Lets define ‘Customer Friendly’. It means that you provide an environment where your customer can come and purchase your product and does not face any hurdles in the way.

There are certain rules to good online selling.

1. Categorize

Divide your products into categories and sub categories. Don’t lump all the products together. Imagine a site selling shoes, clothes and jewelry. It will be very difficult to find what you want if the products were all jumbled up. It will be difficult even if there were categories like Tops, Casual Shoes, Casual Dresses, Pendants and they were all mixed up. Imagine a page full of these categories. The best way to go about it will be to have links to three different pages … one with clothes, one with shoes and the third with jewelry and then have sub categories on each page.

2. Products per Category Page

If you have a lot of products in each category then try not to put all of them on the same page. If you have, say, 50 products, then it is better to break them up into may be 10 – 15 products per page…the break-up really depends on your design and space each product takes.

3. Product Pictures

Always, always have product pictures. This can’t be stressed enough. Even if you think what you are selling is generic stuff and people should know what it is like, give a picture. People want to see what they are getting. One thing that is missing on the net is being able to pick up an object, turn it over in your hands and feel it. Pictures are the closest you can get to showing the product to the customer. Don’t let go of this opportunity. This is one way to convince the customer … no one wants to buy what they can’t even see … especially if they are a first time customer.

4. Prices

Try to keep your prices slightly below off-line prices. The reason being that the person who is going to purchase from you is also going to pay shipping cost … lower prices lets them justify the shipping costs.

5. Shipping cost

Don’t state that shipping costs will be added, always give an estimate of the shipping costs. No one wants to order and then have a huge shipping amount charged on their credit cards. You can charge a minimum shipping cost or you can charge according to weight. The former will get you customers with larger orders while the latter will get you customers who are ordering very small quantities as well. Your choice will depend on your handling and packaging cost of each order. The customer will of course prefer to not have a minimum rate. This can really help in getting first time customers. Say, someone orders something for just $1 and is really pleased with your customer service ..they might place a larger order next time. Having a minimum shipping rate may not get you this customer.

6. Discounts and Special Offers

Retaining customers is very important. Give discounts and special offers to old customers. A rewards program can really help repeat purchases. Your customers earn points on every purchase they make … these points add up and can be redeemed for prizes or discounts at your site. If your customer has the choice to switch to another online store offering the same prices, they may not because they wouldn’t want all those points to go to waste. Special Offers for old customers can make them feel welcome and important. They will keep coming back.

7. Customer Service

Always try and answer your customer’s queries in time. Within 24 hours constitutes excellent customer service and 24-48 hours is the average time within which you should answer all queries. Go through all the emails first and see of there are any urgent ones that should be answered first. Remember to write a professional reply. Try not to write one liners…if they have ordered something then make sure you tell them it was a pleasure doing business with them and thank them. If you are a home-based business don’t give your customer an impression that this is just a side business that you are running to keep you pre-occupied … give the impression of a professional who is serious about their business. Image is everything!

8. Secure Server and Credit Card Processing

If you have a website and are selling online … then let it be online. Too many sites open up a website and let people order via email or telephone. True, you will get some customers this way but there are so many potential customers that you will lose as well. Not having a credit card option means there can’t be any spontaneous purchases … people get time to think over things and may decide not to spend that money after all. Not many people will give their credit card information over a non secure server. So always use a secure server to get that information.

Read: Accepting Credit Cards without a Merchant Account

You might think that you do not need to do all of this because you are getting some customers from your site … and if you are getting customers, then why do you need to do anything more? But you must remember the customer who comes to your site and goes away because they do not find it ‘customer friendly’ are most probably not going to write and tell you about it. In other words you will never know you lost that customer. Making a ‘customer friendly’ site ensures that a customer will not leave on the account that they are unable to make a purchase due to these reasons.

Start by asking yourself: “Why am I thinking of building a web site?” Is it because everyone else is doing it too? Do you have a specific purpose in mind for it?

It is very tempting for us to assume that our web site would turn into a money making machine as soon as it is launched, and that everyone in the world would be dying to visit it. Unfortunately, this is very far from reality.

Clearly defining the purpose of your web site, before you start building it, would ensure that your web site is optimized to achieve the required purpose. After all, you can only meet your goals when you know what they are.

