Secrets to Successful E-commerce

If you have an e-commerce site you will benefit by learning these secrets. The following is a list I've compiled over the course of my 11 year career building Internet businesses. Every item is important, and will make you money today if implemented.

If you’re interested in making money with your web site you should implement as many of these suggestions as you can. If you’re not, then you’re in the wrong place. Try random chicken.

This is a list of real life lessons that you can implement today. It is not "book knowledge." Every item has been tried and tested and proven to work. Books provided the inspiration for many of the items below but if I haven't proven the effectiveness of the suggestion it is not included here.

When I put up a site of my own, I implement as many of these items as possible. They don’t all end up in the first rev, because it’s more important to get a site out there than it is to get it perfect. But I put as many of these items in over time as I have the resources to handle.

Before I get started, here’s the first thing you should ask: “How are you qualified and why should I listen to you?” Hmmm… I knew you were smart – that’s a good question. I’ve sold products, and I’ve sold service. I’ve sold hard goods and information. I’ve sold food, programming, landscaping, legal products, cooking supplies, e-books, wine, gambling, surveys, clubs, travel, rides, and more. I’ve built winners and losers. I’ve done some smart things. I’ve done some stupid things. I’ve consulted with Fortune 500 companies, and startups. I’ve done work for famous people, and my friends. I've worked with Harvard MBA's and high school dropouts. I’ve collected everything.

This is by no means an exhaustive list! I don’t know it all. This list should serve as a starting point for discussion. Send me your own e-commerce secrets. If I agree with you, I’ll post it here (with attribution if you desire.) Send an email to travis [at] giggy [dot] com

The Number One, most important thing to know. Get this idea through your thick skull, or never make one dime.

Ignore the rest of the list if you don’t have a site up and running, or one in the works. The rest is useless to you unless you get off your lazy ass and start making something happen.

Gurus like Perry Marshall and John Carlton will tell you that the number one most important thing is to choose a profitable market. You can't make any money if you're trying to sell to a group of people that never buy anything... but this list isn't for "what" kind of site you should run, it's for "how" you run it.

Site - pre-checkout

1. Be real - put your address and telephone number, and email contact. Put a blurb saying where you're located (next to the police station? across from the library?) and the hours your customer can call. It makes you real and less like a Ukrainian hacker stealing credit cards.
2. Answer the phone - customer service is a dying practice, but a profitable one. If you can prominently display your phone number, you'll get more orders. Most people will never call – they just like to see that there is someone on the other end that’s real. Someone that will answer the phone if their order gets lost in the mail. Someone they can complain to if it’s broken when it arrives. This is more important if you're selling a high dollar, or high touch product. One thing I’ve seen happen over and over is that an extremely happy customer (someone who’s problem you’ve solved) will post a good review somewhere and it will convince someone else to buy, or a pissed off customer (someone who had a bad customer service experience) will post a bad review and it will convince many people to not buy.
3. Use testimonials - real ones. If you can, give out your product for free for a couple of weeks in exchange for testimonials...
4. Be reputable - use a nascar page to convince your customer that you're for real.
5. Use lots of description about products - don't just rely on the factory description of a product to sell it. That's only the basics. Tell the person everything you can think of about the product. Put them in bullets, or short paragraphs. Only one thing you say will catch the shopper’s attention and make them buy. If you don't write everything, you might miss that one thing that convinces them to break out the credit card.
6. Use the word "FREE" if you can - FREE 1st Class Shipping! FREE E-book About Widgets! FREE consultation! FREE FREE FREE! But, don't be cheesy - be providing valuable FREE stuff.
7. Follow-up, stay in touch - if you can, collect an email address (give something FREE away like an e-book to get it.) Then follow-up with that person at regular intervals. Send a monthly newsletter, or sales letter. If you stay on the front of their mind, they'll think of you first when they're ready to buy.
   1. . Break down your list - a tactic I recently learned from Tactic 7, have not yet had the chance to test. Use RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) to break down your list into the most profitable buyers, and pay more attention to them. The more recently someone has purchased, the more frequently they've purchased, and the more money they've spent, the more likely they are to buy again. These people deserve more attention.
8. Live chat - For high dollar, high touch, or recurring revenue products, live chat is an excellent way to engage the potential customer in a non-threatening way. Live chat is great - you put a simple third party javascript applet in the footer of certain pages on your site. After the customer has been on a particular page for 15 seconds (obviously reading the copy) it automatically pops up a screen saying something like "Hi! Welcome to my store! I noticed that you were spending quite a bit of time looking at this page so I wondered if I could help you out in any way. My name is Julia, just type your question below when you're ready to talk!" It works wonders in the web hosting market.
9. Measure, A/B Test important pages - take 10% of your traffic to an important page (one that converts people from shoppers into buyers) and do a valid A/B test on it with better sales copy (longer? more descriptive? bullets? easier words?) When you find a winner, switch to it, and A/B Test THAT!

