This is the breakdown I always give them. It is a good starting point for anyone who wants to sell their products online.

Shipping

Shipping is a great opportunity to win favour with an online shopper. High shipping costs could cause a customer to quickly abandon the cart.

Large online retailers like Amazon have standardised packaging prices and options to make the administration of despatching the order easier. It is worth finding a good courier and packaging suppliers so that you can have a minimum size box, along with cost, for shipping to your market areas.

You can then set a volume quantity to your products so you know when the order will outgrow your minimum size box to increase the shipping charge.

Free shipping, even if built into the cost of the product, is a great cherry on top for the customer as well. A free shipping threshold (e.g. Free shipping for orders over R1,000) can be a good incentive for customers to purchase one more item to obtain free shipping.

Remember, you don’t have to ship everywhere and can limit your deliveries to certain regions. A customer outside this region will be told “We do not ship to that area” and can look elsewhere.

Product categories

Any retail environment, including an eCommerce website, needs to make it easy for the customer to find what they want. Think about how you would categorise your product. The added benefit to something being digital is that you can add multiple categories or tags to the product.

This means that someone could be looking for t-shirts and find a black t-shirt. Or they could be searching for black clothing and find the same black t-shirt. Give people multiple ways to find the product that they want.

Also read: Do you really need a website?

Pictures

Great pictures will sell the product within seconds. Consider how you would take your main product photograph, and what other pictures will give more information to the customer.

Try using a uniformly taken main image as this makes your shop page look neater. Think about the size of the photo and what the background will be. You might also consider product videos as well.

Analytics Measurement

Data is an amazing resource to have. Knowing how long people spend on your eCommerce Website, whether they leave the site at a certain place or how many times an item is added to or removed from the cart can help you tweak your website to get more sales.

It can also give you insight into which of your marketing channels is more profitable. Having this initiated early on in your store’s life, will give you great data to make decisions on later.

2^nd Prize conversion

What happens if they don’t buy? Will you lose them forever? Perhaps try and convince the visitor to sign up for a newsletter or to get special offers. A chatbot can also entice visitors to ask questions in case they are confused.

Google analytics and cookies can allow you to remarket to the visitor at a later stage. Although, they will need to accept cookies on your site in order for this to happen.

You can have the flashiest ads and branding, but without the basics above, you might find it difficult to make progress.

The post 5 Things You Need for an eCommerce Website appeared first on mediaholic marketing.

Before you jump up and write off your website for marketing, lets quickly look at 3 things a website should for your business.

1. It should be a Virtual office/store/staff to answer questions about you
2. It should be a shopfront / till point to make money
3. It should reach out to find more customers using the content you add

That sounds like something every business SHOULD want, but it’s not in everyone’s reality to achieve. If you are one of the following types of business, you could get away without a website;

Small – home services

Let’s be honest, who views the website of a local plumber or electrician before calling them?

I thought so. Have a Google business listing so you can at least turn up in searches, and maybe a Facebook page for people to recommend you.

Local restaurants or bakeries (superettes included)

The biggest selling point for food is high-quality photographs. It’s not like you need to educate people on why they NEED your product. An Instagram account and Facebook would do wonders here. Lots of pics of enticing yumminess and details on specials or events will do well. Also, a google business listing for sure.

Also Read: Content ideas for any business

Local personalities or performers

In the “old” days (ie the early 2000s) the internet was a quirky place. The website for the Smashing pumpkins had amazing effects that would follow the mouse wherever you moved. Other than that there was no reason to be on it.

You can literally contain all your information on YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook. Even Twitter if that’s where your audience is. There is very little need to set up a whole website for yourself.

The exception here is if you are blogging, although you might find other publications to regularly publish your work and earn some bucks from it. They’ll probably even create a page on their site to showcase you and your work.

If you only serve your local community.

You don’t need an app to sell Magwenya at the taxi rank. You could be an estate agent, a mechanic, a convenience store, or even a car dealer. If you only serve a small market, a website might be overkill for your needs.

There are plenty of 3^rd party sites to advertise on that could generate more business with less effort than a website would. Keeping up a website could prove to be a marketing burden that just gets in your way.

In these cases you’re better off putting your marketing budget into channels that have more impact on your bottom line, as opposed to trying to impress people with a website that nobody looks at.

Having a website means you need to maintain it AND spend on advertising to get traffic to the website. If your website is not part of the sales cycle, that is a waste of money.

If you want to learn some unique social media strategies that can help you grow, with or without a website, give us a follow on Facebook, LinkedIn, or subscribe to our newsletter.

You can read about our social media services here.

The post Do you REALLY need a website? appeared first on mediaholic marketing.