As we all know, e-commerce has been becoming a booming industry all over the world. There are innumerable e-commerce sites that have come up selling various kinds of products.
Nowadays, people can buy all kinds of things by sitting at the comforts of their own homes. The only thing that they need is a computer with Internet connection. Payments usually are made via net banking, debit cards or credit cards. Many e-commerce sites also offer facilities of ‘cash on delivery’ these days.
As I am actively involved in e-commerce website marketing business, recently I’ve had a great discussion on Twitter with friends from the same industry. The discussion I hosted was “Factors affecting e-commerce business”.
At the end of our discussion, we’ve come up with 7 most important factors which play a very important role behind the success of any e-commerce website. Read on to find out 7 important factors we discussed with detailed description for each factor.
#1. Pricing of the Products
Customers always compare the price you offer with your competitors. It is imperative for you to check out the prices that your competitors are offering for various products. After a competitive price analysis, decide on the pricing so that you can offer the best prices to your customer without incurring a loss in the business. If you own a huge product catalogue, I strongly recommend using tools to build best pricing strategies for your e-commerce website.
Tools to extract the price from your competitor’s websites
DataCrops is an award winning pricing intelligence tool offering customized solutions for competitive pricing analysis. It has multiple modules like competitive analysis, product price comparison, data and site-wise product price comparison, reprising modules, etc. This tool can be scaled based on the volume of your product catalog and can give best pricing solutions for any e-commerce website.
One of the most popular and FREE web data extraction tools equipped with built-in crawler that can be trained by following few simple steps. You just need to download this tool and train the crawler to extract your competitor’s website data. After following few simple steps, it will automatically extract the data from your competitor’s website.
#2. High Quality Products
Many people have a notion that products that are sold via e-commerce sites are not of good quality. Some even think that the products are not original. Ensure that the products you are selling on your website must have high quality standards and be the same as you described on your website. Customers should not have any complaints with the quality of the products that they buy from your website.
#3. High Security for Transactions
Customers will always check for the security of their confidential information like credit card data. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the transactions are safe and secured. SSL certification is mandatory for such websites.
Make sure that your eCommerce business website has proper and valid SSL certifications or not, so that customers can carry out safe transactions. You can use different SSL certificate tools to check the status of your certificate. Research shows that, customers do not prefer buying from website which is not secured by SSL. If your online store is not secure, just buy at least some basic certificate that is easily available at around $10 from some authorised resellers like Namecheap, Cheapsslshop, Servertastic, etc.
#4. Transparent Shipping and Promo Terms and Conditions
Since online trading can be done from any part of the world, it is important that the goods are delivered to the respective destinations on time. Never tweak your customer for buying your product as having transparent shipping terms and conditions are important. If your business charges for shipping, have that clearly mentioned in the site.
Along with this, you can also come up with attractive promo offers to draw the attention of more and more customers. Make sure that the offers or promo code should work well when your customers start their checkout process. I found that many vendors mislead their customers by offering huge discount while the actual cost of the product will be higher than their competitors’. Such practice will not only ruin your reputation but also cause you to lose the trust from your customers. Flipkart’s Big Billion Day fiasco is one example.
#5. Instant Customer Support
It is obvious that customers might have queries or problems related to products, features or shipping. To handle such issues, you need to have good customer support team who knows how to tackle the real-time customer issues. And the service should be available on round-the-clock basis as customers can use the site at any time of the day.
#6. User Experience and Reviews
With an easily navigable website, customers can find the product quickly. They can keep on adding products to their cart and also save them for future purchase. Optimize your forms for customers who can provide their valuable feedback and write reviews about the services and products they purchased from your website. Make sure that the feedbacks and reviews are properly visible to your buyers so that they can learn from your existing buyers to make their best purchase decision.
#7. M-Commerce
Online shopping trends are changing rapidly and you also need to adapt to the change to stay in competitive market. M-commerce or mobile commerce is the rapidly growing trend these days and people started buying products from the apps. Having a mobile app or mobile version of your e-commerce website is crucial as more and more people visit your website from their smartphones now. While developing the site, make sure that you develop a mobile version as well.
If you are taking care of above mentioned factors, your e-commerce website will definitely see positive ROI over time. It is important that the business is monitored, upgraded and you educate your customers with useful information on regular basis so that customers do not get bored and come back for something new every time they visit the site.