What do you need to grow your online store?

Published on September 17, 2012 What do you need to grow your online store?

As with anything in business, reviewing your success against your objectives is something that will help you track your progress and plan for the future. If you already have an online store, this is a valuable exercise for your website too – even if you are happy with your store and it is making you money.

The main questions to ask are whether you taking advantage of the potential of your current store and whether your store has what it takes to help you grow your revenue to meet your future business objectives.

Can your store software help you grow your business?

Are you taking advantage of your online store to its potential?

When you first opened your online store, your needs may have been simple. You might have only had a few products, a very limited budget and little time to work on it. You might have opted for a simple website with a PayPal link in it and not have used shopping cart software at all. Or you might be selling on an auction system, or through an online marketplace.

These systems might be meeting the objectives that you set out when you first started out – to give you another channel to communicate with customers and generate revenue, but where will you take it now?

The Internet is becoming increasingly complex, with new competitors starting up in Australia to take advantage of research results showing that Australia has one of the biggest percentage (relative to population) of online shopping consumers in the world. New competitors means more money being spent on advanced features, striking designs, integrated supply chains and bigger marketing budgets. As a small business operator, you may need to consider the following:

• Does your shopping cart take a cut of your transaction fees? Avoiding flat rate fees in favour of transaction fees might seem appealing if you don’t expect to make any sales, but as you grow the costs can add up.
• Do you have a market niche that your competitors won’t or can’t touch?
• Does your website stand out from competitors or is it using a template based website with the default colours and design?
• What does your logo say about your business?
• How secure is your website behind the scenes? How secure does it look and feel?
• Do your shipping prices and processes make a compelling case to customers?
• Is your site easy to navigate? Does it feel professional?
• Do you have the tools at your disposal to effectively market your website?
• Do you have the advanced features required that ever-more-demanding customers require?

This last point is an important one. Australian consumers are becoming more savvy shoppers aware of their options and prepared to exercise them. Research suggests they are willing to buy from Australian retailers – but only if they meet the grade. This means customers want a website that feels secure, looks professional and a business with the policies that suit the way they want to shop.

This means that you will need to make your site easy to navigate and credible to buy from if you want to keep your customers shopping on your site. There are a number of ways you can do this.

Filters: One way to do this is with product filters. Filters allow customers to drill down into your site without having to search by category. They can put in their own criteria and narrow down your product range until they find the products they need. Whether it’s printer cartridges, power tools or fashion, this is an increasingly important marketing and navigation tool that can help convert browsers into buyers.

Photo options: Another way to do this is with powerful product photos and the options to let customers visualise the product in their context as best as possible. Can you show additional views of your products and not just one main photo? Can your website offer the feature to allow customers to click on colour swatches and have them change out the product photos with a specific example of the product in that colour?

Reviews: Customers want to read reviews of your products so you either need to make those available on your website or expect that they may go offsite to look for them. This is true of websites that sell generic products and well known brands (where customers are looking for the best possible product option) but can also occur for unknown brands (where customers are unsure of something different and want reassurance). By asking your customers to post reviews of your site and using social media sharing in your site you can help grow trust and credibility of your products and services in your website.

Reassuring customers about your policies and security: Customers want to feel that their credit card details are safe and that they are buying from a credible organisation. Promoting your security features on your site (e.g. secure logos and the “padlock” showing on checkout) can help reassure customers about the security of their personal information and putting your terms and conditions as a popup reference can help hesitant customers check that point they weren’t sure about just before they confirm their order with you – without having to navigate away from the checkout potentially never coming back. This also protects you as a merchant as you can’t have a customer argue you hid your terms from them.

Pricing groups, wholesale customer options and promotional rules: Putting your customers into groups based on how they buy is a well known marketing technique called segmentation, and it’s important to ask yourself to what extent your cart helps you do this. If you can put your customers into pricing groups, you can apply special prices to that group (e.g. if they are wholesale customers), have special products for them (effectively creating VIP areas or products just for wholesale customers), run promotions just for a particular group of customers (surrounding a special event relevant to that group for example), or offer special payment terms or shipping methods for those groups. The more groups you can create the more refined and sophisticated your marketing programme can be.

Design: In a competitive environment, you need to build a strong brand and loyal following to succeed. Online the environment is becoming more competitive every day with a number of DIY ecommerce providers starting up and offering “me too” solutions that include DIY template designs that you have to then edit yourself if you want to differentiate them from competitors. If you have both the skills and the time to do that, then those solutions could work for you, but you have to really consider whether the design of your site is good enough to compete with the best in your industry. Type your business industry into a search engine and look at the top 10 sites. How does yours compare? What would your target audience say about them? If yours doesn’t compete, how can you make it so? You’ll probably need to hire professional ecommerce website designers to create a web presence and shop that gives you the tools to compete in a tough and increasingly more competitive economic market and online economy.

Marketing tools: A PayPal button helps a customer who has already decided to buy from you to purchase, but what if your customer needs more than just a “squeeze page” to get the information they need to sign up or buy? What if those customers want to buy multiple products at once, or you have products that are repeat-ordered like stationery and printer cartridges – what services can you offer your customers in that regard?

Can you accept the Australian payment methods and shipping options that you want to use? Can you use e-path, Stratapay or iPay for example? Can you use eGate, Suncorp, Bendigo or NAB Transact? Can you ship via Fastway, Smartsend, e-Go or TransDirect and not have to type in and maintain tables of shipping rates?

Other marketing tools that you might need for your cart include Does your shopping cart have the ability to encourage customers to make the decision between checking out and shopping more every time they add an item to the cart? Can you get them through checkout quickly if they do decide to buy? Can you respond to a customer who puts items in to the cart, registers an account and shipping address and never buys (an abandoned cart)? What if your product requires age restrictions to be purchased – can you implement that easily? Can you set up printed gift certificates, use discount promotional codes, offer quantity discounts (just for particular groups) and run time dependent specials? What social media options does your cart offer you?

Another big question is whether you can you define your own returns policy and have a returns system that works to your rules? Some marketplace and auction systems do not allow you to set your own returns/exchanges/refunds policies and determine them for you.

The more relevant marketing options you have at your disposal (not just the sheer quantity of them) the better you’ll be able to target and respond to your customer’s needs.

There are many marketing tools and ecommerce features that you need to take into account when determining whether your store has what it takes to grow for the future. If you don’t consider your future and your competitors, then you run the risk of limiting the future success of your online business.