It all started with my E-commerce class where I learn to design an e-commerce website, how to affect customer behaviors online and direct their efforts into buying my group’s products. It’s interested that some of the concepts I see people apply all the times are actually something I’m learning right now. I would really like to sum up all of the points in the course, my thoughts on seller and buyer’s perspective so you can draw your own way to persuade people to buy your products online.
Show trust in handling credit card data
Before you sell something, be a buyer first. Put yourself into a shoe of a novice buyer who doesn’t know a lot about online shopping. The question is, how do you trust a website that they will handle your financial information correctly?
Be smart. There are several ways you can show buyers that you’re a reliable merchandiser and you won’t do anything harm to your customers by:
- Register a SSL certificate. SSL certificate proves you are who you say you are. SSL certificate also helps you secure transmission data between clients and servers. The cost of one SSL certificate often fall in range of $199 (Geotrust) and $499 (Verisign) per year.
Tip: Purchase your own SSL certificate is expensive if you’re a small blogger, so you can try E-junkie, Google checkout and Paypal to sell your items. They are very secured way to handle transactions
- Put up a sign that indicates customers transaction will be %100 secured and safe with you. I know there are some times when buyers have to buy an item any way but when you put it up, buyers will feel much more confident to you.
Have a clear privacy policy
You should have a clear privacy policy for your store. Privacy policy will make the customers feel safer because they know you will not sell/trade their private information like name, email address, real address and phone number to outsiders. A privacy policy will also help you stay out of trouble if there’s any legal concerns with your store.
If you do not know how to write one, that’s totally fine. There are plenty writing services that you can hire to write one for you. Surf forums like WarriorForum and you may end up with 2 or 3 services that can help you handle this.
Offer free shipping charges
You don’t have to worry about free shipping charges for your digital products since most of them are free to download (Do you really intend to charge them?)
Free shipping charges play strong psychological effect on people’s minds. When they shop online, they tend to miscalculate the shipping charge, so when the total amount comes up which may exceed their budgets and price range, they will walk away.
Offer free shipping charges is the answer.
When I sell things on eBay, I tend to offer free shipping all the time. Mostly because my items are small. Not mentioning about eBay gives me nice icon that says free shipping, all of the items that have zero charges on shipping sold more, both quantity and bid price. So, if you can offer free shipping for customers, go for it.
Show them this is a limited time offer
Shoppers have a tendency to hurry when they see items that are offered at low prices for limited time. Are you hurry and try to get your family to stores at 7AM on Black Friday to get cheapest items at JC Penny?
Limited time offer also plays huge psychological effect on customers’ minds because if they don’t act fast, that items will go away. You can create a sense of hurry on your store by placing a count-down timer, highlighting limited time offer words. Just be sure that when you say limited time offer, you mean it.
Provide them a chance to try out product/service before they actual buy it
One of the drawback of online shopping is that you can’t touch, feel, smell and taste products. One way to solve this problem is offer the chance for customers to try before they buy them.
In Internet marketing niche, there are lots of people try this way and they all achieve somewhat success. TrafficTravis allows you to pay $5 to examine the pro version. Market Samurai gives up 7 days to try for free. It’s a good tip to follow.
Have a clear return/refund policy
Most sales pages I visited drive me crazy because they don’t have a clear return/refund policy. I still remembered how struggled I was to find contact information on a website to make a refund and at last, I ended up with Clickbank representative.
So, one thing you can beat your competitors and convince customers to buy is have a clear return/refund policy. It will make you a lot like professional seller in customers’ eyes.
Cross-sell interested and related items
Related items are items that often come in-pair with the products you are selling. For instance: a bag of tortilla chips often comes with salsa dip.
Cross-sell items are items that customers may be interested in checking out. For instance: if you buy a bag of tortilla chips, you may be interested in checking out a BBQ potato chips.
So, offering cross and related items can not only help you boost sale, but also convince buyers to buy online as well.
“Professional ecommerce development can really improve trust, leading to higher conversions, assuming all other elements are in place.”
What’re your thoughts?
Is there anything that I left out? What are you thoughts about this?