Creating an online store is important for any new or established business that needs to expand its sales beyond its local area. An online store can be added to almost any website, but in order for it to significantly increase a business’ sales; it needs to be customer friendly.
A good online store will provide a showplace for a business’ goods and services and have an accurate and reliable way for customers to purchase these products or services. By opening an online store, a retail business will be able to sell everything that it typically sells from its brick and mortar store.
Of course, in order to get online customers to buy, it will be important to have a customer friendly website. To start, it is important that the virtual store can be found. List the popular products on the homepage of the store, rather than cram a single page full of a variety of products. By doing this, search engines will display the website when potential customers do searches for specific products.
Next, make the website easy to search. Simply placing a generic search engine on the site may not be good enough. Constantly check how well the search features on the website work by pretending to be a potential customer. Consider how a customer who doesn’t know the exact name of what they are searching for will be able to find something on the website.
Finally, consider how a potential customer will make a payment in the business’ online store. While it used to be common for a small business to accept payments over the phone, nearly every online store today has a virtual shopping cart and can accept debit cards and credit cards.
Remember that very few customers will want to trust a new company with their specific bank account information, so many will want to pay with a credit or debit card. Because of this, it is essential that a business have their online store set up to accept these types of payments.
Most importantly, the merchant account service that a business chooses to use with its online store should have excellent customer service. Payments should be processed quickly and customers should be able to easily access their receipt. Ideally, the customer should get an immediate receipt after he or she makes a purchase. In the event that there is a problem, such as a charge not going through correctly, the matter needs to be dealt with quickly.