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Monitor Your Web Site’s Performance
The goal of monitoring performance is to ensure that, at any given time, your site is available to visitors and that your pages load quickly. There are numerous ways to measure the performance of a site, and an increasing number of tools and services can help. Use this checklist to learn what aspects of performance are critical to e-commerce success, so you can choose the monitoring method that’s right for your business.
Essentially, Web performance monitoring consists of measuring various components of a site’s performance at regular intervals. How do you know exactly what a monitoring program should measure? Think about the real-world equivalent of your online business, a brick-and-mortar store. In order to have a satisfying shopping experience, customers must be able to get into the store, move around the sales floor without hindrance, and view merchandise quickly and conveniently.
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eCommerce: Building a Customer Base
Once your online store is up and running and you are accepting online credit card payments, you can begin working on getting customers to your site and keeping them there.
Short term solutions for drawing qualified traffic to your site include pay-per-click search engines such as Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Search. There are dozens of less known PPC engines that you can research on the web. PPC is a good short term solution because it draws targeted shoppers to your site overnight. Search engine web promotion is a more cost effective route to drawing targeted traffic to your site but it is not a short term solution. It can take months for search engine spiders to crawl and index your site.
Traditional (offline) advertising methods are less cost effective but can be useful- it is best to start with online advertising and search engine optimization before investing heavily in offline medias such as direct mail, radio spots, billboards, yellow pages, flyers and television commercials.
You can also create banner ads and email management. To optimize your advertising initiatives you must track what kind of customers you are bringing in and focusing on converting visitors to buyers. You need to be able to keep track of your customer base and observe which visitors are actually buying.
Tracking Statistics
Website statistics and “hit” logs maintain traffic patterns-how visitors found your site, which pages they visited, how long they stay on the site, and which customers made a purchase. With this information you can study which methods of advertising and marketing are bringing you the most profit and which ones are non cost effective.
Tracking sales leads is another way to determine which marketing tactics are successful. If you document the source of the lead, customer information, and orders that were placed, you have data that can calculate your return on investment. In addition you can continually improve your marketing and design portions of your plan by seeing why certain people stopped on certain pages.
Staying with E-Commerce
How do you establish the most cost-effective plan for you online e-commerce shopping cart? You must experiment with different advertising and marketing methods and keep a close watch on all sales. Be open-minded and try new things, but always make sure you know where your money is going. Track each advertising initiative. Marketing is key to online success- it is important to keep up-to-date with new technologies and methods of advertising. Constant re-evaluation is important due to the ever-changing nature of marketing on the web.
How to reduce eCommerce stress.
Certainly it’s important to plan and prepare for an online marketplace.
It’s important to learn what you can about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, traffic building, ezine publishing, RSS, blogging, PPC and other marketing methods.
The point of balance in ecommerce is there doesn’t need to be an incredible amount of stress associated with the development of an online store.
It is possible to locate a one-stop ecommerce solution that can get you started on the right path. This can provide you with the opportunity to get your idea moving forward while learning more about the world of ecommerce. If you had to know every facet of ecommerce in order to become an online business professional there would be very few online businesses available.
The very act of online marketing is ever changing and rarely static.
It is possible to find an online resource that can assist you with developing an ecommerce site that includes hosting, customer newsletter system, customer/order database, feedback forms, autoresponders, shopping cart tools. search engine registration, full feature website wizard, merchant CC ID OAC, and authorize.net setup OAC.
The language of ecommerce is very specific, but the truth is no one can learn a new language overnight.
Allowing an existing ecommerce solution to assist you in ’setting up shop’ may be the quickest means of reaching a goal while you learn the skills required to really make your online store a fully optimized site that finds favor with your customers as well as search engines.
If you determine to seek out a full service ecommerce web solution you should look for, or ask for, credentials and testimonials. You might even do well to follow up with some existing customers to see how the service works and if the service was helpful in establishing their online store. It is true there are some less than honest ecommerce solutions available, so it just makes sense to be cautious and research the capabilities of the service.
In many ways ecommerce can feel a bit like taking a final exam before you’ve even had a chance to study for the test. By gaining some help you are essentially inviting a tutor to the study session and finding some much needed help in the development of a dream. Be serious about learning what you can about online marketing, but don’t be afraid to ask for the help of a professional.
A qualified ecommerce solution can provide significant and much needed stress reduction.
Ecommerce for smaller business.
Many businesses owners are finding that setting up an e-commerce website isn’t as costly as they might have first imagined. In the last couple years, a number of e-commerce software systems have arrived in the market which businesses can simply hook-up into their existing brochure type website. The selection of an ecommerce software system however needs to be made carefully as a wrong decision could end up costing a whole lot more in the long run. Of course you will need to check that the e-commerce software can be easily adapted to your existing website colour scheme; whether it has a secure socket layer (SSL) encryption, which is the e-commerce standard for protecting customer information; and the additional features such as calculation of the shipping charge and that it will work with your own payment processing company. On the whole however most of the major ecommerce software systems will have features that will meet most of these requirements.
It is also important to differentiate between “locally hosted” & “remotely hosted” ecommerce software systems as the type can have significant long term cost implications for the smaller business. Locally hosted software such as Actinic (www.actinic.com) and Oscommerce ( www.oscommerce.com ) need to be bought packaged or downloaded from the internet. Setting it up on your web site will require technical skills in database management and web programming, as well as arranging special e-commerce hosting facilities. Generally speaking you will need to get help from a professional web developer to get these systems working properly on your web site.
Remotely hosted e-commerce software such as BazaarBuilder (www.BazaarBuilder.com), on the other hand, can be used without any of the encumbrances of the locally hosted solution as the e-commerce software system is provided on a turnkey basis. Your online business can be set-up and managed from any computer connected to the Internet, anywhere in the world. After registering, you simply add your products to the online database and customise the software to match your own web site, without the need for any web programming skills or any special web hosting requirements. Remotely hosted software therefore become an ideal choice for web site designers who perhaps do not have expertise in web programming and for those who need a quick and low cost solution to setting up an e-commerce website.
With good planning and selection of all the tools available, even the smallest businesses are starting to make profits by selling their products online. Many of the earlier barriers such as high launch costs and technical expertise have been removed by recent advances in software capability. EBusiness has finally come of age for the small business owner as well.
