subject: 5 Ways to Improve your Ecommerce Business Practices [print this page] 5 Ways to Improve your Ecommerce Business Practices
Owning an online business in the ecommerce industry is very much like owning your own high street store, except you don't have to worry too much about trekking to and from work everyday. We all come across many websites in our time whether we're shopping online or generally browsing to see what's on offer, but on a serious note owning an online shop means adapting to provide a great shopping experience and visitor enjoyment on your store front. In this article I'd like to share some great tips in which you can use to improve your ecommerce business practices and improve customer service experience.
Hours of Business
You might think that this seems a little extravagant however consumers looking to do business with you will want to know whether they can contact you should they need to, and in this case it would be helpful to them if you could place your hours of trading perhaps on your contacts pages. This ensures that you can be contacted in normal business hours and not at inconvenient times.
Contact Information
Many online ecommerce businesses don't reveal much in the way of contact information, instead you're given a list of self-diagnostics in hope that your problem can be sorted without contacting them, personally I feel this is very lame and unprofessional. Dedicate a contact number for your business it doesn't take much at all to pop into your local supermarket these days and pick up a cheap pay-as-you-go phone and use it solely for business. Use appropriate answer phone messaging so that if you're not able to connect with your customers they know that they have contacted the right person and can then leave a short message if they wish. Make sure that your contact number is displayed boldly on the home page of your website as well.
Email Communication
It is absolutely and vitally important that you keep your response time for email communication in top form. This means answering to enquiries within a good time, if you receive orders via email or PayPal even, make sure that you send out a personal email letting your customers know that you have received their order and will be processing it shortly and to do the same on despatching of goods to your customers.
Well Written FAQ's
In all good distant selling practices you will need to provide a well written list of frequently asked questions, such as delivery times, postage costs, contact information, returns and refunds policy etc. This will not only help save time in contacting you, but it will also place confidence in your consumer to do business with you.
Get Feedback
Your hard work in providing good online business practices shouldn't go unseen, so therefore you should request feedback ideally by email form from your customer once they have received their goods, so that you can display it proudly on your website to encourage more business. As well as this you can also use the feedback data to make improvements where and if needed.
