There was a time when people were hesitant about online shopping. They didn’t trust online payment methods or didn’t trust that the product they bought would actually get to them or not get lost in the mail.
Thanks to sites like eBay, Amazon and Etsy people nowadays are more comfortable shopping online than ever. These big brands built trust and eased people into online shopping. The challenge isn’t convincing people to purchase online – but to persuade them to purchase from you and not your competitors.
For that to happen you need to make sure people are able to find your website when they need it, hear about it from friends, and feel like they can trust you when entering into a deal.
Here are you a few tips that will help you get discovered, build trust and awareness and eventually sell a whole lot more.
Make sure you’re easy to find
This might seem obvious to some, but a lot of sellers, especially newcomers, tend to get this wrong. It starts with your brand name and ends with bad SEO for your site.
Often, when people go online to search for a brand they’ve just heard of they will turn to Facebook, Twitter, and Google search. With Google, potential buyers that just heard about you for the first time might not get your name right. Make sure that your e-commerce site will rank high on most variations of your domain name.
Google analytics used to supply you with this information but it doesn’t anymore. You can use alternative tools like SimilarWeb to do this. You should also make sure to have active Facebook and Twitter accounts in order to rank higher in their searches.
Know your keywords
When people shop online they search mainly for two things – either a specific brand name or a category of product they’re looking for.
If you want to target only potential clients looking specifically for you, read the first tip again. But unless you’re already a big brand, I suggest you keep on reading.
You don’t want to only be found by your brand name, because it means you’re missing out on a lot of new visitors and potential sales who are not familiar with it.
Ideally you would like people to find you when they are looking for the product you’re selling.Make sure you’re targeting the right keywords on your site, and all the different variations of those keywords.
The best way to do it is to use Google Keyword tool planner and start looking for what you believe are the relevant keywords for you, look at the suggestions it provides and what words are searched for the most.
An extra tip – the most used search words are great but you have a very small chance of winning them over, go for the long tail it will get you a higher conversion rate.
Provide as many details as possible about your product
Although people aren’t as afraid to buy online as they were in the past, you still need to build trust and make them as comfortable as they would be visiting a real-world store.
Provide them with the information they need so they feel comfortable in their decision. Don’t provide them only with the information that will help you sell – but the information they need to be 100% sure they want to buy the product and that will guarantee their satisfaction.
On that note, don’t overwhelm them with too much information, people need to know only so much about a product (varies from product to product) to decide to purchase. Overwhelming them with unimportant information will just confuse them and add to decision fatigue.
Leverage your community on social media
Social media is an important tool to market your business and boost sales, especially if you’re a small business. Facebook, for instance, is a great tool to build a community around your product and broaden your reach so more people will see, experience, and buy your product.
The biggest challenge for Facebook sellers is to get people out of Facebook and onto their landing pages where they can actually buy the product, but there are some ways around it.
The POPshop platform that enables you to build a fully functional eCommerce store right inside your Facebook status update or even use it as an ad.
This means that when someone sees your product they can buy it straight from their feed without having to leave Facebook or go into a complicated purchasing process in a different site.
Another good way to sell on Facebook is to integrate an e-commerce tab into your Facebook page where people can go in and shop. The upside is that you have all your products always on your Facebook page, the downside is that Facebook are trying to kill tabs slowly and usually tabs get low traffic and aren’t very shareable.
Maximizing sales online is a complicated process that involves many stages you can optimize; from getting new users to your eCommerce site, to optimizing landing pages and shopping carts for higher conversions.
The first step is to make sure you are well presented online and make it simple and easy for people to find you and have a great experience on your site. Make people feel comfortable about you and your product; help people share it and recommend it and you’re off to a great start.
