Start Converting Visitors into Buyers

By: Will Kaness

An E-Commerce website is nothing if it is only popular with visitors. To be successful an Ecommerce website must CONVERT them into customers.

Okay - you are getting a good number of visitors each month, but your sales figures are far from what you wanted to see. What you need are ways to convert visitors into actual customers. Here are 5 simple, yet very effective tips that will help you.

• Tip #1 Pay Attention to First Impressions! This is an essential tool for building trust online - especially in case of an e-commerce website. Every little detail about your e-Store has to inspire trust - the slightest doubt - like a misspelling or a design bug - will make your “almost-customer” to leave your site for another place - like your competitors’.

• Tip #2 Make Sure You Write Relevant Content and Good Descriptions Your customers need enough information about the products that you sell to make a good decision when they are considering whether to buy or not to buy something from you. And remember! Your written content also plays a big role in marketing - so you need to appeal to the customer’s feelings. All of your content must be combined with ease of perception. Even though writing content takes some time it’s worth it.

• Tip #3 Keep It Simple! You need to act as though not one of your customers knows a thing about what you sell or what you do. Make it clear as to where they need to go to find anything. Make all navigation titles clear and provide an easy pathway for customers to make purchases. Amazingly, the “Add to Basket” or “Buy Now” signs at some webstores are almost impossible to find.

• Tip #4 Forget Flash Animations and Impressive Graphics Lots of graphics and moving images might look impressive, but they can take too long to load and they annoy your visitors. Customers are not looking for spectacular graphics and animation. And because animation and spectacular elements often look like ads, visitors ignore them.

• Tip #5 State It All Clearly. All policies (guarantee, return, privacy) and terms of use must be stated as clearly as possible. You need to maintain trust and continue to build relationships with your clients even after you’ve made the sale. That is why you should try to answer all support e-mails and feedbacks personally and as soon as you can. The clarity of your official statements makes it very easy to resolve all possible misunderstandings.

Well, that’s pretty much everything that you need for normal business maintenance. All of the tips are simple and if you implement them you will have a much better chance for return purchases. After all, customers like to be taken care of, and they will come back to a place they like.