Small Business e-Commerce Top 5 Tips
Selling products online can be a lucrative business if done properly with around 70% of the UK population reckoned to have internet access.
Whether you’re selling camping equipment, curtains or anything else online you’ll find our useful 5 top tips below;
- Write unique product descriptions
Whether you’re selling your own products or someone else’s it’s important for sales and SEO to write unique product descriptions. Using descriptions supplied by the manufacturer will do you no favours, you should use your descriptions to really try and sell the item as well as including relevant keywords and phrases for SEO purposes.
- Simplify your checkout process
When people are searching for items to buy online they prefer it to be quick and straightforward. Nobody wants to find a product in two minutes and then have to spend the next 10 minutes trying to pay for it.
Having a simple checkout process that allows people to pay without registering can help to dramatically increase your online conversion rates.
- Don’t miss a chance to up-sell or cross-sell
Making use of up-selling or cross-selling on your e-commerce site can help boost your sales. For example if you offer free delivery over £20 and someone’s order is for less, you have the chance to up-sell other products or services such as gift-wrapping.
Having the capability on your site to cross-sell is also critical for e-commerce. For example if someone buys a set of waterproofs for playing golf they may also be interested in buying a new umbrella or hat. Showing these complementary products before they check-out can result in higher order values.
- Optimise all your product pages
As well as writing unique product descriptions, it’s also important to optimise each of your product pages. By writing keyword rich meta titles, descriptions, headings and alt image tags you can boost your search rankings.
For example rather than just having “Canon Camera” in your meta data, each title, description etc should be product specific such as “Canon EOS Rebel T1i Digital Camera”. This will help you get more traffic when people are searching for very specific products for which there is less competition in the search engines.
- Use email marketing to drive repeat sales
Many small e-commerce site owners focus too much on attracting new customers. People who have already bought from you are easier to sell to than new clients. With this in mind, permission based email marketing newsletters and special offers are a must.
You can also create additional sales by offering an exclusive discount to previous customers to tempt them into buying from you again.
If you liked this article you may want to read how to measure your online marketing return
All very good advice and something that should assist startup ecom businesses. One thing I would add is to choose the right payment processor for you. Make sure it is secure and has compatibility with several shopping carts. A good place to compare payment providers is ‘Electronic Payments’ as it has a clear and easy to use comparison tool.
You can also visit our website for more information on payment processing and shopping carts.
Hi Simon, thanks for your comment. You make a very good point about choosing the right payment processor. This is an area I’ll be writing about in a future blog post.