How to Close the Sale – Online - Ziller Web Marketing Blog

When a consumer enters a brick and mortar store and starts browsing some products they are interested in, what will they usually do next? they will choose a item their thinking of buying, pick it up and feel it, look at the front, back and sides and read the fine detail. More often then not they will then choose to buy the product that has better packaging and is more attractive on the outside, then the less attractive product even if the less attractive product is in fact better quality.

If you are thinking of starting a online business or already currently do, how do you try and replace what I just described above using your website? Just because a user is now online it doesn’t mean there shopping behavior has changed. If you cannot give the user a good indication of how that product is going to look / feel when it is in their own hands, the product is not going to sell, or at least not sell as much as if you did.

Having better product images is one of the most complained about factors of e-commerce stores. Too many stores out their place no importance on their product images, when this is one of the most critical areas and one where you should be putting much effort into.

If a user can visualise a product in their hands, the hard work is done. Work hard on that.

Website accounts in shopping carts are common things these days. It is not often that you will come across a e-commerce store that does not offer an account of some type with which you can register, in order to get added benefits. In fact many e-commerce websites make registration mandatory in order to even purchase, which is a hot topic and one which I have touched on in a older post.

As I see it, if you do offer an account with your e-commerce store, the goal would be to have as many of your users register for one as possible. Users who are registered are far more likely to make a purchase, and assuming you gained permission to send them email you can use this to promote new products and or services.

One thing I see common across even some leading e-commerce stores is the poor attempt to sell registration to the user. If you offer registration, whats so good about it? What do you get if you do register and why must the user do it? All these questions should be answered on your account sign-up page.

Take pcparts.net.au as a perfect example – their login page has only a couple of lines of text to promote the creation of an account. At this point in time as a user I have no idea what I get if you sign up so I will be very declined to do so.

pcparts.net.au

If your going to ask a user to not only give up their precious time, but provide personal information such as their email address, you have to offer in return something of equal or greater value.

If you have some experience with HTML and CSS, you will understand that you are able to apply an ID or class attribute to any HTML tag, which allows you to then specify styles for that tag via the style sheet. If you look at any well built style sheet you would usually notice the use of both ID and classes. So what is the difference?

The W3C refers to the ID tag as “a unique identifier to an element”, so in plain English what this means is an ID attribute can only be used on one element, where a class can be used on multiple elements. To give an example, you would use an id when referring to a unique element such as a specific list, however would use a class when applying a certain style to one or more objects such as multiple div’s.

One interesting feature of the ID tag that I find is not well known, is the ability to link with anchor text to a specific ID. For example if you specify your footer element with an ID called “footer”, you are able to link directly to that part of the page… Let’s take news.com.au as an example. There footer is contained within a div which has an id named ‘footer’ applied to it, so if we link to:

http://www.news.com.au/#footer

You will notice the homepage loads, but scrolls directly to the footer tag, which is the bottom of the page.

These days, there are many shopping carts available for purchase, and open source CMS’s that come with a set number of features available to use. These features range from product reviews, to discount pricing, wish lists, and so on.

What you will find, for example is if you take a hand full of ecommerce shopping carts, all from completely different industry’s but that use the same shopping cart, there is a good chance that they will have many of the same features. Now this may sound normal, however what I am finding more and more is that certain things work for certain industries, while other things don’t. I have found that implementing a feature on one web site can have outstanding results, but putting that same feature in a different web site wont really get results at all.

The reason for this is every industry is different, people looking to buy a house on the internet don’t really interact and behave how someone who is trying to buy a second hand couch does. When you are designing a web site or planning new features, you must do your research and find out how your customers behave. If you take the time to do this initially, you will find you will save yourself a lot of time and money in the long run.

These days, many websites have a Content Management System or otherwise know as a CMS, which allows a user with no real web design experience to be able to update the content and make other changes to the web site, that usually would require someone with web design experience to do. For many online businesses this is absolutely crucial, and in fact you will not find many shopping carts out there that don’t have either a custom CMS solution or a standard one that came with the cart.

Once you have your shopping cart up and running, to have to constantly pay web designers to update the web site or hire a experienced employee with web design experience can be very costly, and its for this very reason CMS’s are so popular, they save operating costs and allow you more flexibility to be able to update your site.

So now to the point about my post. From my description above you could easily conclude that there are no down sides to a CMS yeah? I mean what could be possibly bad about them, they give you options to regularly update your site that you would not otherwise have, and ultimately save you money. However from my experience in designing these shopping carts with a CMS, there has been a problem that I have noticed over time, which I am not that all happy about.

You spend countless hours designing this great shopping cart. You put a lot of time into thought about the design, how things should look, and in the end have a beautiful looking web site that will be perfect for your portfolio, and most importantly converts users in buying and make the client money. Then you deliver the website to the user, and that is where the problem starts.

Once the client knows how to use the CMS, in most cases they will have the ability to make a multitude of changes, including changes to the homepage, and other content pages. When the client does make these changes, I have found on many occasions that they wreck the site! They will do things like put absolutely stupid images in a prime position, use text with the wrong font, and generally do things that no one with web design or internet marketing experience would do. Unless you have an ongoing contract with the client and perform regular work for them, you really have no control over this.

While it may sound like I am complaining, (which I am) it just annoys me to see a great website ruined because you give the client the ability to manage the site themselves. What I would recommend to anyone one who does run a online website and has a CMS, is to make sure that changes yourself or your employees make, are inline with the designer and or internet marketers ideas and are going to effectively improve your website, not ruin it!