E-commerce Success Know How

You can make money online selling digital or physical products, software or services. A lot of internet marketers are building their business empire based on affiliate marketing. However, having your own e-commerce business will give you full control of your business destiny and giving you sustainable online income. Therefore e-commerce should not be left out in your Make Money Online portfolio.

There is no difference between selling online and offline. Basically there are 2 stages- PREselling and  Post Selling.

PREselling:

(1)Traffic:

If you are selling offline, you would prefer to open your shop at busy and crowded street, mall or housing area. This will guarantee you lots of walk-in customers by default. The same preference applied to selling online.

If you have a physically product to sell online, on top of having your very own e-commerce website, you should consider selling the same product at market places like eBay, Amazon, Overstock, eCrater,  uBid where you will be getting free traffics which are ready there for you. You will also increase your income by many folds when you sell at several market places. Imaging if you are getting USD500 of sale from eBay every month, by having your products at Amazon, Overstock, uBid etc will easily multiply your income by several folds.

For your own e-commerce site, you may consider PPC, Google organic ranking, links or refer by other sites, directory listing, email marketing, article marketing, social media etc to generate traffic to your site. It will take some efforts in generating traffic to your e-commerce site.

(2)Convincing Sales Pitch:

Nowadays, having traffic to your sites just isn’t enough.

If you open a shop in a shopping mall where competition is fierce, you will have to stand out from the crowd to win your sale. You may want to employ a very good and decent looking sales person who can talk a bird down from the tree, or you are selling at a competitive price with very good customer service and impressive deco.

There is no difference in selling online. You need a good sales pitch and decent web design to at least attract people to stay long enough on your sites to buy. It is even better if the potential customers hear something good about your products before they arrive at your sites. For example, your product is recommended by someone they trust via newsletter or friends in Facebook. Remember, whatever we are selling, we are providing solution to people’s needs. The copywriting has to be spot on.

Money back guarantee, feedbacks and call-to-action are important features to show on your site. They not only help to increase the conversion rate but also help in your SEO campaign. Google gives you extra points for that. You may also consider building your shipping cost onto your product cost and give FREE shipping on your sites. It is the nature of human being to take advantage of FREE offer.

Post Selling

(1)More Products:

Have you ever noticed that there is always a convenient shop at the petrol station? A lot of times people would drop by the shop after paying for the petrol. Or very often in a retail shop, after making your payment for your purchase, you still have to walk past some shelves with interesting products and then find another cashier counter at the end before you can physically leave the shop. All these are just another up-selling tactic of the businesses.

When come to online, if you ever purchased digital products from some Gurus, you may remember that after your first payment, there was another OTO (One time offer) popping up trying to sell you another product? So the same up-selling tactic being applied to both offline and online businesses. When you shop in Amazon, I am sure you have seen this before- “ Customers viewed this item also view…”. So the idea here is, trying to get the most out of your buying customers. The saying is always right- “Those who buy will keep on buying”.

(2)Contacts:

If someone asks you to fill in the survey form or personal details to win prizes in the shop, you are giving away your contact details for their future communication with you. The shop will send you their promotion or new catalogues in post.

We shall do the same online. And we need the help of GetResponse to collect email addresses of our customers online. For all the internet marketers, it is an undeniable truth that Money is in the List. You should always give out something for free as bait in exchange for your customer email address. Your opt in form should be seen on your e-commerce site, and also in the page where the customer is directed to after successful payment. For example, if you are purchasing a home air purifier product online and you are offered a FREE ebook on How to Stay Healthy, would you give away your email for the free ebook that will help to improve the health of your family? Most likely the answer is YES.

I am sure by now you can see how to integrates your e-commerce business with affiliate marketing with the leads collected- more sales in the future. To grow your business I mean long term business), you should now starting to capture leads (email address) of your customers. Check out GetResponse as it is one of the best email marketing software in the market.

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How much is each customer worth for your online ecommerce business?

I am sure you always hear people saying that those who bought from you before will always buy from you again. They are more likely to become your returning customers, be it buying the same product or other products that you are promoting.

Before you start an online business, please make sure that you do not fall into the low end of any market and compete on the price with many others. Imaging if I am selling a product costs USD49 as compared to you selling a product costs only USD4.90. You may have to sell 10 products to make the same amount of money that I am making with only 1 sale (assuming the profit margin is proportionate). In normal circumstances, the higher the price the better the profit margin.

Of course it is acceptable if you have few OTOs (one time offers) or upselling following your first sale. Some people try to attract the potential customers to pay very little for the 1st product and then promote them the 2nd or 3rd products after they manage to close the 1st deal. This is a good marketing strategy because as mentioned above, those who purchased from you before will always buy again from you- people tend to purchase from someone whom they are familiar with or whom they trust.

So think about the products or services that you are going to sell online and see how you can make the most out from your customers. How much income can you generate from each customer per year? If at all possible, pick a product or service that can build a long term relationship with your customers and hence getting them to buy from you again and again. For example, you can sell a health product that demand repeated purchase from time to time. Or you can sell your membership site that charge your members monthly fee.

So back to the question- how much is each customer worth for your ecommerce sites? The rules of thumb from my personal experience is to generate minimum USD50 per annum from each customer. Why minimum USD50? Sometimes you may spend money on Google adwords advertising which costs you some money. If the cost for you to convert someone into a paying customer is 5USD. Then 5USD seems like a good bargain if you can expect each customer to pay you USD50 per year. If you know how much is each customer worth for your ecommerce sites, then you can budget your ads spending.

I hope you have grasped the idea that I am trying to convey to you now. If you are smart enough, you should be able to tell that ecommerce is a number game. If you have a website that generate USD50 per year from each customer, then you can have several other websites that generate the same amount of money from every single one of your customers. If you have 10 ecommerce sites that sell, then you are basically increasing your net-worth by 10 folds.

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