Of course, defining a purpose may not be as easy as it sounds. It comes naturally to some of us while it is a lot harder for others. But the importance of determining your purpose cannot be stressed enough.

1. Product Sales

This is the most important reason for building a web site. You want to sell your products to the net surfers who would visit your web site. These products might be your own or you might be selling them as a sales representative of a company. But why would people visit your web site and not thousands of others selling products similar to yours? What makes you different from your competitors?

You need to chalk out a strategy to draw visitors to your web site. Only then will you be able to sell your products to net surfers. For the purpose of drawing visitors you would need to promote your site well. Moreover, you would need to offer them something that they consider useful, on your web site. This could be special offers or bonuses etc. For example, most web sites selling software tend to offer a free trial download.

One good way to draw visitors to a web site, is to offer unique and useful product related information to them. For example, Amazon.com offers a number of customer reviews for each book it is selling. This serves as very useful information for people who might be thinking of buying that particular book.

Observe the sites of your competitors closely and see what they are doing to draw visitors to their sites and make sales.

2. Brand Awareness

Some web sites are built to create awareness for a brand. Let’s take the example of Coke’s web site. Is it there because the Coca-Cola Company hopes to sell coke bottles on the web? No, it is there to create brand awareness amongst the net surfers and assert its brand identity. It wants to stay with the times and project an image of being trendy.

You may decide to bring your business to the web for the sole purpose of reassuring your customers that your company is willing to evolve with the changing times. The web site that you build would center on the purpose of enhancing and reasserting the image of your company.

3. Cost Reduction

Another purpose for building a web site can be cost reduction. A web site can result in cost reductions for you in a number of ways. You may decrease your customer services costs by having an online customer services system, your order processing costs by having an online ordering system for distributors and retailers, and your printing and paper costs by having brochures or product manuals online.

If your business has no offline presence, building a start up business on the web would involve minimal costs as compared to building a brick and mortar store. This is a major reason why many start up businesses are emerging on the web.

4. Providing Information

A web site can be constructed for the sole purpose of providing information about your company. A web site, which is built for this purpose, would take the form of an online brochure. It would result in cost savings from advertising for you. Furthermore, It would be easy to build and would not require a lot of maintenance.

5. Facilitating Communication

You may choose to build a web site to make it easy for your customers or target audience to communicate with you. A lot of television channels and periodicals have web sites where they conduct online surveys on different topics. An online survey is very easy to conduct and compile in comparison to an offline survey, and is a good source of eliciting customer opinions about a product or idea.

Moreover, traditional mediums of communication like fax, telephone, snail mail etc are expensive and time consuming. Through a web site or email, your customer can easily get in touch with you.

6. Affiliate Commissions

Another reason for building a web site may be to make money through promoting affiliate programs, which offer you a commission on sales. If you plan to build a web site for this purpose, do keep the following in mind:

7. Revenue from Advertising

You may want to earn money by putting up the banners of other business on your web site. However this is not as easy as it sounds. The foremost concern of advertisers is the amount and quality of traffic your web site is drawing. You need to promote your web site well to ensure that it has a high amount of traffic. Moreover, you need to offer information similar to the advertisers’ products to ensure that they are getting the audience they intend to target. This would require hard work and planning.

No matter what the purpose of your web site may be, make sure that you keep track of the visitors of your web site. A traffic tracking system would give you valuable information about your customers or prospects that are visiting your web site. It would also enable you to make important decisions related to the optimization of your web site.

How can the health of your web site be maintained?
The first step is to identify the ailments it may be suffering from. There are many web site ailments. But some of them are more common than others, and those are what we may attempt to discuss:

Ailment#1: Extreme Suitability Deficiency Syndrome

This happens when you build a web site without determining the purpose it is supposed to serve. Or you may have a purpose in mind but your web site is not built according to that particular purpose.

You may be offering irrelevant information, or offering in a way which is not effective or persuasive.

The web site is not focused on its purpose in the way it is designed and/or written. If there is no focus, there would be confusion for the visitor. People don’t like being confused. They would simply leave and forget all about you. Now, that’s what we call unhealthy, right?

Prescribed Remedy:
Your Web site Copy or Design must be suitable to the offer you are making, or the customers you are targeting. Try to come up with a prioritised list of what you want your visitors to do, and then design and write the copy of your web site, based on that checklist.

