Lesson 5: Planning For A Successful Web Store

In our previous post we looked at what the important metrics are for measuring the effectiveness of an ad campaign.

1) Total Views
2) Click Through Rate
3) Conversion Rate

If you're not sure what those 3 items measure, you can take a quick refresher here. But the last time, we talked about how your landing pages can have a huge impact on the conversion rates for your web store.



Now imagine you were looking for a book. You know the title and you know the author of the book. So you're walking along the street and you see Bookstore A. It has a poster on its window that says "We have every book you ever need". You're thinking.. "What luck!" This store might very possibly have the book you're looking for.

When you walk into Bookstore A, you notice that the layout of the store is very messy and books are haphazardly put onto shelves with no alphabetical order or categories. You don't even know where to begin your search. You want help, but you don't see a store attendant anywhere. Even the cashier's counter seems to be hidden. Less than 2 minutes later, you walk out from the store and start searching for another bookstore.

If Bookstore A had put some thought into its layout, like arranging its shelves carefully, placing books into a category system for easy browsing, make the cashier's counter easily discoverable and make help available at all steps for its customers, the scenario of a customer walking off in disappointment wouldn't happen often.

The same can be said for web stores.

A lot of web store owners are new to the web and know little about how a web layout impacts customer conversions. And because of that, its hard for the new businesses to take off even if they've done the necessary marketing and promotion.

Remember, the goal here is to persuade visitors to your store to buy your products. Because of the way organic searches work, the entry point to your web store may not be just on your front page, but any page in your website. So every page in your site has to be well thought out and focused on helping you achieve your sale.

So, what are some key points to take into consideration when planning for a new web store?

Professional Design Matters

A good professionally designed site shows that you're serious about what you do. When sites come across as looking amateurish, it may give visitors the impression that you're not serious about your business and possibly be a scam site. Remember, you're trying to convince people to buy something from you and only receive the item they're buying some time after they've paid you, so there's a trust issue here. Looking professional and like a real business can help overcome that first step into earning their trust.

Full Disclosure

Again, this is another method of helping your web store earn your potential customer's trust.

Disclosing your business's contact information, any payment, shipping or return policies show that you're all about ensuring a transparent relationship with your customers and have no hidden agendas. Customers won't get any unwanted or unexpected surprises and you don't end up being flamed as a cheat in popular forums when things go wrong. If you're unsure of what to put into your policies, you can reference them from popular e-commerce websites.

And be sure to display links to these information on every page of your web store. So that no matter which page your customer enters from, they'll have easy access to it.

Show Your Customer What They Need To See

When a visitor clicks on your ad and lands on your website, they most likely looking for something that your ad has offered. So you only have about 1 - 10 seconds to convince them that you do.

To do that, having a combination of these elements on your page could do the job for you
- Preview of the latest and most popular products in your store.
- Promotions that you might be having at the moment
- Categories of the products that you
- A search box if you have an extensive product collection
- Well taken pictures of your products

Having them there puts it out to your visitors what you're about and what you have in stock that might catch their interest. And even if they don't see what they like at first glance, they still have easy access to search for it in your store.

First Rate Customer Service

Provide a fast response contact form or an online customer service chat option for your web store. Quick responses to your customer's queries means: (1) it gives the reassurance of a real business because there is a dedicated person working on customer support (2) they'll be able to make their purchases sooner if you've clarified all their sales related queries. (3) if they're impulse buyers, you've just made sure they didn't have enough time to rethink their purchase. (4) impressive customer service always guarantees repeat business.

In Summary...

In reality, a lot of web stores don't do as well because they aren't well planned for in the beginning. Many people tend to rush into it since it doesn't really require high capital investment in the beginning as compared to running an offline store. And then they set themselves up for disappointment in the web when things don't turn around as quickly.

Believe me, I've been guilty of that before..

However, if we just take a little time to do more prep work for our web business and the platform that we're going to be doing our business on, the results may turn out to be very different.