Shopping Cart - checkout process

1. Make it easy. The number one reason people don't buy on the net is because they can't figure out the damn shopping carts.
2. Give them options. I've heard good arguments for making people purchase in one way only (like phone order ONLY, or paypal ONLY) but I just can't believe it. Give the customer as many ways to give you their money as possible. Your in-house merchant account, paypal, phone, online check, IOU - just let them give away their money in whatever way makes them feel most comfortable.
3. Don't let them out of the shopping cart - remove excess top nav links, footer links, outside links if possible. Don't let that person get “shiny object syndrome” and get out of your shopping cart by clicking on a link that you provided for them. It's just not smart business to give your potential customers a way out of buying your stuff!
4. Collect their info (name, email, addy) on the page before they enter their credit card info. A lot of people will get stage fright right before they submit their CC info and abandon the cart. If you have their contact info, however, you can send them a couple of "please please please come back and give me your money" emails!
5. Give them upgrade/downgrade options if possible. Some people want it rush, and some want to save money.

Making money $$$ (dollars and cents - as many of each as possible)

1. Be easy to find - get your site out there. Adwords, overture, froogle, craigslist, ebay, amazon, yahoo, seo, partnerships, newsgroups, forums, opl (other people's lists), it doesn't matter - just get out there. Nobody is going to buy from you if they can't find your site!!!
2. Measure, measure your marketing effectiveness - Don't spend money on stuff that doesn't pull. Advertising should stand on it's own merit - if it doesn't pay for itself the first time it runs, it won't pay for itself after running 20 times. If you're not measuring your marketing spend, you don't deserve to have a site on the Internet.
3. Measure, measure your site conversion - Know where your customers are coming in, and dropping off. See if you can smooth out the places where they lose interest. See if you can understand why they're getting confused by something, or getting stuck somewhere, or losing interest in a product description, etc... a little optimization of the site flow goes a long way...
4. Keep putting your name out there - As stated above, the customer can't buy from you if she can't find you. Every day, try to get your site listed in another directory, mentioned in a blog, mentioned in a newspaper, etc… Getting your name out there helps them find you, but it also helps the search engines trust you. The more places the search engine spiders find your links, the more important they will know you are. That means higher rankings, which results in more visitors, more sales, and more trips to Tahiti for you and your family.
5. Affiliate power - Affiliate sales are sweet sweet sweet. Money won is twice as sweet as money earned - and affiliate sales are like money won. They do all the promotion for you, pay for the traffic, pre-sell the traffic, and send 'em your way. Most people set up a site through CJ or ClickBank, etc, and forget about it. Your affiliates just build and build. If you have the money use Commission Junction. I hate their technology and fee structure but I love their service and traffic. You'll get a whole lot of affiliates and traffic coming through CJ.

HEY – did ya like this list? Is something missing? Send an email to travis [at] giggy [dot] com. I’ll post the comments here.

Here are more ramblings by me: Gig-a-Blog: Internet Business