An example of such a list may be: make the visitors stay; lead the visitor to browse the services page; make the visitor read the text; make the visitor interested in the services; persuade the visitor to buy the services or ask for a free trial;make the visitor remember the offering even after he/she leaves.

Ailment#2: The Blundering Web site

This is when your web site has broken links,typing and grammatical mistakes or HTML errors. This would result in an utterly unprofessional impression of your web site.

Your visitors are likely to make the conclusion that if you cannot pay attention to the details of your web site, you would definitely not be attentive to their needs either. As a result they would be very hesitant in buying from you (if they stay long enough after looking at the errors).

Prescribed Remedy:
Proof read your web site copy again and again to identify errors. Also check all the links for problems. If possible, hire a professional proof reader/virtual assistant, especially if the web site is a big one. Consider this as an investment in building your image.

Ailment#3: The Drowsy Web site

This problem occurs when you put your visitor to sleep by being too technical or too boring in your Web site Copy. Your product or your life history may be the greatest thing in the world to you, but your visitors honestly couldn’t care less. They are only interested in how something can work for them and what they get out of visiting your web site.

If you bore your visitor, or if you don’t come up with good reasons for them to stay at your web site, they are quite unlikely to stay for long, or ever come back.

Prescribed Remedy:
Try to think the way the visitor does. Tell the visitor about what he will get out of your product/service. In other words list all the key benefits in a persuasive, interesting and easy to understand manner. Focus on what the visitor is interested in.

Again, if possible, hire a professional to write your copy. It would be much easier for a professional to identify key areas of emphasis in your offering, and to keep the visitor interested Remember, if you want to persuade your visitor to buy you must come up with interesting and effective copy for your web site.

Ailment#4: The Obese Web site

You make your web pages so heavy with text and graphics that they take ages to download. Net surfers are extremely impatient and would only wait for a few seconds to see something of interest. If they don’t see it they would leave and never come back.

Prescribed Remedy:
Write and rewrite your text to ensure that it is not longer than the required length, and that you are not missing any important points.

Make sure the images are relevant to the purpose of the site. If they are, then use an image crunching program to reduce the image size. If they are not, then get rid of the graphics. There is no use for a pretty picture if no one can see it.

Ailment#5: The Frenzied Web site

A frenzied web site would be one that is full of distracting and irritating elements. Some examples of such elements are animated graphics (also difficult to download), blinking text (impossible to read) animated banners and others.

Needless to say, it is hard for people to concentrate in a place which is full of irritating elements, and the same applies to web sites. They won’t wait long to click on to some other site, possibly your competitor’s.

Prescribed Remedy:
Identify the distracting elements in your web site and get rid of them.

Ailment#6: The Indeterminate Web site

Your web site is indeterminate if it is not properly organized or easy to navigate. Your visitor won’t be able to find the desired information. He/she would also most likely be confused and won’t know where to go.

It is a known fact that people detest web sites that are not easy to navigate, because they confuse them, and would not stay for long.

Prescribed Remedy:
If it is not possible for you to reorganize your site the right way, then hire a professional web designer to do this for you.

Like I said before, these are only a FEW of the possible ailments a Web site may have. If your web site suffers from any or all of these ailments, it is not a healthy web site and this would prove FATAL for your sales.

Some of these problems can be cured by a little effort on your part and others may require professional advice or help. Also, do encourage your visitors to give you feedback, so that it is possible for you to identify areas with problems and look for solutions.

Remember, a little investment in your web site’s health would go a long way in building the right image. Your web site must attract visitors and keep them there to ensure your online success. Make as much effort as you can to MAKE IT HAPPEN!

One way of facilitating the process of setting goals for web sites is to define the type or category of your web site. Web sites can be categorized in a number of ways. This article discusses three possible category types along with the pros and cons of each type. These categories are based essentially on the level of information and interactivity that a web site should contain.

1. Information oriented

A site like this would basically provide information about the business’ products and services to the customer. The internet is flooded with web sites like these, which focus only on providing information about their business and products. These sites are just another form of a brochure. They would typically contain the following page titles:

-Home
-About Us
-Services
-Contact

2.Transcation oriented

A site of this type would contain information about the business and also urge the visitor to buy online then and there. This would be done by emphasizing on the benefits of the product and offering special deals etc. This may be a useful site for downloadable products (software etc) or purchases which need to be made in an emergency (air flight bookings). The site would include order forms and payment options along with other information.

