site design",
we'll take a look at shopping carts. A shopping cart is a software
package that collects customer details, assembles the order,
calculates price, shipping and tax, then submits the data to you
and a credit card payment gateway for further processing.
There are many products and services on the market, but it is
imperative to find one that suits your business totally and allows
scalability. The wrong package could cause you a great deal of
headaches and cost you money as your business grows.
The good news is that there are a number of free shopping cart
software packages on the market as well, which may fulfill your
requirements.
Read more about
selecting suitable shopping carts.
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles2/shopping-carts.htm
Michael Bloch
Taming the Beast
http://www.tamingthebeast.net
Tutorials, web content, tools and software.
Web Marketing, Internet Development & Ecommerce Resources
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