Key aspects of on-line trading

Let us suppose you are an established manufacturer of handkerchiefs (we take this example at random). You have been making and selling the little cloth squares for years and wholesaling them to chain stores.

The MD's daughter leaves University and decides to join the business. She decides that there is more money to be made from selling handkerchiefs on the Internet than selling them to retail outlets.

She commissions a web house to build an on-line shop. What key things should she be concerned with in moving the business into the virtual market place?

Use your site to collect data

Try to collect at least one piece of data from every visitor. This might be their e-mail address. But further data can be of value to your business. You could, for example, invite visitors to type data about themselves into on-line forms that will provide you with feedback about your customers. Offer competitions in which visitors can win a supply of your products. The competition is an incentive to provide information about the customer and his or her tastes and interests in your products.

Visitors to your web site can be invited to submit basic demographic data - age, sex, location - and information about such things as their colour preference, past buying habits or future purchasing intentions. This information can be used in marketing projects.

Your web server should be able to log the number of times your main web page is called and to log which ISP called it - that will tell you which countries are using your site. It will also indicate which days of the week or time in the day are giving the highest rate of hits

Trade securely

Security is the Internet's hot potato. Shoppers are concerned that their credit card numbers will be handled securely. Internet users wondering about buying on-line worry about whether their credit card details will be abused and whether the goods they pay for will actually be delivered to them. Some companies now guarantee on-line transactions against fraud or non-delivery - ask your insurance company about this and seek advice from your credit card company.

If you have set up a safe, secure shopping environment for your customers you should reassure them at every opportunity that this is the case. In our example, the MD's daughter puts a photo of herself on the web site inviting customers to contact her sales manager if they have any problems in making purchases or receiving goods.

Some shopping sites now have telephone or chat links to live sales representatives who can help them with the procedures involved in buying from a web page. In the US this has proved to significantly increase sales.

Promote your on-line shop?

It is no good having a real shop in the High Street if no one ever goes into it. Site traffic to an on-line shop is therefore of considerable importance to its success. On-line merchants are preoccupied with things like conversion rates, i.e. the rate at which people visiting their web sites actually buy something.

It is not uncommon for only three people in every hundred who see an advertising banner to click on it and visit the advertiser's web site. Of these three visitors only one might actually make a purchase. In order to get a return on investment, the merchant needs to get a banner seen tens of thousands of times. By choosing the right sites on which to advertise, these rates can be achieved.

Get visitors to come back

People talk about the extent to which a site is sticky - this is the degree to which visitors keep coming back to it. Web designers try to make their sites as sticky as possible and have developed an inventory of techniques for achieving this. Such techniques include frequent refreshment of the content, interactive elements that engage the visitor, competitions and follow-up e-mails.

Keep on top of orders and logistics

Merchants must ensure that orders are fulfilled promptly and delivered safely. Nothing gets the on-line shopping a bad reputation like failing to respond to orders and failing to get the goods delivered quickly. If you set up an on-line shop, make sure that it provides good support for order delivery, order picking, and order tracking. Your order management system should be fully integrated with book keeping software.

The Internet Services Team at Maple Systems can help you with all these aspects of on-line shops, to make sure your on-line shop is an on-line success.