Since the beginning of the recent few years, online shopping has gained more popularity. In UK alone, the amount of money consumers spent on the internet rose by 35% in 2007, to a total of £14.7bn. With this speed, internet retail sales are expected to hit £44.9bn by 2012, accounting for 13.8% of the retail market.
With the increasing demand, more and more businesses especially home-based ones are jumping on the Internet bandwagon, selling things from hand-made jewelries to services. Online stores are being set up with website development software within a few hours; domains are registered, with the entrepreneur eager to make a quick buck from the Internet pie. But soon, the reality kicks in and they wonder why there are no visitors clicking their pages, and some not even close to visiting their homepage.
A large number of internet based business owners have the perception that the hardest part of Internet selling is getting traffic into their sites. There are a lot of guides and tips out there to assist you with that but this is not the end of the story. Getting hits on your website is just 1 percent of the whole 100% story of selling on the Internet. Even before getting your business online, the pages and structure need to be carefully planned, especially the product catalogues, which is the vital part for any internet based businesses.
In this part of the article ‘Guide to Selling for Internet Based Business‘, we will discuss about how information about products and services should be disseminated. Remember, badly organized information can alienate customers and destroy your advantage on doing business online. The key to their expectation is how fast, accurate and how well any business satisfies their hunger for reliable, usable information.
Part 1 - Speed of Accessibility
Part 1 of this article will cover the Speed of Accessibility. This means to provide information about your products with least possible clicks.
Many internet based business website or online stores are designed in such a way that visitors need to click a link ‘Our Products’ on the home page to reach the product catalogue. Then the visitors are required to select the subcategories of the product they are looking for. It requires another click by the visitor to read the (limited) details of the product, with a thumbnail image of the product. Then another extra click if the visitor wish to view the larger image of the product. It has taken visitors 4 clicks to assemble all the information. To contact the seller, visitor is required to jump to another page.
Internet based business or 'website store' owners should strive to reduce the number of clicks as possible.
Consider our site 12ShowU.net, a website store for online stores, which provides a free online business platform for internet based business. We have carefully designed our site so that it conforms to only 3 clicks for visitors to see the details (with the large enough product image), and two clicks if the visitor only wishes to see the larger image. The product details include the description, possible shipping location, shipping rates and delivery times, prices, seller's company information and contact number and map location.
Visitors may also initiate instant messenger to talk to the seller directly or even opt to send the seller an offline message on the same page.
And if the visitors wish to know more about the product in depth, there is another link that they can click to view them. Our website store does not limit the length of the details posted by our sellers. This ensure that visitors can get as much information as possible, all with the least number of clicks.