Complete E-Commerce Book

The Essentials for an Successful Web-Based Business

Research your niche market - understand the niche to understand the customer behaviours that drive it. Every e-commerce operator should assume that their customers are sophisticated shoppers who demand prompt delivery of a product that is exactly as portrayed on their website.

Track the status of every purchase. Customer service and product fulfillment is the immediate priority to building a relationship with your customer.

Use your website to provide useful and interesting information about your products/services and your entire niche market. The group that makes up a niche market always yearns for more information. They will return time and again to your website if they are appealed to based on their special interests — detailed articles and content-rich advertising specifically targeted to them.

Start with your home page; think of it as the cover of a book.

The design of your website and the content within will influence your customer’s perception of your business and, in turn, their purchasing decision.

• Stickiness and traffic generation - ContentSearch engines
• Performance - Speedy downloads Tables
• Ease of use - Site Navigation
• Content visibility - Viewable Site Frames Java Plug-ins

Use logging to enhance your site. Log analysis is useful for finding problems with your site. For example, you can track “error messages” that cause people to leave a site. If you see many of them in a day’s report, you know you have a problem. You might see an error message and realize that the message only occurs with a certain browser version.

Logging also provides stats on the types and versions of browsers used to view your site, as well as devices employed.

How do customers find your site? Your top referrers should be Google or Yahoo. The second top source of traffic is linked sites.

Quality Assurance Plan

Developing and maintaining a quality assurance plan ensures your site stays easy to use.

This plan allows you to develop and implement testing protocols to improve production specifications, visual and HTML style guidelines, and process flow.

Suggested tools for testing your site:

Watchfire’s WebQA 2.0 Web Content Quality Testing tool (www.tetranetsoftware.com/products) helps put you in control of your website by supplying intelligence on simulated visitor interactions with site content and website transactions. Reporting, analysis, and measurement solutions provide you with a real-time view of your website. This vendor also offers, WebXACT, a free online service that lets you test single pages of web content for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues. You can access WebXACT at http://webxact.watchfire.com.

Site Mapper (http://trellian.com/mapper/) is perhaps the best of the lot. This product will analyze your website's content and create a detailed map of all resources with an indexed listing by page and category. It also validates all links so that visitors need never come across a “File not found” error. Some of the quality assurance features Site Mapper offers include: spellcheck of documents as they are mapped, built-in document preview functionality, the ability to integrate with your favourite document editor, can map javascript files, stylesheets, and media files, and it can list and map external links and broken links.

SEO

So even though search engines vary on how they rank websites, every web page should include:

• Pagetag.
• Keyword meta tag, which is more than one word.
• Description meta-tag.
• <!— comments tags —>.
• First 25 words (or 255 characters) of text.
• NO FRAMES tag.
• Hidden FORM tag
• .HTML tags.
• tags.

Keywords: There are two ways to approach keywords: A blanket strategy and a targeted strategy. When you use a large list of keywords, your pages will be found by various surfers using an extensive range of search strings. Still, your web pages will not, in all probability, be among the top-ranking pages — this is the blanket strategy. When you use a limited number of keywords, the density of these few keywords increases and, therefore, puts them higher on the targeted strategy.