An extreme competition and the World’s Crisis made customers very picky, suspicious and hesitant. Today it is not sufficient to declare that your online store offers the broadest choice and the best prices unless you sell really unique and exclusive stuff and do not have at all or have only a few competitors.

If your competition is tough you should consider applying an ecommerce marketing strategy to allow your online store to stand out from the crowd. An here are the basic rules which every ecommerce marketing expert will tell you:

1. Provide detailed descriptions and visual presentations of your products
Do not let your customer seek for information about your product anywhere else but on your site. Describe products with as much details as possible, provide customers with free manuals and service instructions. Make them feel that you are an expert in the products you sell and they can trust you. Provide multiple product views, close-ups, video or flash presentations. This will let you outpace those competitors who do not bother to include such an extensive info in their websites. Another advantage of this rule is that you will have a keyword rich content which is very conducive to your online store’s search engine optimization. But please, use only original content and never try to copy content from other websites to avoid penalty by major search engines like Google for duplicate content. It is advisable to write / rewrite content by your own or hire a professional copywriter (which is actually a good investment to your future success in the online business).

2. Tell what others think about the product
Testimonials and user’s opinions can be an effective marketing tool which is able to persuade hesitant buyers into purchasing your products. You can use text, audio or video testimonials. However my personal thinking is that one should not scatter testimonials everywhere on the page or set them off boldly since such site is very likely to bear strong resemblance to those scammy websites which are growing up like mushrooms in the Internet. Make the testimonials look unobtrusive just like Amazon did it.

3. Make your customers stay on your website as long as possible
According to the recent marketing researches the longer visitors stay on your website the more they are likely to buy fro your store. That’s why it is recommended to find ways to make spending time on your site interesting. It is well known that people use Internet to get information. Therefore you can write interesting and informative articles (but please, do not copypaste from other websites (it’s better to write by yourself, encourage your staff to write for the website or hire an experienced copywriter) otherwise you will be penalized by Google for duplicate content and this will screw up your page rank in this search engine); share interviews, useful tips, recipes. Offering all kinds of freebies, samples, giveaways and free downloads is another effective marketing tool to attract prospective clients’ attention to your online store.

4. Use video on your website
Some ecommerce experts highly evaluate using of short presentational video for on-line business. You can create not very long (up to 3 min.) videos to demonstrate your product features, compare products and teach how to properly use them. You can store your videos on popular video storage sites like YouTube, Google Video etc. Today thousands of online shoppers visit YouTube and other such websites to verify whether there is anything to watch about the products they want to purchase. Why don’t show your products there?

5. Be a real person
In spite of buying from the Internet using a computer, every customer wants to be sure that he/she purchases something from a real person who can always help or give an advice. So try to do your best to create physiological comfort and confidence for a buyer regarding purchasing things from a responsive and helpful human being to a computer.

First of all, put your staff pictures on your About Us page. Ask your employees to write on the blog and social media sites. It’s a good thing to have a live on-line or off-line customer support service.

6. Show why you are better than other guys
Don’t be afraid of showing off your best products and value propositions. Review your sales statistics to determine which target group you make most of your money from and think what else you can offer for this niche group or groups to attract buyers even more and gain recurrent customers.

7. Use social media to promote your business
It’s not a secret that social media websites like Facebook and Twitter are growing more and more popular. Small and large businesses use this popularity to promote their brand and products. The best thing about social media websites is that they let people communicate and share information with each other. So you can use such websites to spread the buzz about your ecommerce store..

If you want to establish your business online from scratch or overhaul your existing ecommerce store, we kindly invite you to browse through our website to learn more about our web design team and services, and when you are ready, feel free to contact us and we will be happy to assist you with your ecommerse store design, development and launching online.