3.Relationship Oriented

This type of sites would emphasize on maintaining a relation with the online visitors and on generation of more traffic to the site along with offering services online. Sites like these are vast and must provide information that online surfers are highly interested in. This information does not have to be specifically about the product, but should be related to the product (for example, online courses or book reviews on a site selling books).

The list of web site types given above is certainly not exhaustive, but it will give you an idea of how you should generally categorize your web site. Remember, when something is planned well, and given a lot of creative thought, its chances of success increase manifolds.

Wait.

Have you planned for your web site?

Planned?

Yes, imagine what would happen to a house if you built it without planning it first. Web sites meet the same fate if they are not planned before they are built. And yet, most web sites are obviously being built that way. They appear confusing and haphazard and have no focus. But you want your web site to be different, right? Then let’s get to the process of planning a web site.

Planning a web site is not difficult. All it requires is a little thought, and it is certainly well worth the effort. The planning process can be completed by answering the following questions, and then basing the design of your web site on the outcome of these questions.

1. What is the purpose of the web site?

We come to the foremost question in our planning process. You must determine the purpose of your web site to ensure that you would achieve that purpose.

The most usual answer to this question is ” to sell my products/services”. But what would you do to make sure that you sell? Here are a few possible responses:

Keep asking yourself questions until you come up with a response which is as specific as possible. Come up with a unique and clearly defined purpose for your web site. How can you achieve your goals if you have not defined them clearly enough?

2. For whom is the web site being built?

Again, do not fall into the trap of thinking that you are building it for everyone, for you would end up catering to no one at all. Possible target audiences for your web site can be:

You may choose to design your web site for all of the above audiences. However, a much better approach would be to determine the type of audience which is the most important to you and then focus more on that audience. The more focused your web site, the more impact it would have on your target audience.

Do keep in mind that your potential customers cannot be just anyone surfing on the net. They would be people who have a need (whether realized or unrealized) for your product. It would be helpful to come up with a customer profile including demographics and psychographics of your customers. This would require research but it would definitely give you a much better idea of how you should design your web site and the appeals you should be using to convince your customers.

Search for clues of unfulfilled needs. What do they want which is not being done? What are they dissatisfied with? What problems do they want solved? The answers to these questions may lead you to a winning business idea. All successful businesses achieve success through satisfying an unmet demand, the right way.

3. What information should the web site have?

This would depend entirely on your goals and target audience. For example if you intend to gain repeat sales from your current customers through your web site, you only need updated and accurate information of your products and an easy and hassle free ordering system.

On the other hand, if you want to cater to potential customers and want increased hits to your web site, you would need to provide valuable information to draw these customers to your web site. For example, a web site selling herbal soaps may provide informative articles on skin care and herbal ingredients etc. This would attract people interested in herbal ingredients/ soaps to the web site. If they find the offered information useful they just might buy from you. Even if they don’t buy they might book mark the web site and visit again. The more they repeatedly visit your web site, the higher the chances that they would buy from you.

4. How should the information be organized?

The information must be organized well to ensure ease of navigation and usability. Remember to view your web site from your visitors perspective. Highlight the information which your visitors would find interesting and not that which you consider important. Group similar batches of information together, and keep the navigation consistent throughout the web site. Do not build a menu with countless choices on your home page. This would bewilder and confuse the visitors and they would leave without exploring further.

5.What visuals and color scheme should be used?

Yes, this should be the final step in your web site plan. People usually make the big error of going through this step first. The result is an unimpressive and confusing web site with no obvious purpose or interest. If you decide the visuals and color scheme at the end of the planning process you would be able to come up with original ideas which suit the content and image of your web site perfectly. Your design would seamlessly flow together and your web site would give a well organized and impressive look.

You might have come across numerous web sites with no obvious color schemes or consistent visuals. This is a result of bad planning, or more likely, no planning at all. Do not plunge directly into web design, without giving thought to the planning process. There is no point in building a web site which is not optimized to achieve its purpose.