Why sell online? How significant can online selling by to your business?

The decision making process for a buyer has altered and shifted over recent years. Generally speaking, buyers are conducting more research and more many more tools to be able to do this. The prospective buyer will likely have a very good understanding idea about the product or service before they’ve even spoken to a salesperson directly.

How significant is ecommerce in overall consumerism? How much presence do you need to have online? To put is simply, online sales for retailed goods is growing faster than offline sales for brick-and-mortar stores. Online retailing appears to be the place to be to grab a larger slice of the market.

But what are the main benefits of conducting business this way?

Basically, selling directly online increases your customer reach, and boosts your visibility to a wider volume of consumers. You can cater for people any time of the day and with the correct information available can save time for both buyer and seller.

A website or other ecommerce platform will typically provide you with real time data and analytics about your products and customers. This data and intelligence is vital to your business. What this can further tell you is exactly how your customers interact with your website, what pages their frequent and how much money they spend. These are highly valuable metrics that allow you to make adjustments to meet your customer’s need. What should you consider?

Focus on an outside-in approach from the perspective of your customer. What is the average user journey like, and how can this be improved? Don’t give any user an excuse to want to leave your website. It has to be as simple as possible.

Trust indicators such as online reviews are important for building trust and credibility. Many surveys show that on average between 5 – 10% of users cite that online reviews have some form of influence on their buying decision.

A user will more likely feel comfortable if they are aware of all the information about a product or service. They will be more likely to abandon their order if any unexpected costs or key information is missed until the end of the user journey.

Security is of course vital and imperative, and the user needs to feel that browsing and completing payments are through a secure platform. Also if the security questions or registering for an account to make a payment is too complicated and extensive; users will lose patience and interest.

Personalize the experience! Every aspect of the user journey adds (or removes) value to your brand, so if you can monitor that a user is struggling, then proactively reach out to them.

Feedback is key. Your customer user journey should always be reviewed, developed and innovated to keep ahead of the competition. A great way to do this is listen to any feedback, whether it’s positive or negative!

Overall usage on mobile devices have switched to now being more favourable them traditional desktops. This means that the website has to be mobile friendly and deliver the same experience and usability levels as a desktop.

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This post was written by Chris Beck