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Improve Your E-commerce

31 August 2017, 17:57 CET

In many ways, the internet is an essential tool for today's small businesses. It gives you access to customers all around the world, while it gives local customers all the information they need if they want to check out your services before using them. Make sure you're taking full advantage of the benefits of being connected.

What's the Plan?

Whatever you decide, make sure your business plan suits you. You may need a basic site to manage your presence, while you trade using other sites like eBay or Amazon, or you may want to trade directly from your site. Make sure your business can do everything it needs to online. Having a website also allows customers to contact you – it's useful to have facilities for this on your site so you can make the most of their feedback and improve your relationship with them.

Get Ahead of the Competition

More people than ever before are shopping online, which gives you the opportunity to sell to people who would never walk into your store. If you aren't selling a service or a digital product, make sure you've got an efficient shipping or postage system in place. You can also take a good look at the thousands of competitors you have. Are they offering any extra services that your business isn't? Do their sites make them appear more successful than your business? Find out how they're doing it, and do it yourself.

Presentation

While E-commerce dramatically increases your potential customer base, it also pits you against thousands of other businesses. When you're confident that you're offering a better deal for them than the other competitors, it can be frustrating if your sales don't reflect this, so make sure the online presentation of your business is up to scratch. Companies like CurrantWeb can design your website and improve your business presentation, as well as generating SEO content.

Be Visible

Having a company manage your SEO output is a good idea. Running your website will be just another wasteful expense if your business isn't appearing on search engines when it should. With an SEO marketing strategy in place, the idea is to get your website as high up as possible in the ranking results when a relevant phrase or keyword is entered. You should aim to appear on the first page if you want to make your online venture a success.

Freebees

The key to online marketing is to put together a network of customers loyal to your business. It's difficult to build this kind of relationship, but one way to do it is to offer freebees to your loyal customers. This gives you an excuse to engage with them in a scenario that doesn't involve them paying you money, which will change how they view your business.

Feedback

Another way of improving and developing your customers' relationship with your business is to actively seek their feedback. On the one hand, this empowers the customer and gets them thinking about your services, while on the other hand it gives you information about the customers you're able to target as well as a more objective view of the achievements and shortcomings of your site.

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