subject: Enhancing the Internet Shopping Experience [print this page] Enhancing the Internet Shopping Experience
As an online shopping website owner, you should strive for two things: to attract customers to your online store and to close the sale. For the first item, optimizing your site such that customer can easily find it as they search for items they want to buy can make their internet shopping experience better. As such, you should only target keywords that are relevant to your shopping websites. You can go for the general keywords that cover your niche market. For instance, if you are selling shoes, target shoe-store related keywords. You can also go by brands that you sell. Do be careful as some keywords maybe trademarked by the brand owner. If this is the case, you will need their authorization before you can start targeting those keywords.
Once you are ranking well in search engines or in paid campaigns for keywords related to your website, you might also want to try getting the word out about your online shopping sites in your social networks. Allowing your potential customers different points of interaction with your brand won't just be good for your exposure but can also increase your bottom line.
Next, when they've found you online and are already in your shopping websites, you need to ensure that your copy is compelling, your images are of good quality, you have a convincing call to action and your items are priced right. These are all ingredients to help your customers convert into closed sales. Aside from ensuring good copy, design and overall usability, it would also be best to study your numbers. By this, we mean look at your web analytics.
Your web analytics can tell you a lot about your shopping websites. First, it can tell you where your visitors are coming from. From country of origin to type of browsers being used, you can easily extract data to help you determine how your target market is evolving. The general numbers can tell you if there's a drop or an increase in interest in your brand or the items you sell. The visitor data an also include the keywords used to find your site, which can help you expand your marketing efforts to cover popular keywords that may not necessarily be part of your campaigns yet.
Web analytics can also impart data that would help you improve conversions. One thing to look at are your bounce rates. These say a lot about how much your shopping website holds your audience's interest. If a lot of them are bouncing (more than 50%), either your site is inaccessible or your website does not entice the audience that came to visit it. You should also look at time on site, this gauges how interested your engaged audience is. The more time they spend on the site, the better you're doing. This simply means that they're actually reading your articles or are browsing through your product pages.
Improving the internet shopping experience of your potential buyers means doing your research and analyzing the data you have on hand.
