Web Sales

An introduction to web selling - How to sell stuff from your website

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Boost your web sales with savvy web selling

Comparing web selling with traditional selling

This tutorial is entitled Web Sales. See our menu for many more tutorials on related topics. In this tutorial we look at selling goods from a website.

Website selling has parallels to traditional selling. When you promote a traditional retail store in the right way, you can bring potential customers (prospects) to your premises. If you promote a website in the right way, you can bring interested prospects to your website. (We call it targeted traffic.)

Traditional selling skills

In the retail store, what happens to those prospects depends on how skillfully the salesman deals with them.

A good salesman establishes an empathetic relationship. He demonstrates a good knowledge of his field, and is clearly an expert on his products. His customer can sees that he has a sincere desire to help her make the right purchase. He helps her to understand which product will best meet her needs. He communicates effectively. His integrity is apparent. Because of all this, his customers start to trust him...

Web selling skills

With web selling, your site has to do all these things without the benefit of the in-store salesman. How can this be done?

Your site will be welcoming and friendly, well-laid-out and easy to navigate. It will demonstrate your expertise, and your understanding of your products and your customers. Product descriptions and illustrations will be detailed and informative, so visitors can choose easily. Terms of trade will be clearly indicated. You provide answers to all of your visitors' unspoken questions. Because of these things, your visitors will trust your site.

This trust is most important. Without a trusting relationship, web sales do not occur.

How to build trust online

At the point of purchase, your customer must trust that you will

fulfil all your promises
provide goods of the quality she expects
deliver the goods on time
provide any needed support
stand by your guarantee
handle their personal information with integrity
not abuse their credit card.

If customers have any doubt about any one of these issues, they simply will not buy.

Now a salesman can look you in the eye and convey his integrity non-verbally. (You can see what a sincere fellow he is!) In a web selling situation each one of these promises has to be spelled out, more or less explicitly, to put your customer's mind at ease.

Special offers boost web sales

Offer special promotions. Give discounts, two-for-one promotions, limited time offers, limited quantity offers, free bonus products. People feel good when they buy on special! They save money. They feel smart. If they enjoy the feeling enough, they may come back to your website, to be sold again!

But expect your visitors to be skeptical when they see your special offer. They'll see it as a web-selling ruse. That is because many web businesses offer the same "limited" offers every day.

Just your good luck. You happened on their site on the very last day of their special offer! (But when you enter their site the next day and see the same offer, you stop trusting them. And you know there's no hurry to buy.)

If your offer is for this week only, make sure it ends this week. If you offer only 5 of an item at a special price, let your special offer end when 5 are sold. In the long term, your credibility will boost your web sales.

How to ask-for-the-order in web-selling terms

Any traditional selling course would teach you to "ask for the order". On your website you also need to help your visitors overcome their final reluctance to commit.

Display your Order-Now button prominently, close to the description, or illustration, of your product. Your money-back-guarantee information, if any, should also be close at hand. If you are selling a single product, you may need to display your order button (or suitable encouraging text links) several times.

Remember those lo...ong pages written by professional copy writers? Every paragraph or two there's a new link to their order page. They put in all those links because they get more "conversions" (sales) that way!

Visual appeal

Unless you are selling to the teenage market, avoid flashing buttons and pop-up screens. They chase customers away.

Integrate your shopping cart and payment gateway facilities seamlessly into your site. Aim for a very smooth purchase transaction, quick and easy.

Invite customer testimonials. Publish them on your site.

Web-selling is easier the second time around

Give some thought to how you can get customers to return to your site. In web selling, as elsewhere, it usually takes much less effort to hang onto an existing customer than to find a new one.

A customer who has already bought from you once (and had a good experience) will have much less reluctance next time.

A mailing list is one good way to keep your old customers coming back for more. (See our mailing list tutorial in the Build Traffic section)

Shopping cart software

Choosing the right shopping-cart software is a big decision. Allocate some time for serious research. Wrong choices are costly and can set you back. I'm not talking about money. But money is an issue too.

Prices range from free - to thousands of dollars a year.

Some shopping carts can be purchased outright, downloaded to your web server and installed by you or your technical team. They often come with source code to make customization possible.

Other shopping carts are rented. These are hosted solutions. They are simpler to set-up and run. They typically cost hundreds (sometimes thousands) of US Dollars per year, depending on features and number of products.

Tied in with the choice of shopping cart software is your choice of payment options. You will need to choose a shopping cart which supports the payment options you wish to offer on your website. No shopping cart supports all payment gateways, so this will be an important consideration.

Homework for today...

To get you started with this research, here is a starter list of questions to think about:

Do you require your shopping cart software to

Handle sales of downloadable egoods
Cater for coupons or gift certificates
Calculate discounts
Calculate shipping charges
Provide templates for integrating the shopping cart into your website
Provide inventory management or other back-office facilities
Cater for many different products
Allow for multiple product illustrations and descritions
Capture customer details for your mailing list.
Be supported by the supplier

Payment gateways process payments for your web sales

The payment gateway provides a service to your website by linking your shopping cart to the financial network/s involved in the transaction. There are dozens of payment gateways. How do you choose which ones you want on your website?

If you have a merchant account with your bank, you will need to deal with a payment gateway that can communicate with your bank.

Your chosen payment gateways (you might choose only one, or several) must be compatible with the shopping cart software you have chosen.

But if you want to use a specific payment gateway which is not supported, you may find the supplier of your shopping cart software willing to enhance the software to include your chosen gateway, possibly at their own cost.

Payment gateway operations - and fees

Look carefully at the fee structure, particularly if you are selling low value products online. Fixed transaction fees can gobble up all your profits. Minimum monthly fees can be a drag on a start-up business.

Make sure that the payment gateway operates in the countries where you expect to do business. Some gateways specialize in servicing a particular region, and may provide poor service (or none at all) outside it.

Some payment gateways expect buyers to open an account with them before they can make a purchase. This makes the checkout process cumbersome if the customer is not already an account holder.

Address verifcation system (AVS) is an important feature offered by most gateways (for an increased transaction fee.) This means they check the customer's billing address (as captured on your website) with that of the credit card issuer, AVS can prevent fraudulent credit card use, before the transaction is processed.

Some payment gateways (even major ones) have a poor reputation. Careful research is recommended. (More homework, I'm afraid)

Now take a break and stretch your legs. We've reached the end of this tutorial. In the next one, we'll be looking at running a home-based service business, from your website, of course...

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Links / Resources

How to convert more traffic into sales:

Art of the Irresistable Offer (watch the video)

Web sales articles:

Interspire: How to sell online (14 part course)

Tips to increase web sales

Downloaded shopping cart software

Zen Cart (free)

Commerce.CGI (free)

X-Cart

Rented shopping carts

Shopsite (a low-priced starter option is available)

Fortune 3

Fast Commerce

More shopping cart articles

Wikipedia: Shopping cart software

Shopping cart software review

eCommerce software review

How to choose a shopping cart

Shopping cart reviews

Choosing shopping cart software

Shopping cart reviews

Some payment gateways:

Merchant Warehouse (US)

2Checkout

Google Checkout

Alert Pay

Pay mate (AU)

More articles on choosing payment gateways:

Payment gateways

Payment gateway

3 Tips for choosing a payment gateway

How to choose a payment gateway in Africa (but this very useful article applies anywhere)

Choosing a payment gateway

Payment gateways (list)

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