Now that you have built your online store, marketing is going well and you have loads of happy customers, it’s easy to get into a groove that’s worked well so far. This is where it all goes wrong for many stores.
Maintenance
Broken links, images, font changes, out of date information. These are the best ways to look unprofessional and annoy visitors, needless to say, drop your search engine rankings. Testing and browsing your store as a daily or weekly task is important to maintaining the integrity of your brand. Your storefront and how it works all contribute to how visitors perceive your company. An old looking, out of date, broken site is a way of saying that your company is not keeping up with the times.
All the industry leading sites which receive thousands of visitors a day employ the services of external testing company’s whose sole job it is to identify broken links, images and other frustrating unprofessional errors. It’s important that you locate these problems before your visitors do.
Improvements
Each industry will have their own unique ways to improve their site and service, however here are some general ideas to get you started.
1. Increase your product range.
If there is a clear need identified, why not broaden your product range to cover that need. You already have an established presence and possibly a known brand identity, so now might be the time to increase your offerings (in-line with your company)
2. Adapt to new technologies and features.
New technologies and features can help both you and your customers. They can automate parts of your business like invoicing and offer new features such as better image display options. Use these new innovations selectively as they may not fit your business model or customer interaction.
3. New Shiny things to look at
If you always offer the same products, show the same design and content, then why would visitors return to your site. Constantly changing your product range, uploading new and interesting content and changing your design for the silly season will ensure there’s always a reason to come back.
4. Do what no one else could be bothered with
Have you been procrastinating with an idea simply because it looks too big? I think we’ve all been guilty of that, but what if you could be the only one with this ground breaking product or feature? Sometimes taking on large daunting tasks that no one else could be bothered with will set you apart from the crowd and impress your visitors and win you the sale.
Take a deep breath, count to three and just do it.
Author: Brian Altona
Copyright 2010
