Your Online Store – Part Two

The first part of this blog talked about some ways to bring traffic to your online store. This second part touches on secure payment gateways, competition, shipping, and customer service.

Receiving Payments

You have to be able to accept electronic payments for your online store. Fortunately, there are some excellent payment processing companies from which to choose. Each payment provider has its own fee structure, be sure to compare before making a decision.

Some well-known payment processing companies include:

• Authorize.net (this is the one I used)
• PayPal
• stripe
• WePay
• Google Wallet
• Chargify
• Dwolla

Customers feel better about shopping online when they know they are using a safe and secure means of making payment.

Know Your Competition and Their Prices

It’s easy for potential customers to price shop online. Everyone wants a bargain, and he or she is going to hunt for it.

This was tough for me. I honestly didn’t know how some companies were able to have prices that were lower than my cost. I knew they were probably buying in bulk, but still the prices were well below what I could offer. When that was the case, I usually took the items that I couldn’t offer a comparable price off my website. I focused more on the products with which I could be competitive.

Shipping

I wasn’t ever able to provide free shipping like so many businesses do. What I did, was keep my shipping costs as low as possible. My customers didn’t seem to mind paying shipping. In fact, I had some fantastic return customers who never balked at having to pay.

I tried to keep my niche item in stock, but there were times when I would get an order for something I didn’t have. My main suppliers were willing to drop-ship occasional articles for me. It seems that manufacturers and distributors have no problem doing this for large retailers, but I ran into some problems finding those that would do it for my small business. I would suggest lining up suppliers that are willing to do this for you should you be out of stock on a particular item, or have a special order.

Customer Service

I took pride in offering people excellent personalized customer service. Whether they walked into my physical location or shopped at my online store, each customer received the attention they deserved. I know for a fact that some of my online customers came back due to the service they received; they made it well known to me.

Providing personal customer service is an advantage you have over large companies. I would highly recommend you make use of it. It’s not only something your customers will remember but is also something that will make you feel good. One of the most rewarding parts of being a small retail business owner was the personal relationships I developed with my customers.

I hope this blog has provided some helpful information. Thank you for stopping by and reading. 

Your Online Store

I’ve had this ongoing dialog with myself this morning. It’s about eCommerce of all things. So I figured I really should put this down in writing and blog about it.

I had an online store for my business which was a tack shop. I thought it was going to take off and bring in lots of sales because it’s not like there are millions of tack shops out there. Well, once again I was wrong. I don’t think it matters what business you are in; there is going to be competition online. Some of your competition may be from large, well-known companies, and then there will be individuals or small businesses too. The question becomes, “how can you stand out from the rest?”

I did some research on how to get traffic to my online store and I’m going to share some of the key points that seemed to work.

Finding a Niche

Marketing online as a tack shop, or even English tack, wasn’t going to get traffic to my website. I had to find a niche and focus on that. One thing I carried in my shop was plus size breeches. They were hard to come by, and I knew I wasn’t the only rider that needed them. I also knew from experience that they weren’t easy to find online. In fact, there was only one company that specialized in them at the time.

Bingo! I found my niche. I decided to focus my marketing on plus size breeches. This meant a bit of tweaking to my website’s search engine optimization (SEO) and the online store setup. I was still going to offer other products but wanted the plus size clothing to stand out.

Search Engine Marketing

A website that is set up with excellent SEO is going to rank on search engines. Add more hits to your pages and your site will rank even higher.

I would recommend making use of a pay per click program. Google AdWords is one you probably recognize, but do some homework because others offer good programs too.

Social Media

Make use of social media as a marketing tool for your business. It’s easy to set up a FaceBook page and Twitter account. The hard part is keeping them active. Be sure to visit your social media accounts and keep them alive. Tell people about new products and sales. Encourage questions and interactions.

As a store owner, I enjoyed being able to get to know my customers on a personal level. Social media helps keep these relationships alive. It is also a great way to gain more potential customers or clients.

These things should help you get some traffic to your website. This blog will be continued next week with a few more things I found to be helpful with my online store.